PHOTO: Ana Marques
She became, in the Special Administrative Region, the face of the fight against human trafficking and was one of the most active voices in the defense of a law that could actually protect the victims of domestic violence. At 81, Juliana Devoy says that Macau gave her the opportunity to help the others in a way that would be unthinkable anywhere else. The director of the Good Shepherd Centre claims, nevertheless, that there is still a lot to do help Macau to become a just city. The fight for a more human process of adoption is Juliana Devoy’s next battle.
You are, in a certain sense, the face of the fight against human trafficking and violence against women in Macau. Concerning human trafficking, is the panorama in Macau improving or not? Aspects like prostitution or sexual abuse against underage girls are still an issue in Macau.
Well, I can only speak about those under 18 years old. We have an agreement with the Government in which we assume responsibility for those girls under 18. Girls who are under 18 are considered by the United Nations to be children, in need of protection. Actually, those who are under 18 were all coming from Mainland China. They were not from Macau. The number of girls under 18 that make use of the hotline to get help is not very substantial. It is hard to say if the number of women forced to prostitute themselves is increasing or decreasing because the Government doesn’t give statistics on these people. It is only when they are picked up that they have some statistics. The girls under 18 years that are picked up by the police – some of them may not be – are delivered to us after being interrogated. In the last six years – maybe six years now – we had 62 underage girls …
Sixty two?
Sixty two, yes. But, in the begining they were more. Now they are less. In a year we might get two or three, whereas sometimes in the past we had five or six per year. The problem is still there, in the sense that these girls, who come from different parts of Mainland China, are very vulnerable. Most of them are coming from poor families, they are school dropouts. We only ran into one who had finished her secondary school, so mostly they drop out much before that. They are unhappy at home and, therefore, they are very easy prey for traffickers. They promise them a lot when they come to Macau …
What do the traffickers promise them exactly? Work?
Money. They promise mainly money. I worked in Hong Kong for a very long time with behavior problem girls, and comparingly, these girls, I consider them nice. They are not tough and problematic like the girls we used to have in Hong Kong. They are, nevertheless, very vulnerable. When they are picked up by the police, they will run a physical exam and then they will interrogate them and afterwards they will bring them here. Then they will continue the interrogation for a while but the girls won’t cooperate: they will say nobody brought them here, that they came here by themselves, which is impossible because most of them have no idea where this is. The position of the Government is like this: without any evidence there’s no way they can bring some people to trial. We have tried to make things differently, but we can’t do much. They don’t stay that long and there’s nothing we can do but send them back. The traffickers, very often, are waiting. Even though we have taken care of more than 60 girls, I just know of one case who is now married and has a baby, but what happened to the rest, we have no idea. We have no way to follow them up. Anyway, what we have tried to do is to tell the Government, based on what some European countries have done: they have a period for recovery and reflection for victims of trafficking from other places. Here in Macau, we should be able to keep these girls longer, event if they are not agreeable to that. They are not already hardened prostitutes, they are just kids.
How long do you think should they be allowed to remain in Macau?
We should be able to insist that they have to stay here for a larger period of time, maybe several months, otherwise, we won’t have any influence on them. We are very friendly and we try our best to engage them, but the time is so short. The most progress we have made in that area is … A year ago, because one particular girl that said that definitively she would pick up doing the same thing, instead of sending her across the border, to catch the plane back to where she came from, some staff from the Women’s Organization accompanied her to her hometown. They bought the ticket here in Macau – which was a much more expensive option – and took her home and tried to give her back to her family. The Women’s Organization set up some kind of a programme for her, so they felt they were making some progress. No, they were not. Within a week or two she was gone.
Nevertheless, the Good Shepherd Center is not only about helping women that are victims of human trafficking. It’s about helping women in distress …
Basically, we are a crisis center. That’s why we didn’t use the Portuguese word “Lar” when we first started the project. That’s a residential home. From the very beginning, we started to take public positions on the rights of women. Over the years, the kind of women that we have got and the situations we had to deal with are some that you would never think of. Besides the local people, which were 99 percent of those that we help, we also took in foreigners: we have had women that were released from prison and they were waiting to go back to wherever they were from. We have had some Africans and we still are in contact with them . They were from Uganda, they were drug traffickers but they were also victims, utilized by people who were very smart and very cunning and that told them there was no problem bringing the drugs in. We had people from Russia, from Mongolia, from almost any place. We even had a family from Jamaica.
(To be continued next issue.)
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