YESTERDAY, The Sun told how babies born to women – including sex workers – in the Philippines are being abandoned by their British fathers. But time is now running out for dads as charity workers use DNA to track them down and make them pay for their children.
They have already pinned down an alleged UK dad living the high life in Dubai while his little boy lives in poverty in the slums of Angeles City. Today, in part two of our series, Looking for Dad: The Children of Britain’s Sex Tourists, we outline how experts traced a man who left behind his daughter.
Little Nazelle is the daughter of a Birmingham man who is currently being pursued for maintenance Credit: Dave Tacon
Jowelaine Jamil, with her daughters Nazelle and Nazneen, 9, talks to Margaret Credit: Dave Tacon
Jowelaine and her family enjoy a simple meal of rice and fish after being helped by the charity Credit: Dave Tacon
Here, worker and journalist Margaret Simons explains how errant dads are chased as she reveals the hardship suffered by abandoned kids and their families.
EARLIER this year, I sent a letter to a woman I have never met.
I knew when the stranger, who lives in Buckinghamshire, opened the letter, it would be an unwelcome shock and apologised for that.
I pleaded for her help on behalf of a potential niece she has never met and didn’t even know she had.
I hoped she would help me find her brother, a man born in Birmingham in the 1980s
I head up a charity that works to track down the dads born to sex workers and other Filipino women.
Our detective work has established that the West Midlands man is potentially the father of a sweet little bright-eyed girl, Nazelle Logano, about to turn six.
It is likely that her father– let’s call him John – doesn’t know she exists, let alone living in poverty in the slums of City in the
Nazelle’s mother, Jowelaine Jamil Logano, 32 years old, is a sex worker – one of the thousands of Filipino women forced into the trade because of poverty.
Angeles, a city northwest of Manila, hosts thousands of British sex tourists each year.
Jowelaine is a ‘freelancer’ who connects with foreign men through online apps or simply by walking the streets in the red-light district.
She charges her clients around 2000 pesos – about 25 British pounds – for a “short time” – an hour back in their hotel room.
She can’t stay overnight because she has nobody back home to take care of Nazelle or her older sister, Nazneen, 8, who we have established is the daughter of a US former serviceman.
We took our own DNA samples from Nazelle and Nazneen in late 2024 and submitted them to one of the big, publicly available DNA databases.
It showed that on her paternal side, she is the product of networks of family history across the British Isles, converging in a marriage during the 1970s that produced two children – John and his sister.
Unless there is some hidden child – adopted out, perhaps –it is highly likely that John is Nazelle’s father.
We have been trying to find him using public records. We have an address, we know he has not died.
And, of course, we know he was in Angeles City around August 2019, because that is when he met Jowelaine. Nazelle was born on 16 April 2020.
I told the man’s sister, who appears to live a professional middle-class life, how poor Nazelle was, how deserving of a chance in life, and I asked for her help in contacting her brother.
Sex is cheap in Angeles City, but comes at a high cost to the women involved Credit: Getty
Many poor families live in slums like this in Angeles City Credit: Dave Tacon
I sent a picture of this cute little girl, all bright eyes and attitude, to remove her from the abstract and to make her real.
The week after writing that letter, I went to visit Nazelle, Nazneen and their mother.
They live in two rooms in a concrete compound with three other families. There is a mattress on which they all , and a basic kitchen and shared bathroom. When we arrived at the gate, the two children ran to meet us.
Nazneen was calling out in Tagalog, “Have you brought my father?”
They know we are looking for him. They long to know him.
But while we have found these girls’ fathers, we have not yet managed to make that life-changing connection.
We gave Jowelaine for rice, and she took the girls to the local market and returned to cook them a simple meal over a burner.
With a full belly for once, Nazelle sat on my lap and snuggled into me.
She spends the day here, playing with her sister in the concrete driveway of the compound. The children have no toys. They make do with cans and rocks, their shoes and bits of scrap they pick up, sharing the space with cockerels the men keep for fighting, and that bark at every stranger who approaches.
