A leader in the job recruitment industry on Sunday called on the labor department to investigate the involvement local placement agencies in human trafficking, particularly in the recruitment of young women who are offered bogus jobs and then thrown into sex dens in Metro Manila.
Emmanuel Geslani, former vice president of the Philippine Association of Service Exporters, said these unscrupulous agencies lure young women from Visayas and Mindanao who end up in girlie bars and prostitution rings after being offered jobs as domestic helpers.
Some of the women also gets trafficked to provinces in the north and to Sabah, Malaysia, through the country’s southern backdoor, Geslani said in a statement.
“The young women who are often only in their teens and eager to find work… are forced into the oldest profession in the world, as their recruiters threaten and beat them into submission,” he added.
“Some of them are brought out through the country’s backdoor without documents and are dumped in Sabah to operators of prostitution dens for higher prices that customers are willing to pay,” he said.
He urged the regional branches of the Bureau of Local Employment to investigate this modus operandi and crack down on local hiring offices “in order to stem the outflow of young Filipino women into prostitution.”