I’ve visited Angeles City many times before, not as a tourist but as an executive of an multi-national bank. It was part of my responsibility to inspect various merchant acceptors of Visa and MasterCard International Credit Cards. We wanted to make sure that the establishments were legitimate businesses catering mostly to tourists.
That was in the early 80s. In the course of my inspection sorties, I discovered that many of the actual owners of bars and girlie joints were Australians although the registered owners were Filipina women whom they married. Naturally, the Australian connection delivered many Australian tourists, many of whom made the trip for sex adventures.
But that was many years ago. It is surprising that the sex trade in Angeles City still flourishes. Many children born of Australian fathers are now grownups. Some have ended up as dancers in nightclubs in Fields Avenue, the red light district of Angeles City. And yet some are still very young — their white skin being a telltale sign that their father is indeed Australian or some other Caucasian.
Abandoned children
It was reported recently in Daily Mail Australia that “Angeles City has become a hotspot for child sex tourism.” Hundreds of young sex workers are left to raise their children, born of foreign travellers, with no financial support.
Francine, 7 outside her home in Hadrian’s Slum. Francine’s father, was an Australian visitor whom her mother met while working as a dancer at Blue Nile, a bar on the Fields Avenue red light strip. ‘He was nice, he was bald, he was older than sixty’, says Susan of Francine’s father, Marshall. Marshall sent two Western Union money transfers totalling less than AU$300 before he cut off contact prior to Francine’s birth.
Australia and the Philippines have a reciprocal arrangement whereby a child-support assessment raised under Philippine law can, in theory, be enforced against an Australian resident.
In practice, it is a fiction. The Australian Department of Human Services, asked to spell out the procedure by which this can be done, advises that mothers should lodge their request first with the Philippine solicitor general. Neither the Philippine solicitor general nor the public advocate, who is meant to provide legal aid to the impoverished, responded to numerous attempts to make contact. There is no hint of the correct procedure to claim child support on the Philippine government websites. Nor could any information be obtained about the costs involved. It is clear that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of children with Australian fathers.
How the City earned its name
The Spanish colonialists named this place Pueblo de los Angeles, or ‘town of the angels’. It sits 85 kilometres north-west of Manila. During the Vietnam War it was the home of Clark Air Base, then the largest American military facility outside the US. The base stayed open until 1991, when an eruption at Mt. Pinatubo, the volcano looming 15 kilometres to the west, precipitated its closure. By then, the town of the angels had become one of the centres of Asian sex tourism. — (Daily Mail Australia)
According to the local department of tourism, more than 4.7 million foreigners come to the Philippines each year. More than 60% of them are men, and Australians are among the most numerous and are the third biggest spenders, behind the Americans and South Koreans and just ahead of the Japanese. The US Department of State report on human trafficking states that Australians are also one of the groups most active in child sex tourism, although in Angeles City, it seems, most of this is not ‘preferential’ but situational — men who have sex with prostitutes, and simply don’t care about their age.
In 2011 the then US ambassador to the Philippines, Harry K. Thomas Jr, stated that 40% of male tourists visited the country for sex, and no other reason. His statement was both controversial and impossible to prove. He backed down. But nobody who has been to Angeles City doubts that he was right.