IMAGES from Manila and the places around it come crowding like fever dreams. The dwarves, a man and a woman dwarf, scuttling forward from the back of a dim bar to drag the customer in. The young prostitute, standing passively in her little frock in front of the paunchy, middle aged, Caucasian man who has called her out from a flock of girls, and the contempt with which he flicks up her skirt at the front to inspect her.
Listless children holding begging hands out to the endless, honking traffic jams in Manila, where the polluted grey concrete pavements of a city of ten million people are what they have for home.
Poverty beyond imagining. A runny nosed, blotchy child, crawling up the slope of a garbage dump, bent under a load of the bits of cardboard his father has collected to build a lean to. They've picked a square foot or so between the plumes of acrid smoke that belch up from where the deep layers of rotting garbage are permanently on fire. If there were anything to eat in the garbage, the terrible dogs, bald with mange, would have got it already.
On the verandah of Father Shay Cullen's shelter for children, the pinched, drugged look on the face of a little boy whose mother has hauled him back to ask for another chance there. This boy, it transpires, was the partner of a little girl called Rosario in sex displays. Rosario was once world famous. She became famous for dying from the effects of having a vibrator break inside her.
And outside Manila, on the road to the former "sin city" of Olongapo, where the Subic Bay US Naval Base left a corrupted society behind when; the Marines moved out in 1992, a vision of environmental hell. The landscape, from one moment to the next, is wiped out. When the Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted three years ago it covered fields and trees and houses and churches and every living thing in a sea of mud. Now there is nothing as far as the horizon but smooth, hardened, grey mud.
The people sit out in the grey vastness, under makeshift canopies. Women, babies on their hips, line the road, hoping for a few pence to be thrown through the dust from passing buses. These people have nothing. They have absolutely nothing.
Statistics are no more reliable than anything else in this chaotic country. But the World Bank estimated, a few years ago, that approximately 30 million Filipinos live in absolute poverty. The number of the poor increases all the time. The Roman Catholic church has successfully opposed any national family planning initiative. The population, 65 million in 1993, is likely to reach 100 million in under 30 years.
The rich own the land. The rich run the country. The Marcos family alone took about $10 billion out of the Philippines.
Everyone who can steal, steals, from the ruling oligarchy with its rural slave labour and its urban kick backs, to the traffic policemen, "fining" drivers for imaginary infringements, to the postal workers who peel the stamps off postcards. The poor must shift for themselves. This is the context of sex tourism.
This is the immediate explanation for why, according to UNICEF, there are 60,000 child prostitutes in the Philippines. The first thing I hear on Philippine soil, as the plane lands in Manila, is a European man explaining tap a group of Filipino boys that he is on a holiday". "We'll get you nice company," the boys say, and they all laugh, understanding each other. There is no tourism in Manila, or the former US "recreation" cities of Olongapo and Angeles, except sex tourism.
The last words I hear are "I am hungry", from a child living in a doorway near the hotel, and from a couple of transvestites, hanging, around the street in a downpour of hot rain - "My, you are beautiful". They simper as the rain runs down their faces, pathetic in their thin women's clothes and tottering high heels.
In between, the signs of how cheap sex can come when too many people are trading it are everywhere. The menu in a cafe, scribbled over with messages: "Hi! Hello! My name is Jefferson de la Cruz and I am a callboy.". The patient whores, combing their shining hair as they wait for custom in bars and hotel lobbies. The local girls, so slight that in a hamburger diner, the half drunk men customers bounce them on their thighs like babies. In a karaoke disco, the girls exaggerate their infantile appeal with white ankle socks. Not that they need to compared to the big Australian and German and English men, all the Filipina girls look like children.
They are as relatively helpless as children, too. Which is why, in spite of all the neon and the pounding music and the suggestive language, the sex scene is so dull. The girls must always say "yes". The man points; she must come forward. There is no erotic edge, no thrill of seduction, in the nightclubs and bars of metro Manila.
There are scores of impassive young people on offer foreign men, however inadequate by the standards of their own cultures, can preen themselves in front of them. For no other reason than that outside, on the broken down streets, and far away, in the villages, there is absolute poverty.
A pimp was secretly recorded offering under age girls to Father Cullen's investigator. "I tell the girls doesn't want to go to the tourist," the pimp remarked, "only Filipino, because the girls think that Caucasian penis are very big compared with Filipino. But because of money, because she want money to buy foods or for buying something, I can't explain . . .
And then, there are the real children. The three year old, dragging a battered toy through the dust of the yard she lives in. "She was abused by her step father." Nothing unusual about that thousands, if not tens of thousands of the street children have been sexually abused in their home or their neighbourhood. It is just that she is so strikingly tiny.
The national chairwoman of the Philippines' women's organisations, a Benedictine, Sister Mary John Mananzan, tersely explains. "The children are too small for what the men want to do with them. So the men give them drugs to relax their muscles. Then they become addicted. Our children are systematically corrupted."
