Notes: Children in Sex Work - Part 2

In all my travels and years in development work, I always find the plight of children to be disturbing. As a foreigner and tourist in developing countries, I can’t help but notice children in the streets begging or being involved in the flesh trade. It is the latter that I find most upsetting. I know that the main reason behind these activities is poverty. But I can’t also help but wonder if children engaged in sex work are pure victims, or do they exercise human agency in making sense of, and living in the social world of sex work? What aspects of sex work are open to their decision-making? And how do children decide and interpret their engagement in this occupation?

This is the second of this 3-part post.

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL AGENT
People acquire the capacities necessary to be agents in the social world, at the same time that society both enables and constrains the exercise of this agency. By active participant, I presuppose the intentionality and willingness of the child’s agency regardless of, and given, its limited experience and bounded knowledge – connoting the concept of the child sex worker’s limited agency and bounded realities.

Thus, I contend that children sex workers have both the practical and discursive knowledge, however limited these may be, of the rules and structures in the social world. These include authority structures and role-specific social structures that guide the actions, interactions, and relations of social actors in the process of exercising their agency through restructuration (reproduction of social structures) and destructuration (breaking the rules and preventing the reproduction of structures).

This contention presupposes the rationality of the children sex workers as it is imperative to establish the intentionality of the child as active social agents, albeit a limited one given the limitations of the child’s knowledge and experience. While knowledgeability is founded less upon discursive consciousness than practical consciousness; human agents always know what they are doing on the level of discursive under some description.

I further contend that the child’s agency is limited compared to the adult; the child’s exercise of agency is bounded by the lack of knowledge and experience by virtue of their age, and not because of their incapacity for reason. The adult is more “rational” than the child in the sense that the adult has more time than the child to acquire knowledge and experience, and to exercise the ability to reason. In other words, the child is capable of reason as far as her knowledge and experience allows.

Thus, I also contend that the limited knowledge and experience of the children sex workers does not prevent them from exercising their agency in their everyday life situations, however limited her agency may be compared to the adult social actors in sex work.

The children sex workers I have interviewed and observed were 14 years old. Prior to sex work, the social worlds of these three children were limited only to the family and, in one case, to the gang, as well. The very limited knowledge and experience of the children sex workers, which form their discursive and practical consciousness, were founded on this bounded reality as they entered sex work.

Furthermore, the social rules and structures in sex work affect the agency of the child. Most of the social rules and structures in sex work are mainly based on the social constructions of childhood and sexuality characterized by adult and male bias. Thus, as the child exercises her agency in sex work in her everyday interactions and relations with the pimps, managers, and customers, the child finds her agency to be limited not only by her bounded reality, but also by the social rules and structures in sex work.

Wait for the last part of this 3-part post...

Notes: Poverty and Development – Part 2

As a development worker working and traveling in developing countries, I noticed one common and disturbing theme: POVERTY. For me, poverty is THE development issue. It has been a perennial problem that majority of the world’s population faces. But the lack of impact of development efforts on developing countries, despite the years and the billions of dollars spent on programs makes me wonder if development programs helping poor countries as intended or are they fostering dependency on international aid, corruption within the government and consequently, furthering poverty and underdevelopment? This has led me to one major question: what have we not done right?

This is the second part of my effort at examining the historical development trends and progress, with a focus on the Philippines.

DEVELOPMENT IN THE PHILIPPINES
Having a history of more than half a century of development work, the Philippine experience may be the best example to illustrate my answer. Its development history has been driven by both capitalist-led interventions and socialist ideals. The oldest-known non-government organization (NGO), the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM) was founded in 1952 based on Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s…

This long history of development in the Philippines has resulted to several positive outcomes. Today, the country has one of the highest literacy rates (98%) in the world. While there are still human rights violations, it boasts of having one of the highest levels of gender equality among developing nations, especially in education and employment.

Many sectoral organizations have formed national-level federations and international alliances to represent and advocate for grassroots interests. The enactment of the Local Government Code (LGC) has empowered local communities to be independent and to address problems at the local level. There has also been a noticeable decrease in the number of people living below the poverty line as the proportion of the middle class expanded.

These gains however, are currently being threatened. The World Bank has categorized the Philippines as a middle income country at the start of the 21st century (year?) due to the rise in its HDI and GDP. As a consequence, much of the international donor agencies pulled out from the country, resulting to a chain reaction starting with the closure of majority of local NGOs. Without support from the NGOs, many cooperatives and community-based organizations (CBOs) collapsed, further weakening the civil society movement.

In addition, majority of financial programs such as credit and livelihood were stopped, and environmental protection and rehabilitation activities were abandoned. In less than a decade the country’s development has regressed, leading the World Bank and other donor agencies to question if they had pulled out of the country too soon.

Blaming the country’s regression solely on the pull-out of international funding is oversimplifying the situation. There are of course several other factors that contributed to the Philippines’ regression. The Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) implemented in 1988 under the Aquino administration failed to protect farmers from decisions of landowners to convert agricultural lands into residential, commercial or industrial areas.

These converted lands are exempted from CARP and were not distributed to the farmers who have worked on it for decades and centuries. The land remains with the landowner. Moreover, the CARP and the government in general, failed to subsidize small farmers, leaving them vulnerable to exorbitant prices of agricultural inputs.

As the Philippine government pursued industrialization, many farmers found it more practical to sell their land for conversion than to continue tilling them. Many of those who continued farming turned to cash crops which generated more revenues than agricultural food crops. These land conversions and increase in cash crop production led to the scarcity of food in the country. It is ironic that the Philippines, host to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) established to increase rice production, ended up importing rice from other countries that benefitted from IRRI’s research and training.

Please wait for the 3rd part of this 4-part post...