Lurid Manila nights
The median age of the victims was 11, and some were infants. Here, we are talking of monsters sharing space with innocent kids.
The label “Manila Nites,” reportedly found on videotapes in a Mexican storage unit rented under Thomas Markle Sr.’s name, is disturbing enough. The tapes’ contents have not been made public but authorities in the Philippines are coordinating with US and UK law enforcement, while Markle denies the allegations that he kept child abuse material.
Whatever the investigations find, the larger issue is why the sexual exploitation of Filipino children is so common, so profitable and so familiar. It is far bigger than what one foreigner may have kept in a locker.
A 2022 study by UNICEF’s Office of Research–Innocenti, ECPAT International, and Interpol, “Disrupting Harm in the Philippines,” found that 20 percent of internet-using children aged 12 to 17 had suffered serious online sexual abuse or exploitation in the previous year.
That meant being blackmailed, having sexual images shared without consent, or being pressured with offers of money and gifts. Projected from a survey of 950 children, this comes to an estimated two million nationwide. To be clear, that is not a count of children prostituted or of victims police have identified.
In 2023, the International Justice Mission (IJM) and the University of Nottingham Rights Lab looked at something narrower: children trafficked to produce new abuse material, much of it livestreamed for paying viewers. It estimated that 471,416 Filipino children, about one in 100, were trafficked this way in 2022, by nearly 250,000 Filipino adults.
The two studies measure different things and should not be added together. Both are estimates of a hidden crime, and the second counted only traffickers, not the customers who pay them. And the crime is not confined to Manila. The IJM study found it widespread across Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao, and officials have named Cagayan de Oro and Iligan cities among the hotspots.
Many of the customers are foreigners. In IJM’s 2020 review of Philippine casework, every identified customer was a man aged 40 to 72, mostly from the US, Sweden and Australia. The median age of the victims was 11, and some were infants. Here, we are talking of monsters sharing space with innocent kids.
Still, foreign customers are only part of the problem. Too often, the person selling a child is someone in the child’s own home. In that review, among victims whose relationship to the trafficker was known, 41 percent were abused by a parent and 42 percent by other relatives.
The figure comes from cases IJM worked on, not from every abused child in the country. Poverty explains some of this, but not all, and it does not excuse selling a child.
Silence also sustains it. The Disrupting Harm project found that shame, victim-blaming, and not knowing what to do played a major role in whether children reported abuse. A transaction can be hidden behind a screen, but it continues for years only if the people around it say nothing.
Enforcement lag worsens the matter. The US State Department’s 2026 trafficking report counted 2,693 prosecutions continued from earlier years and 103 convictions, down from 143 the year before. Those figures cover all forms of trafficking, not online child exploitation alone.
The Philippine National Police should follow the evidence in the Markle case wherever it may lead. But no case against one man answers for a country where hundreds of thousands of children may have been trafficked for this purpose, and where relatives are often among the traffickers in the cases investigators have seen.
Whatever “Manila Nites” turns out to be, the studies are documented warnings, and the exploitation of Filipino children is not somebody else’s scandal. We have not done enough.