Even though it is widely practiced, prostitution is illegal in the Philippines. There is an organized movement to make prostitution a legal activity in the Philippines. By one estimate a half a million women prostitute themselves.
Brothels are often disguised as restaurants. Most of the men who use prostitutes in the Philippines are locals not foreigners. You would not get this impression by visiting one of the better known red light districts.
Local tend to use community-, neighborhood- and town- based brotherl and sex workers. In Angeles City, near Clark Air base, there is one street with bars for foreigners on one side, and bars for locals on the other.
Many prostitutes work for pimps. The Amou, or maintainers, who recruit and take care of the girls, and make sure they do not run away. They also push drugs on the girls. The Iti, or wild ducks, chase customers, and bring them to the girls. The police arguably do more to abet prostitution than stop it. Transvestites also participate in prostitution, especially with unwary foreigners.
Jose Florante J. Leyson wrote in the Encyclopedia of Sexuality: Tribal wars between the aborigines in the Philippine islands turned the vanquished into slaves for labor or cannibalism, but not sexual slaves. When Chinese merchants started trading with the inhabitants of the archipelago in C. With the advent of Spanish colonists in the late s, a flourishing slave trade was established between the Philippines, the Caribbean, and Spain. When Pope Gregory XIV abolished slavery in the Philippines in , middle-class Europeans started to immigrate to the archipelago, but the sexual exploitation of Filipinas by the Spanish colonists continued.
