CEDAW/C/PHI/5-6 recommended the blacklisting of 9 foreign nationals involved in operating pen pal clubs or recruiting Filipino women for marriage to foreigners. Prostitution 182. Poverty and the absence of alternative sources of income continued to push women into prostitution, where den operators and pimps exploited them. Customers and police officers contributed their share of violating the prostituted women’s rights. Unscrupulous operators in the tourism and entertainment industries have used loopholes in laws to continue to exploit prostitution. The total number of prostituted women and children could not be ascertained, as it is considered illegal and perpetrators conduct their business clandestinely. But the estimates are staggering. Violence against women 183. Violence against women persists, with the number of reported crimes rising between 2000 and 2002 before declining to 7,805 in 2003. The 2003 figure for VAW cases is 6 percent lower than that in 2000 and 13 percent lower than that in 2002. While probably the most gruesome, rape constitutes less than 13 percent of cases reported to the police. The more common remains to be physical abuse and wife battering. 184. Meanwhile, cases of violence against children numbered 7,303 in 2003, which is 15 percent less than those in 2000 and 8 percent lower than those in 2002. Of these cases, 46 percent were victims of rape, including incestuous rape (4 percent); 27 percent involved physical abuse, and 15 percent were acts of lasciviousness.13 In 2002, for which data are available, three of six child victims were 12 to 17 years old; 25 percent were 6 to 11 years old. As with the women victims of violence, about half of the perpetrators of crimes against children were not related to the victims. In fact, many (31 percent) were total strangers to the child. Husbands accounted for 28 percent of VAW crimes, while close male relatives were responsible for 13 percent of the reported crimes of violence against children (NSCB 2003a). Violence against women in areas of armed conflict 185. Civilians displaced from their homes due to armed conflict suffer in the evacuation centers due to poor living conditions, malnutrition and illness. Congestion, lack of food, poor sanitation and unavailability of medical facilities and supplies at evacuation centers have caused a rise in common illnesses such as diarrhea, dysentery and respiratory ailments which have resulted in deaths among evacuees. According to the social welfare department, most of the reported deaths due to illness in evacuation centers are children below 2 years old (www.inq7.net). 186. Some reports of violations of human rights of civilians — men, women and children — committed by the combatants in Mindanao: a. In 1998, the Philippine Beijing Score Board (PBSB) reported that three women were raped under military custody, 717 families from four tribes were dislocated from their ancestral domain, 90 families of the Manobo tribe in Agusan del Sur had to give way to logging 13Based on the “Annual and Quarterly Comparative Statistics on Crimes Against Children (CY 1999-2003)” table provided by the PNP Women’s and Children’s Concerns Desk to NCRFW in March 2004. 60