TO the average Filipino teenager, ?gimmick? is a distorted translation of hanging out and having wholesome fun with friends. To 14-year-old Marife, the word would eventually mean having sex with dozens of paying customers after she was sold to a prostitution house in Angeles City. Without proper education and already too psychologically damaged to consider returning to her family, she languished for years in a world where violence, pornography, deceit, exploitation and brutality was a way of life.

?The aunt of my sister-in-law convinced me to leave Pangasinan and work as a housemaid for a family she knew in Manila,? recounts Marife, now 22. ?She left me with an employer who sexually abused me repeatedly until I ran away with no money and nowhere to go for help. I roamed Cubao aimlessly until a young girl befriended me. She introduced me to a man who promised me a job in his uncle?s store in Pampanga. I agreed because I was hungry, tired and didn?t know where else to go,? she says slowly. ?I saw him hand the girl P700 before we left, but I thought nothing of it. We arrived at night at a large house in Angeles City and I wanted to leave. He assured me that we would go in the morning but he disappeared the next day. I was threatened when I tried to leave, then locked up in a room and forced to have sex with men 24 hours a day. If I resisted, I would be beaten up until I stopped trying to fight them off.?

Being the youngest in the prostitution house and having a child-like face made Marife a favorite of customers. Many times she was shuttled from one room to another without a moment?s rest, servicing up to 22 men a day. The people running the house treated the girls like caged animals, many of them minors from the provinces with no formal education and hardly any knowledge about reproductive health. They were not taught or provided with means to protect themselves from getting pregnant or contracting sexually transmitted diseases. Marife suffered through both. Her manager paid for an abortion and venereal disease treatments.

?If I hadn?t been screaming in pain because of an infection, the manager would not have brought me to the hospital. He warned me not to tell anyone I worked in a ?casa? (prostitution house). I was also told to say I was 18 and married. He kept close watch while the medical staff attended to me,? Marife recounts. ?When I was released from the hospital, I had to work immediately because he said I had to pay for the medical expenses on top of what I already owed them for board and lodging.?

For six months, Marife worked without a salary and endured the deplorable living conditions by taking all kinds of drugs until she managed to escape. ?After I left the casa, I thought there was no point looking for another job when I had already worked as a prostitute.? Like other abused women, she thought that this was her fate and there was nothing she could do about it.

?I ?gimmicked? in the Quezon Boulevard and Avenida area just to get by, until I met women who saved me.?

While working on the streets, Marife was invited by volunteers of the Bagong Kamalayan (New Consciousness) Collective, Inc, founded in 2004 by Mylene Aniola, 29, and six other former streetwalkers. They give literacy classes, facilitate educational scholarship and livelihood projects, conduct rights and health seminars, carry out research and campaign, provide counseling, and tap legal services for abused prostituted women and children on a small scale basis in Quezon City and Manila.

It was here that Marife met Lita, who had also been recruited from Iligan City at 16 to work in Manila. Lita was forced to dance half naked in a sleazy club in Lucena City then prostituted to customers without pay. ?Our handlers roughed up all the girls regularly so we lived in constant fear,? Lita reveals. ?I learned to take drugs everytime I had to go onstage. The customers were disgusting and I wanted to stab them while they were having sex with me,? she adds. ?I could not take it anymore so I tried to escape; but they caught me. The club owner and his men almost killed me. They made me work round the clock without food as a punishment. I thought I was going to die in the club without my family even knowing where I was.?

Lita finally got to escape when she was brought to a hospital for profuse bleeding after having undergone an abortion. Now 44, she and Marife have found their dignity again and struggle not only to rebuild their lives but also to help victims like themselves. Marife works as a secretary healing officer at the Bagong Kamalayan while Lita has been reunited with her long-lost children.

Both women were unaware of Republic Act 9208, the anti trafficking law that institute policies to eliminate trafficking in persons, especially women and children, and providing penalties for its violations. They are only two out of the thousands of women trafficked everyday.

But fortunately, there is justice. On March 27, 2007, according to a report from the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking, a conviction for violation of the anti-trafficking law was meted by the Regional Trial Court of Zamboanga City. The accused, Rosie Ociel, was sentenced to suffer the penalty of life imprisonment and to pay the fine of P1 Million for violating Section 3(a) in relation to Section 4(a) and Section 6(c) of R.A. No. 9208.

In this case, the accused, together with cohorts who remain at large, recruited six women from Laguna and Cavite, aged 20-23 years, to work as entertainers in Sandakan, Malaysia. They traveled to Malaysia via Zamboanga City, and once in Malaysia they were forced to work as prostitutes. Through the help of a volunteer working with the DFA, they were rescued by Malaysian immigration authorities and deported to the Philippines along with the accused. When they arrived in Zamboanga, they were met by NBI agents, who took them to their office where they filed a complaint against the accused. They were able to return to their respective families through the help of the DSWD who paid for their transportation.

For girls like Marife and Lita, it takes months or even years of counseling for them to understand and believe that they are victims, and they can still make a difference in someone else?s life.

Sister Sol Peripan, CEO of the Third World Movement Against the Exploitation of Women (TW-Mae-W) says, ?It is no longer true that victims of sexual exploitation, rape and incest are unable to face society. Conversion is not automatic but they can come out if they are motivated. Everybody deserves a second chance, especially the girls who are victims already.?

?Even the ones who have ?chosen? to work as prostitutes,? she adds, ?We can help them turn a new leaf.? Women?s Feature Service

The TW-Mae-W is geared towards the sector of children and women survivors of sexual abuse and exploitation. For inquiries, call tel. no. 9139255. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Asia Pacific can be reached at tel. no. 4342149 and 4269873.