In a wide ranging discussion of the plight of her countrywomen, Sister Mahanzan stresses the ideals that make prostitution so especially destructive in her culture. Virginity is everything. (In the newspaper ads, private clinics offer vaginal repair.) Even without penetration, girls who have been abused believe in their own heads that they can never be brides. And a husband is every girl's ideal. Family is cherished. The world sees the lives of lonely toil that young men and women from the Philippines cheerfully undertake to help the family at home. At Christmas, the planes to Manila from the Gulf states are full of Filipina maids, laden with the gifts they can afford after a year of work abroad. A Channel Four documentary has followed an even more desperate strategy - a Filipino father of a large family who works as a "woman" in Japanese gay bars, to earn a living for all of them. EVERYWHERE, people are as courteous and as dignified as their circumstances allow. They have no affinity with sleaze. A man who owes his education and his job to the Americans at the Subic Bay base is nevertheless glad they are gone, because of the pain of watching the sailors fondling the local girls lasciviously in public on the street.
A conference of prostitutes - ASCONPRO - was held in Manila. Some of the first world prostitutes - working in the Netherlands and Paris and the USA - insisted they had freely chosen to work in prostitution and that it is their right. But the Filipina prostitutes were unanimous. If there was anything at all else they could do to earn money, they would do it. Anything.
But the Philippines, once the economic hope of Asia - English speaking, linked with America, and more developed than Indonesia, Malaysia or Thailand before the ruin of the Marcos regime - appears to be in rapid decline. There are blackboards on the pavements of Manila, offering batches of jobs as labourers and servants all over the Arab world. But there are no jobs in the Philippines.
Poverty denatures. An appalled sadness is all there is to offer back to it. To the photo of a child witness in one of Father Shay Cullen's paedophile prosecutions, who was chained by her mother to a bed - food thrown down to her, as to a dog - to prevent her giving testimony against her abuser. To the harsh tears of a tough trial lawyer who represents women who use a crisis centre in Quezon City, when she suddenly breaks down, mid interview, at the memory of a five year old whose mother had stuffed her with cotton wool soaked in chicken blood to make her desirable to sex tourists, and who is now infected with VD. To the little girl, living now in Father Cullen's Preda Foundation shelter in Olongapo, who proudly showed me her locker with her toothbrush and school blouse and other precious things, when she tells an ITV camera exactly what happened when she was first with a paedophile. He had claimed that she and the other kids enjoyed it. But she whispers, through sobs - "when it was over I said, `I want to go home now, sir. Sir, please' `let me, go home'. But he said, one more time."
The local political and even legal establishment will protect that paedophile sooner than face what they are allowing him to do within their country. A sex industry is not simply a product of market economics. There is a system which allows it to be. That is why Father Shay Cullen's work for children has developed in the direction of entrapping paedophiles while simultaneously entrapping local police into starting proceedings against them.
At a typical, apparently ramshackle, court hearing one morning last month, Father Cullen sits on a broken oilcloth sofa in the decrepit, fly blown court room while people wander in and out, hens cluck in the laneway outside, and prisoners stand around in T shirts that read "Inmate Olongapo City Jail" and joke with their warders.
A 62 year old Australian man - still jaunty enough looking, after two years of hearings got one girl who was living on the street to collect some other homeless small girls and bring them to his yacht, moored in Subic Bay. He "messed with" six little girls altogether. His defence is that they enjoyed it, and that no signs of violence were found on their private parts.
Father Cullen has been counter accused of inventing the children's testimony. A social worker from his shelter is testifying that the girls themselves gave an account of what happened. Time passes slowly. The ceiling fan pushes the humid air, around. There will be a hearing in another paedophile case tomorrow. Another hearing in this one next month. No foreigner has ever been convicted, of child sex abuse. If change does come, it will be slow in coming. And, it will apply only to children that any man can do whatever he likes to their older sisters and mothers is accepted.
A TYPHOON is passing across the South China Sea. Rains begin. In Manila, in the Tondo shanty town, passing, jeepneys and lorries spray mud onto a mad young woman who stands, naked, in the middle of the rutted road, and gibbers, pointing at herself. No one takes any notice.
A few miles away, in the faux Spanish church of St. Anthony of Padua, in the rich enclave of Forbes Park, the rain relieves the grey heat that hangs over a society wedding. A line of white Mercedes waits at the porch. Marvellous bouquets, with trailing streamers of the whitest chiffon, adorn the pews. It is a scene of silk and brocade and gift boxes wrapped in gold and silver, and a tenor sings Nat King Cole songs, When I Fall In Love. It Will Be Forever.
Two grimy street boys have somehow got past the security guards, and are going through the bit of rubbish spilled where the church keeps its bins. They find something. A few hungry cats begin prowling around them to try to get at it. But the boys crawl in under a hedge to share whatever it is. The limousines of the bride and groom and their bevy of attendants in virginal white, resplendent representatives of the importance and beauty of the temple of the body when you have money, swish past the hedge where the boys are crouching, on their way to the customary banquet.