Don't know how long it'll be up on the site, but here's the link:
http:// http://www.herald.ns.ca/Front/553869.html
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Ex-cop Stephen Perrott has seen a lot of injustice in his life.
But nothing he saw as a Halifax police officer, not even families homeless and living in their own feces, compared to what he saw in the Philippines. The anger in his voice is raw and immediate.
"The world is not a fair place," he says.
White western men buy sex from young Filipino prostitutes for little more than the price of a coffee — while the government turns a blind eye. Girls as young as 10 are sold into slavery and locked in tiny cells, where they can be expected to service as many as 15 men a night.
The tragedy is outlined in the Halifax-produced documentary Selling Sex in Heaven, whose Canadian TV premiere airs tonight on CBC Newsworld at 11.
The film is written and directed by Mount Saint Vincent University professor Meredith Ralston and is narrated by the gravel-voiced Kiefer Sutherland, whose actor father Donald Sutherland was born in Halifax.
It follows Mila, a young prostitute who works in a little bar called Heaven in the "blowjob alley" district of Angeles City. The area was home to a U.S. air force base until 1991 but now is one of the largest sex tourism destinations in Asia.
Western men, mainly from the U.S., Australia and Sweden, flock to the Southeast Asian country for the warm weather, "male bonding, cheap beer and even cheaper women."
Mr. Perrott said a Filipino police officer once told him that $2 US could get him oral and vaginal sex. For $5, a prostitute would be a slave for the day, doing laundry, cooking dinner and doing any sexual favours asked of her.
"And I said, ‘Two dollars?’ and he said, ‘If you think that’s too much, you can bargain down,’ " a
ed Mr. Perrott said.
A beer costs about $1 in the Philippines.
Selling Sex in Heaven is told through the eyes of three people from Halifax working on a Canadian International Development Agency-funded project to help women trapped in prostitution and was taped largely from 2001 and ’02.
Mr. Perrott, a Mount Saint Vincent psychology professor, was there because of his 10 years as a police officer. Due to the highly patriarchal nature of Filipino society, it was thought that a man with his background would be taken more seriously by police.
Two idealistic young women were there as interns with the project.
"I have this dream of making some kind of . . . (massive) change," Jessica Ibbitson says at the start of the film. Five years later, at the end of her internship, she felt hopeless.
"I felt that I had to get out of there or I was gonna die," Ms. Ibbitson said from her home in Clayton Park.
She has just finished watching the documentary and her face is flushed and her voice strained.
In the version of the film aired by CBC, the sex tourists have their faces blurred for legal reasons but you can tell that many of the men are in their 40s or 50s and are with girls who appear to be high school-aged.
"It’s a lot more powerful when you can see their face and see that they are just ugly losers," Ms. Ibbitson’s fiancé said. At the Atlantic Film Festival in 2005, the documentary was shown without the faces blurred.
Mr. Perrott can barely contain his anger when discussing the men who fly thousands of kilometres to have sex with the young women of Angeles City.
"I felt
ed by these men, these sex tourists," he said. "They think of it as some kind of male bonding.
"They were so able to make these young women into something different than their daughters or wives."
Mila, aged 21 in the film, is one of thousands of prostitutes working the strip on Field Avenue surrounding the old airbase. She has been having sex for money since she was 17. But according to the Philippines government, there are no prostitutes in the country.
There are "bar girls," "dancers" or GROs — guest-relations officers. They go on "dates" with their "boyfriends" — white men who happen to have sex with girls in the bars and pay the bar owner for the girl’s time.
"White men are treated like kings there," Mr. Perrott said. "A working-class guy (in Canada) is rich over there."
The original title of the film was Hope in Heaven, referring to the prostitutes’ unrealistic dream of a westerner marrying them and taking them out of the Philippines.
Ms. Ibbitson still seethes about what she saw in the Philippines. She said prostitution there is not just a poverty issue. Instead, she said, it is largely the fault of the Roman Catholic Church and years of western colonization.
"It’s the Pope’s fault, that’s your headline," she said.
"Some huge proportion of Filipino men go to prostitutes regularly," said the filmmaker, Ms. Ralston, who also worked on the CIDA project.
"It’s a very Catholic country, so you can’t have sex with women you’re going to marry; you have to have sex with prostitutes."
Being a strict Catholic country, birth control and condoms are condemned. But the Angeles City municipal government tests its "guest-relations officers" once a week with Pap smears.
In the film, women are herded into a
ing doctor’s office and lined up like cattle to be tested, without so much as a curtain for privacy.
If the women are free of sexually transmitted diseases they get a tag for their bikinis indicating they are clean.
"The government stamps them Grade A beef," Mr. Perrott said. "But the johns don’t have to get tested."
He said this is just another example of the "massive level of hypocrisy" in the country.
But there is reason for hope. Mr. Perrott and Ms. Ralston said things appear to be changing slowly. The police are taking the problem more seriously and there are a growing number of grassroots women’s organizations working with the prostitutes.
Shortly after seeing the film again, Ms. Ibbitson displays some of the idealism that she had five years ago as a wide-eyed intern in the Philippines.
"If only Canada could all become interested after seeing the documentary and then this issue could . . . " Her voice trails off and she slumps back into her seat.
She doesn’t finish the sentence.
( jvisser@herald.ca)