Nazelle tells me she would one day like a doll’s house. And perhaps even a doll to go in it.
The charity I run has bought the girls’ school uniforms, so when term starts mid-year, they will be able to enrol.
We want to give them options in life – make sure they do not have to follow their mother into sex work when they are older.
Jowelaine was expecting to meet a client later that night.
She always tells her friends where she is meeting a man, and texts when they reach his hotel room. She is a cheerful soul “So far, I am safe,” she says.
I ask her if she is ever frightened.
“How can I afford to be frightened?” she almost shouts at me. Even with her income, she can barely afford food, rent and electricity.
Jowelaine, originally from the city of Davao in the southern Philippines, was sucked into sex work while working in a bar in Angeles City.
She tells me: “I did not plan this kind of life. This happened to me. And now I have no other way.”
Soon, I will hopefully find John, and he will get a phone call to tell him he could have a daughter.
I know from nearly ten years of doing this work that many men do not recognise any responsibility for their children in cases like this.
The reality is that men can have sex in the Philippines without the same
consequences they would face in Britain.
It is hard to fully understand the unfairness of that until you meet and cuddle a little girl like Nazelle.
Jowelaine uses condoms, but tells me sometimes men offer to pay much more if she lets them have sex without them.
Sometimes, once she is in their hotel room on her own, she has little choice; she alleges. “They just refuse and do it anyway,”.
‘Is this rape?’ I ask her. She shrugs.
For her, the distinctions are academic. Prostitution is illegal here. If she complained, she doubts the would be on her side.
The contraceptive pill is available, but expensive, and a combination of the cost, her Catholic upbringing and distrust in the quality of the drug prevents her from using it.
Abortion is illegal in this conservative country, and therefore dangerous.
Margaret has spent years helping women and their abandoned babies
Abijail sells sex to feed her children Credit: Dave Tacon
I first came to Angeles City as a journalist ten years ago. The stories I wrote about the many foreign fathered children here drew attention in and overseas.
People wanted to help.
I founded a charity, Angeles Relief Inc , which now raises money to provide welfare support to the abandoned children of foreign fathers in the Philippines.
In 2022, we began to use DNA sampling to trace the fathers. It is no longer
necessary for all parties to give a DNA sample in order to trace family relationships.
Over the last decade, vast databases have been built up by private companies, which hold data from millions of people who have submitted their DNA in order to trace their ancestry.
In the same week we visited Nazelle, we managed to track down an American citizen we had been tracing for over a year.
The DNA tests we took show he has a three-year-old son, Marklie, born in late 2024.
Leslie, 38 years old, Marklie’s mother, told me how this man would take her back to his luxury condo in Angeles City – the ride up in the elevator to the top floor, the walk down the corridor.
Turns out he owns that condo and is living in it.
I wrote this man numerous emails and letters, and my colleagues tried to ring him on all the telephone numbers we could trace. No response.
But on this trip, I knocked on his door, armed with a letter pleading with him to negotiate a minimal amount of child support for his alleged son.
A tall man with glasses in white boxer shorts opened the door.
He closed it on me as soon as I had introduced myself. I threw the letter in just before it slammed.
No reply so far. Next step: legal action. It will cost him, and us. Yet as little as 25 pounds a week would transform his son’s life.
The next day, we visited a family who live behind a corrugated iron fence on a building site littered with cat and dog faeces, waste, broken glass and paving stones.
Picking our way over the broken concrete, we arrived at the mostly demolished remnants of a hotel. The toilets no longer work.
Here, Abijail Jurado, 30, lives with her partner, two children and two of her sister’s children in a room just big enough to lay down a thin mattress, on which all six of them sleep.
Abijail lives with son David in a slum area Credit: Dave Tacon
The family share dinner in a partly-demolished room as their house is torn down to make way for a new railway. Credit: Dave Tacon
One of those children, David, age 8, is likely the child of a sex tourist. We don’t know who his father is, nor his nationality “Would you like to know him?” I ask David.
He looks at me steadily. “I’m not sure. What kind of man can he be?”
