BAGUIO CITY July 13 – The United States government was able to provide the Philippine government at least $13 million to strengthen and sustain the implementation of anti-human trafficking in persons over the past ten years in order to protect the vulnerable sectors from being tricked into the modern slavery, US Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg said here Friday.
Goldberg was in the city to grace one of the consultations organized by the Inter-Agency Council Against the Trafficking in Persons in order to reduce the risk of women and children from being exposed to the dangers of human trafficking that is a major problem globally.
He disclosed there are 12 to 17 million people worldwide who are exposed to human trafficking and 80 percent of the said number of victims are said to be women and children.
Further, 75 percent of the women exposed to human trafficking are said to be minors or those below 18 years of age while 6 percent of those exposed to human trafficking are women below 12 years old.
Ambassador Golberg cited Filipinos are among the identified vulnerable citizens to human trafficking because of the desperate effort of people to find descent jobs not knowing that they are being tricked into joining the modern form of slavery.
“The anti-human trafficking against persons involves not only education but also the provision of appropriate care for the youth,” Ambassador Golberg stressed.
He disclosed the US justice department continues to provide adequate trainings for prosecutors in the proper handling of trafficking in persons cases in order to ensure the conviction of traffickers who continue to take advantage of the vulnerability of women and children into luring them to the slavery.
Earlier, 15 government agencies, 19 embassies and 11 non-government organizations renewed their commitments to the snowballing campaign to curb the proliferation of trafficking in persons cases in order to prevent the abuse of women and children from the human trafficking industry.
The US ambassador cited the initial gains of the Philippines in the campaign against human trafficking, citing there is still a need to involve more non-government organizations in the effort to significantly reduce the victims of trafficking in persons through the years by eliminating the syndicates who are involved in the modern slavery.
According to him, the US government will continue to be at the forefront in the worldwide campaign against human trafficking because the vulnerable sectors are deprived of better quality of life because of being victims of slavery, thus, the need to intensify and uplift all consolidated efforts to stop the illegal activity of enterprising members of human trafficking syndicates.
He called on concerned local governments, government agencies and law enforcers to continuously innovate their respective anti-human trafficking programs to make sure that they will be able to cope with the current trends of syndicates involved in trafficking in persons and for them to be able to effect the arrest of those involved in the worsening global trade.
