Not only abandoned Filipino Amerasians are increasing, as a sad offshoot of visiting US military troops. Rising too from sexploitation of desperate Filipinas are offspring of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese itinerants. The left-behinds – Japinos, Kopinos, Chipinos – are so like the Fil-Amerasians: poor and stigmatized.
That is the keynote research submitted to the 2nd Asia-Pacific Conference on Business and Social Sciences, which reels off in Taipei on Friday. The paper is titled “No Way Out: The Tragic Transnational Sexual Exploitation of the Philippines.” It links for the first time the plight of forsaken Fil-Amerasians to kids of more recent sexploitation by visiting Asian neighbors.
Author Dr. P.C. “Pete” Kutschera, PhD, counts 250,000-plus penurious, outcast Fil-Amerasians: seniors, adults, and youths. Abandoned Japinos, Kopinos, and Chipinos total about the same, 200,000, 30,000, and 5,000, respectively. The successive sprout of the mixed heritage children is an “unprecedented diaspora,” Kutschera laments, and warns of no end in sight.
Fil-Amerasians emerged in the early 1900s with US colonization of the archipelago, and went on till World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam War, to the present. There are even second-generation Fil-Amerasians born to biracial mothers, abandoned by soldier-fathers, and prostituted from slums around Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base. Japinos sprang from the wave of Japanese traders and sex-tourists in the ‘70s to ‘80s, Kutschera recounts. “Uncontrolled,” he says of the explosion of Kopinos with the Korean migration to the Philippines. The new swell of Chipinos comes as Chinese males’ remedy to their state’s one-child policy and from sex-tourism. “We are now entering our fourth chronological iteration of child abandonment by developed world powerhouses,” Kutschera says. “It’s an admixture of mass molestation, severe psychological stigmatization, and financial burdening, in a wholly sexualized manner, onto a needy, vulnerable, weak state.”
The paper recommended an infusion of empirical data, grants, renewed academic interest, public awareness, and government and United Nations policies.
New Yorker Kutschera did his study as director of the Philippine Amerasian Research Center of Systems-Plus College Foundation, Angeles City. Co-author is Dr. Edgar G. Galang, SPCF vice president for academics and research, and dean of arts and social science. Their notes:
• Fil-Amerasians: “Hypocritical” is the US State Department’s annual castigation of countries in its Trafficking in Persons reports, while ignoring the abandoned “G.I. babies.” Such child neglect or abuse, and lack of child support by fathers and grandfathers are crimes in most of America’s 50 states.
• Japinos: In the ‘70s Japanese accounted for one-third of tourists to the islands. In the ‘80s alarmingly four in five Japanese tourists were males, as golf, casino and sex tours openly were advertised in Japan. For a time, even the Philippine government disguised Filipina sex workers as cultural dancers, singers, choreographers, guest relations officers, tour guides under an “Overseas Performing Arts Program.” Many “Japayukis” who got pregnant were fired from work and deported.
• Kopinos are increasing exponentially. Now 30,000, they were only 10,000 in 2011, the second year that Koreans led the total tourist arrivals. Many are children of teenage Filipinas impregnated by Korean college students. Some are even lured into video and Internet porn. The South Korean government, a military ally of the Philippines like the US and Japan, is ignoring the problem.
• Chipinos are sired by businessmen and tourists from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao. They are yet unnoticed, notes the researchers who coined the moniker. Yet the two-hour flight proximity to the Philippines of many Chinese southern cities makes sexploitation of forlorn Filipinas easy. China’s one-child rule also has resulted to gender disparity of 130 males to 100 females, thus the search for Filipina mates.
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Abu Sayyaf Islamist terrorists claim to have received P250-million ransom to release the German senior couple they had kidnapped in Sulu. They even posted on social media a video of the supposed loot in opaque plastic bags, with adolescent voices in background audio scounting in Taosug. Truth or propaganda?
Two hundred-fifty million pesos cash is a heavy load to lug into the terrorists’ mountain lair. A million pesos in P1,000s weighs about one kilo, so P250 million is 250 kilos. A large suitcase can carry 25 kilos, so the loot would need ten suitcases. Picture the underfed “jihadists” retreating uphill while firing and being fired at by pursuing state troops.
Oh, but the kidnappers ordered the military to back off lest they behead the hostages. That’s allegedly how they made a clean, cozy getaway.
Surely there are heavily armed bounty hunters in Wild West Sulu. There might even be army units to volunteer to wipe out the bandits, then keep the loot. The kidnappers know better than to lure pursuers into their hideout for real.
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