TRAFFICKING IN THE UNITED STATES

• From the 1980s on, around 5,000 Filipinas are married to American men annually through the so-called mail-order bride agencies or the international match-making agencies. These agencies comprise a multi-million dollar business.

• Wife battery and control are usual features of these marriages, where the divorce rate is estimated at 70%.

• The fiance/husband/male client usually believes he has been taken advantaged of when the Filipina tries to divorce or leave him. His retaliation runs the gamut of mild (maxing out credit cards and making sure the court divides the debt between him and his to-be-ex-wife) to killing her, as what happened in a Seattle courtroom.

• Several young Filipinas were married to psychopaths and/or serial killers. Estelita Villa Reeves in Texas disappeared and the police discovered that her husband had married two others--a Latina and a Vietnamese--before her, both died mysteriously.

• An estimated 25,000 Filipinas have been brough into the US to work at brothel houses, bars, nightclubs and illegal sex farms in various states and in the vicinity of US military bases and camps.

• Some 25 sex tour operators in the US each send 15-25 men each month to the Philippines to engage in sex tourism. A Philippine Adventure Tour, for instance, costs $1,645 including RT airfare, hotel and guided tours to the bars where women are purchased for sex for as low as $24.

• Neither the Philippine embassy and its consulates nor the US government has any adequate program to deal with the problem. US legislators of Philippine ancestry focus largely on whether the women should be called "mail-order brides," the agencies "mail-order bride agencies," or some other term which would effectively hide the fact that women are being sold.

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