Protection
The Philippine government relied heavily on NGOs and international organizations to provide services to victims. Victims were encouraged to file civil cases against traffickers, and the former are not penalized for any crimes committed as a direct result of their being trafficked. The implementing rules and regulations of the 2003 anti-trafficking law outline identification and referral procedures. The government assisted victims by providing temporary residency status, relief from deportation, shelter, and access to legal, medical, and psychological services.
The Department of Social Welfare and Development established 42 temporary shelters for victims and 13 of these were supported by a non-profit charity organization. The government sent 8 social workers to Philippine diplomatic missions to provide psychosocial counseling to overseas Filipino workers in distress. The Philippine Ports Authority provided the building and facilities for halfway houses in Manila, Davao, Batangas, and Sorsogon, managed by an NGO; the Ports Authority, police, and the Coast Guard referred victims to the halfway houses. In March 2007, the Department of Labor and Employment opened the first reintegration center where returning overseas Filipino workers may seek services such as skills training, psycho-social counseling, and business development assistance.
This law saves and protects many women and children from and against prostitution, pornography, sexual exploitation, forced labor, slavery, involuntary servitude or debt bondage, both domestic and overseas. R. A. Sec. 4b of 9208 supplements the Anti Mail-order bride law which only prohibits matching of Filipino women for marriage to foreign nationals on a mail-order bride formula, for this law punishes "introducing or matching any Filipino woman to a foreign national for marriage for the purpose of acquiring, buying, offering, selling, or trading her to engage in prostitution, pornography, sexual exploitation, forced labor, slavery, involuntary servitude or debt bondage is also considered an act of trafficking."
RA 9208 directs the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), and the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) to establish programs for Filipinos who are trafficked overseas, to ensure the safety of overseas Filipinos. This law covers both national and international migration, and requires the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), Department of Justice (DOJ), Bureau of Immigration (BI), Philippine National Police, Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG), NCRFW, and local government units (LGUs), to establish programs to prevent, protect, and rehabilitate trafficked victims.
Read more about this topic: Anti-Trafficking In Persons Act Of 2003
Famous quotes containing the word protection:
“Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been—what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be protected from people.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Take away from the courts, if it could be taken away, the power to issue injunctions in labor disputes, and it would create a privileged class among the laborers and save the lawless among their number from a most needful remedy available to all men for the protection of their business interests against unlawful invasion.... The secondary boycott is an instrument of tyranny, and ought not to be made legitimate.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)