Filipino mail-order brides trafficked to China: alarm in Philippines over links to Chinese organised crime

A recent warning from the Philippines' immigration agency regarding a new sophisticated scheme to traffic Filipino women to China as mail-order brides suggests a "concerning" connection to Chinese organised crime and trafficking syndicates, experts say.

The Bureau of Immigration revealed in early March that immigration officers had intercepted a 20-year-old Filipino woman and a 34-year-old Chinese man who were attempting to travel to Shenzhen on February 28 as a married couple.

"This is obviously another case of the mail-order bride scheme that has resurfaced recently," said bureau Commissioner Norman Tansingco in a press release.

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The pair were able to provide a genuine Philippine marriage certificate, but officers became suspicious after noticing inconsistencies in their statements, according to the release.

The woman later admitted that no marriage had occurred, and that she had paid 45,000 pesos (US$810) - more than twice the average monthly income in the Philippines - for an agent to process the document.

In another incident from February, officers barred a Filipino woman from leaving the country with a Chinese national who had been working in the Philippines and claimed to be her husband. The pair also provided a seemingly authentic marriage certificate showing they wed in the southern Philippines in 2022, yet an inspection of the man's travel records revealed he was not in the country at that time.

The man later admitted to paying a China-based agency 40,000 pesos to process the documents.

Four such couples have been intercepted so far this year, according to immigration officials, who expressed particular concern over their ability to produce authentic documents.

Initial investigations by the immigration bureau's anti-fraud section showed the certificates were "seemingly original", deputy spokesman Melvin Mabulac told media on March 7, prompting the Department of Justice, as head of the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking, "to further conduct a probe on how these documents have been released".

This Week in Asia has contacted the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking and Bureau of Investigation for comment.

Nathalie Africa-Verceles, a professor at the University of the Philippines' Department of Women and Development Studies, said the presence of legitimate marriage documents suggested the involvement of organised crime groups in the trafficking scheme.

"What the Bureau of Immigration should investigate is who is issuing these marriage certificates," she said, adding that the number of women being trafficked into marriage could be much higher than the recent interceptions suggest.

"The fact that [the Filipino woman and Chinese national] had a legal document is concerning, because there was obviously some corruption there, because how else do you obtain a legal marriage certificate?"

Limited resources and training could hamper law enforcement agencies' ability to identify trafficking cases, especially if organised crime syndicates are involved, according to Ross Tugade, a human rights lawyer and professor of international law at the University of the Philippines.

"It might be the case that authorities are better equipped to identify cases involving forced labour or obvious sex trafficking, but might miss more nuanced scenarios like mail-order bride exploitation," she said, adding that China's gender imbalance could be driving demand for mail-order brides.

"Traffickers also constantly adapt their methods. They shift operations, move online, and find loopholes to exploit. Laws often struggle to keep up with these tactics."

The Philippines has laws specifically designed to combat human trafficking. The Anti Mail-Order Bride Law of 1990, and its replacement the Anti Mail-Order Spouse Act of 2016, prohibits the business of organising or facilitating the marriage of Filipino women to foreign men by matchmaking services. There is also the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003, which was expanded in 2022 to provide authorities with more oversight and enhanced penalties for violations.

But experts say these laws are only as good as their implementation.

"Do a lot of women know about these laws? Or, given their economic exigencies [needs], do these laws even matter to them? We have a lot of laws and if they were implemented properly, it would really improve the condition of Filipino women," Africa-Verceles said.

She said young women on low incomes with low educational attainment, particularly those who had been internally displaced, were the most vulnerable to being trafficked.

Jean Enriquez, executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women - Asia-Pacific, told This Week in Asia that the marriage trafficking scheme could be connected to the surge in Chinese investments into Philippine offshore gaming operations (POGO) that reached its height under the previous administration of former president Rodrigo Duterte.

At its peak, the POGO industry employed around 300,000 Chinese workers in the Philippines taking advantage of loose regulations on gambling businesses to cater to customers in mainland China. It has been linked to a slew of crimes and controversies, from cases of abduction, tax evasion and bribery to sex dens, prostitution rings, and torture chambers being uncovered by authorities.

A March 13 raid on a POGO compound in Tarlac province, around 100km north of Manila, uncovered a potential hub for love scams, with 373 Filipinos being rescued amid allegations of human trafficking and illegal detentions.

In November, authorities also rescued 15 Filipino women - including five suspected to be underage - from an alleged prostitution den in Pasay City catering to Chinese POGO workers.

Women are lined up in "aquarium"-like chambers at such facilities to be picked out by "POGO employees and their bosses" and used as "sex slaves", Philippine Senator Risa Hontiveros told a November Senate hearing after touring a raided POGO hub. "I could hardly stop crying when I saw," she said.

Anti-trafficking campaigner Enriquez said the revelations about raided POGO hubs "point to the targeting of Filipino women by customers from China for sexual exploitation".

Women being trafficked to China was a "historical phenomenon rooted in China's patriarchal demand", she said, with Southeast Asian nations "such as Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam used as source areas for women to be sexually exploited".

China's one-child policy, which began in 1980 and ended in 2016, resulted in there being an estimated 35 million more men than women in the country, making it challenging for Chinese men to find a wife, Enriquez said.

"The supply side is pushed by the women's poverty in source countries like the Philippines and the neighbouring Mekong subregion, which is being exploited by traffickers and buyers, as patriarchal stereotypes prey on the pressure for women to marry and save their families from poverty through marriage," she said.

Enriquez said trafficking will continue to be an issue until the Philippines starts to hold the buyers of women accountable. "Until now, those convicted are third-party traffickers and we have yet to hear of male procurers being punished, even as the practice has been normalised," she said, citing the example of websites offering catalogues of Filipino "brides" available for purchase. She said the owners of such websites could be prosecuted under the 2022 anti-trafficking law.

But ultimately, Enriquez said, curbing trafficking cases is a two-way street.

"While the Philippines must create local sustainable jobs and ensure that accessible support is provided for susceptible communities of women and girls, China must address its own demand side - patriarchal policies and culture which socialises men as perpetrators."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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