By Claire Wallerstein

The Philippines is a target for sex tourist. Thousands of children are exploited and degraded by pedophiles. A journalist in Manila profiles a missionary priest who has despaired of the authorities and taken a personal initiative against the trade.

A middle-aged tourist in a baseball cap sits at the sleazy bar sipping a beer, and watches the young Filipina dancers gyrating suggestively on stage. After a while, the owner of the joint sidles up to him. “You like the girls? You wanna take one out for the night? Only 500 pesos.” “Maybe, but I really wanted something younger.” “No problem”, replies the proprietor. “I’ve got girls, 14, 15 – virgins too. But they’ll cost you more.”

Fr Shay Cullen

This scene is typical of the sordid deals brokered any night of the week in the girlie bars of Angeles City, capital of the Philippines’ thriving child sex trade. There is just one thing which is not as it seems. The tourist in the baseball cap is not a pedophile -- he is a priest. And in his shirt picket is a tiny, hidden camera which may have recorded enough evidence to put this brothel, one of a staggering 200 in Angeles, out of business.

100, 000 victims

The priest, Fr. Shay Cullen, a 54-year-old missionary, has lived and worked in the Philippines fro the past 28 years. Far from his home town of Glasthule, just south of Dublin, he is waging a personal war on the country’s child sex industry, which the United Nation Children’s Fund (Unicef) estimates “employs” 60, 000 youngsters nationwide.

Fr. Cullen believes the true figures could be 100, 000. While ministers of tourism and officials of non-governmental organizations from 60 nations attended the World Tourism Organizations conference in Manila, he voiced fears over the Philippine Government’s plans to boost tourist numbers from 2.04 million last year to five million by the year 2000.

Street Children

Fr Shay Cullen with
the children in the orphanage

Filipinos earn the lowest wages in Southeast Asia, and 1.5 million children live on the streets. Fr. Cullen warns this could provide a huge potential supply of starving youngsters willing to sell themselves for sex if care is not taken to encourage socially responsible tourism. His warning is based on alarming first-hand evidence of pedophile operations in the Philippines.

Back in 1994, the softly-spoken priest, frustrated by the rampant corruption and inefficiency he found within the police force and authorities, decided to turn the tables on the pedophiles by going undercover and tackling them on their own territory.

By night, acting on tip-offs from a growing network of sources, Fr. Cullen abandons his more orthodox priestly duties. Wired for sound, he and his dedicated team cruise the parks and streets of Manila, Angeles and Olongapo, or bars where minors have been spotted working as hospitality girls with fake IDs, or being “rented out” from back rooms by bar owners.

Priest Beaten Up

Fr. Cullen uses his recorded evidence to obtain arrest warrants from the Philippine courts, and organizes a few police officers – who can be trusted not to tip off the targets – into raiding the clubs. He has been beaten up several times by thugs protecting the racket, and even received death threats.

But he can boast that his unconventional tactics have had success. A procession of local and foreign pedophiles-including Brett Tyler from Britain, the murderer of 12-year-old Daniel Handley -- have been rooted out and brought to justice as a result of his work.

Fr. Cullen’s base is in a hilltop house just outside Olongapo City. Here, his PREDA Foundation (Prevent and Rehabilitate Drug Abusers) runs a centre originally set up in 1974 to help drug addicts, but now largely concerned with caring for the victims of pedophiles.

20 Years Jail

Fr Shay Cullen and his angels

The foundation’s high-profile campaigning also helped to prompt the introduction in 1992 of Philippines Child Protection Law RA 7610. This means child prostitutes are for the fist time viewed as victims rather than offenders, and any adult found in a secluded place with an unrelated child technically faces a jail term of seven to twenty years. Previously, pedophiles were merely deported, allowing them to escape justice while legal and prison costs were saved. PREDA has also pushed for the adoption of legal changes in Western countries, so that pedophiles who flee the Philippines can now be prosecuted in their home countries.

These changes have led to a huge increase in the number of cases of child sex abuse reported to the Department of Social Welfare and Development -- up from 84 in 1993 to 2,621 in 1996. But despite these successes, and the fact that many of the neon sex bars in Olongapo and Angeles have gone out of business since the closure of the nearby United States military bases in 1992, Fr. Cullen refuses to rest.

The Philippines is still seen as one of the cheapest and most attractive destinations for pedophiles, he points out. There are at least five Internet web sites promoting the country as a place for sexual encounters, and, as more and more tourists arrive and foreigners come to retire, the problem is likely to get worse.

Harder to tackle

If anything, he says, pedophile has become harder to tackle since the American forces left and the laws were tightened up. “It’s been driven underground, and has become more ‘residential. You get pedophiles who come over here to buy a place. They ingratiate themselves with the local kids, give them gifts, or money. One man can molest dozens of children.

“Their methods are fairly sophisticated. They will befriend a family, sometimes they will pay the children’s school fees, or they might even marry a single Filipina woman as a front, and adopt her children. Even if we manage to track these people down and get cases to court, they can drag on for years. Defendants pay off witnesses who often aren’t in a position to be able to refuse large cash sums, and some judges and prosecutors are corrupt and accept pay-offs also."

Root Causes

There is no simple solution. Fr. Cullen believes a more equitable distribution of wealth and better education are two of the first steps needed to remove the root causes of the deprivation and unemployment which can lead to prostitution, diseases, drug abuse and crime. But with 12, 000 of the country’s 43, 000 rural districts still without even an elementary school, it could take years if not decades for these changes to materialize.

At times, he admits, he is pessimistic about the future. “Look what terrible things our small team has discovered in a short time, and often by accident. You can’t change a whole culture overnight, but until corruption is rooted out in the Philippines, until police and politicians stop profiting from protecting the pedophiles, nothing will stop them preying on innocent children. I am a priest -- I should not have to be doing the work of the police. But at a moment, it seems that nobody else is going to do it.”