What initially looked as a chance to enhance her martial arts skill turned into a personal tragedy for New Zealander Mary Elizabeth Jones, who was lured via Facebook to travel to the Philippines where she was robbed and sexually abused.

Jones told the New Zealand Herald that she got a Facebook invitation late last year from a supposed Filipino group that ran a school on martial arts, which got her interested and convinced her to take the plane going to Iloilo City, located south-central of the Philippines.

"They were meant to be world class and I thought this was a chance for me to learn from the best," Jones was quoted by The Herald as saying in describing the bogus school.

The publication added that Jones was fetched by a man at the city airport upon her arrival on October 2010 but instead of bringing her to the martial arts center, she was locked up in a cramped room where her ordeal immediately started.

Jones recalled that after taking her personal belongings, she was forced to engage in sexual acts to as many as nine men each day who all reportedly paid some $140 for the chance to abuse her.

The whole episode, Jones said, lasted for months and all those horrifying moments, death seemed only her escape as the people guarding her subjected her to severe beatings each time she tried escaping.

"It was meant to be a trip of a lifetime but it has destroyed my whole life instead ... I felt utterly disgusted, and I was treated like a piece of meat," Jones said.

Finally, the Filipino human trafficking syndicate decided to take her to Manila, the country's capital, where Jones was abandoned by her abductors hungry and virtually helpless until she was rescued and returned to New Zealand.

As of the latest assessment issued by the U.S. Department of State, the Philippines has been tagged as one of the countries that have been unsuccessful in curbing the incidence of human trafficking that preys on unsuspecting local women who were then smuggled to Singapore or Malaysia to work as prostitutes.

The State Department also cited blatant incidences of forced prostitution within the country, in which women, many of them minors, were sold to local and foreign customers alike.