Jean never knew how long it would take to repay her debt. All she knew was that doing so was destroying her. They make you take it with them. We could earn a lot of money from using drugs with clients. It was a far cry from the good life and pleasant job in a restaurant she had been promised when a recruiter visited her home town in Pampanga in Jean, a single mother of a 4-year-old girl with no family support network, took the job out of desperation.
She arrived in Hong Kong on a tourist visa, and was told by her recruiters she owed a heavy debt for the cost of her ticket, visa and living expenses. To pay it off, she would have to prostitute herself. The State Department says that traffickers commonly use promises of employment to lure vulnerable women from the Philippines and Thailand to Hong Kong, where they confiscate their passports and force them into prostitution through debt bondage.
It urged the city to proactively identify trafficking victims among vulnerable groups such as migrants, domestic workers and women and children in prostitution. It was in a bar not unlike the ones where Jutting met his victims that Jean found herself working shortly after arriving in the city. Her recruiters had arranged a two-year domestic helper visa for her as part of an arrangement with the bar, where she worked with women of other nationalities.
I was deceived. These girls are deceived… then forced into prostitution [by having their] passports taken. The United Nations defines human trafficking as the action or practice of legally or illegally transporting people from one place to another for the purposes of forced labour or commercial sexual exploitation.
In most situations, victims cannot escape from the traffickers. Jean said the bar she had worked in was co-owned by a Hong Kong police officer. It has since closed. In an unrelated case, the Independent Commission Against Corruption ICAC said on January 25 that 12 people, including three police officers, had been arrested on suspicion of corruption in relation to enforcement action against two nightclubs.