Abijail works as a maid for an Australian expat. She sells plastic flowers to tourists on Fields Avenue – a form of begging – and although she is reluctant to discuss it in front of David, she too is a freelance sex worker looking for clients on the street.
For all this, she earns little more than the rent on the room in which they live – which is in any case about to be cleared to make way for the new Angeles City to Manila railway.
Amazingly, she manages to send David and her other son on the three-kilometre walk to the local school in a clean uniform. But they own only one uniform between them.
Because of that, they take turns to go to school.
We took a DNA sample from David. We hope to find his father. The results will be in soon. And we bought the family another school uniform. Now both boys can go to school every day.
The next day, I met Jeaniela, a 12-year-old with extraordinary poise and presence, and her mother, Jean Ann, 55, in the yard outside a church that runs a shelter for desperate women – two rooms with mattresses on the floor where they can at least sleep safely.
Jean Ann works as an on-call cleaner for Airbnbs that host the tourists who come here. She told me she met Jeaniela’s father when she was working at a bar. On her account, he allegedly drugged her and took her to his room.
She didn’t lodge a complaint with the police. She believes they would have blamed her because she was a bar girl, and that the father would simply have bribed them to make any problem go away.
“I woke up that morning and thought, it has happened now. There is nothing I can do about it. Just move on.”
Then she found she was pregnant. Jeaniela was born on 30 October 2013.
I asked Jeaniela what she thought of her mother’s story. She looked straight into my eyes and said in slow and deliberate English: “I am offended.”
THE LAW
By Margaret Simons
Supporting your children is not only a moral responsibility, but also a legal one in almost all countries of the world, including the Philippines and the United Kingdom.
Coming to a sensible and amicable agreement between mothers and fathers is usually in everyone’s best interests.
But as a last resort, we find lawyers to act for the children and their mothers and go to court.
The United Kingdom and the Philippines have a reciprocal enforcement maintenance order arrangement.
This means the British authorities and courts will enforce a
legitimate child support application from a Philippines-based parent.
The legal obligation to support your children does not depend on whether the mother and father were married, or had a long-term relationship.
If the father is not acknowledged on the birth certificate, then its more complicated and a special application with additional evidence, such as a DNA test, will have to be made.
If the father won’t provide DNA evidence, then an application can be made to the courts to make a declaration of parentage on the basis of any other evidence provided, and taking into account the father’s refusal.
The courts can also order a father to do a DNA test if they decide it is in the child’s best interests.
If the British authorities decide a father is due to pay child support, then they use a formula based on the income of both parents to decide the amount.
Failure to pay child support can lead to money being deducted direct from wages or pensions, or bailiffs can be sent to collect on the debt.
We have succeeded in helping mothers to take the legal path in Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the USA – now we begin in the United Kingdom – the laws are there.
If a child was born on or after 1 July 2006 to a Filipino mother and a British citizen, then they are automatically British citizens. They can apply to the British Government for a letter to confirm this, and then for a British passport – but would have to provide evidence of parentage.
Again, the courts can be asked to order a DNA test.
Jeaniela says she never wants to meet her father, but she wants him to know about her, to help support her. It is, she says in that clear and deliberate voice, a matter of responsibility.
Meanwhile, I haven’t heard back from John’s sister, potentially Nazelle’s auntie. I know she got my letter, because it was registered post and she would have had to sign for it. I can only imagine what she is thinking. Has her heart been touched?
I will write once more.
Meanwhile, our charity has an international network of lawyers, private investigators and volunteers. We will never stop looking for John.
One day, I hope to turn up at Nazelle’s home with her father. She will want him to be ready to love her.
I just want him to be prepared to help. To take responsibility for this lovely little girl.
COMING THIS WEEKEND: PART 3: Meet the Brit dads who were traced after fathering kids overseas as clock ticks for rest to be exposed
Eze Chidiebere Paul
I'm dedicated to creating high-quality content that informs, inspires, and delights. If you have any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to get in touch. Happy reading!
