AS THE sun sets and the shadows of the buildings and establishments in the city grow larger, girls and young women dressed in skimpy shorts and tight tank tops take their posts on the streets of Davao City, particularly Tionko Avenue, the street at the side of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
They are the prostituted.
As early as September 15, 1996, an administrative order was signed to constitute a committee that will draft a Code for women's development in the city of Davao.
On October 14, the following year, then mayor Rodrigo Roa-Duterte approved Ordinance 5004, also known as the Women Development Code of Davao City.
Chapter II, Article 18 of the Code says: "Prostitution shall be recognized as a violation of human rights and exploitation of women who have no real choices for survival."
Still when the night falls, these girls roam the streets in silence, sometimes outside the clubs calling on prospect customers who chance to pass by.
Clad in a yellow shirt with a Talikala print on her chest, I approached Ate Lorna (not her real name), one of the center's volunteers, who was sitting on a wooden bench in the Talikala Center's living room. When she started talking, that was when I learned she was a former prostituted woman herself.
Talikala is a non-profit organization based in Davao City that rescues and helps trafficked and prostituted women to improve their quality of life.
Just like most of women in prostitution, Ate Lorna became involved in it because of poverty. She was 19 years old when she started. A little too old for some girls who actually start during their minor years, as shown in the documentary film "Magda Not For Sale" produced by Talikala Inc. and AWO International.
Ate Lorna said before she stopped, she was doing it for around 18 years. She was initially tricked into working as a waitress but ended up being an entertainer who gets to go on an "outing" with a customer, a term that means to be taken to a motel or a house by the customer.
"But even when I lied low around 2003 to 2004, I already experienced a variety of sexually transmitted infections. I had gonorrhea and trichomoniasis. These infections can just be treated but we became more afraid when HIV became more widespread in the city. We had a friend who were in the same business as we did; she died because of HIV/Aids. Since then, we became more encouraged to be tested regularly and to request customers to use condom. But even so, others would insist on sexual acts that they like. We have no choice but to follow if we do not want to be hurt or killed," Ate Lorna said in the vernacular.
Gonorrhea is a sexually-transmitted infection caused by a bacterium that takes shelter in the warm, moist internal and external areas of the reproductive health tract. They can be spread by bodily fluid, so a mother could also pass it on to her newborn child.
Trichomoniasis, on the other hand, is an infection mostly affecting women with several sex partners. Ate Lorna said, before she was diagnosed with the infection, she would often experience difficulty in urinating coupled with a very painful lower abdomen.
During her time in the 1990s, she recalled that "pink treatment cards" were issued to workers who entertain customers as their nature of work, not necessarily involving any sexual acts.
These pink treatment cards, according to Dr. Josephine Villafuerte of the City Health Office, are issued to all workers who will have contact with another person physically, including massage therapists. These cards are renewed annually and the holders are to undergo basic laboratory tests including stool and urine tests. However, for those workers with possible involvement of sexual acts, extra laboratory tests are conducted like Hepatitis B and Veneral Disease Research Laboratory (VDRL), a test to see whether the patient has syphilis, an infection transferrable through sexual activities including anal and oral sex.
Ate Lorna recalled that law enforcers during her time were very strict to the point of raiding their entertainment establishment if they were discovered not having regular check-ups and updates with their pink treatment cards.
Once an entertainer was found positive of a sexually transmitted infection, she is not allowed to engage into an "outing" for a week. She would have to cure herself first and take the prescribed medicine which means a week's worth of income taken from her.
Ate Lorna had been lucky to not develop HIV/Aids before she left the flesh trade.
But in a data of the Department of Health (DOH), 294 individuals were recorded, from January to November of last year, and they were found to be HIV positive and have been accepting payments for sex. These are people ages 16 to 50 years of age. Surprisingly, 273 of these are males and only 21 are females.
The same data also revealed that 151 individuals recorded to be HIV positive are engaged in both accepting payments and paying for sex. About 137 of these are male and only 14 are female.
In November of last year, 96 percent of HIV/Aids cases involved in transactional sex, or those paying or receiving payments for sex, are males whose ages ranged from 18 to 50 years old.
The City Government of Davao made it clear in the Women Development Code that prostitution, in any way, is illegal.
However, the issuance of pink treatment cards for entertainers, including Ate Lorna before she stopped being in prostitution, has helped people in this kind of industry to watch out for their health regularly and to make sure that the infections that they acquire from different customers do not develop into worse cases of HIV/Aids.
People have the misconceptions of only women in prostitution as the mostly recorded cases with HIV/Aids since they are more known to be with different sexual partners. But recent surveys revealed that cases for males, including homosexual males, are also alarmingly increasing in number.
