Afew weeks ago, I visited yet again several child detention centers
and police holding cells around Metro Manila with the Preda Foundation
social workers. We found two small girls, 13 and 14 years of age behind
bars looking out tearfully; and next to their cell was an adult male
prisoner reaching through the steel bars beside them. They were
terrified. The cell of the children had no beds, curtains, toilet, just a
bucket in the corner and no privacy. It was terrible. One had been
charged with stealing food, the other for kidnapping a child. An adult
told her to bring a baby to another place. She was arrested. Immediately
we began legal action to have them released to the Preda Girl’s Home.
In
another child detention center on the other side of Metro Manila, we
found three small girls, from 6 to 12 years of age, locked in a room
with male teenage boys. The place was bare and empty: no beds, chairs,
showers, just a single toilet in the corner. It was a depressingly empty
detention room.
Preda began negotiations with the Center Head to
have the girls taken out of that detention holding room. It was no easy
task. They were oblivious of the danger of sexual molestation to the
small children. The Mayor received US$58,500,00 from the national
government’s Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) to
build a home for the children but as yet, only another room in the same
building is being renovated.
In other jails, we found many more
young minors behind bars without proper recreation, education, exercise,
food, sanitation and legal assistance. This is the secret shame of the
Philippines, hidden away from the media and the public. Hundreds if not
thousands of children suffer the humiliation and deprivation of sub-human jail conditions every year.
More
must be done to change the system that locks up children without care
and education and respect for their human and child rights. It is
similar in many developing countries.
Philippine government, NGOs,
churches, and international aid agencies and charities are giving too
little funds and advocacy to challenge and stop the gross violation of
children’s rights in the jails around the Philippines where thousands of
children suffer time behind bars in dehumanizing conditions not fit for
animals.
It is much the same in other developing countries and
much more has to be done by Unicef and the World Health Organization to
pressure governments to change and transform the whole system of
recovery and stop jailing children.
I can write from experience on
this because of the success of the Preda social workers getting the
children out of jails and transferring the custody to their parents and
relatives or to the Preda Home for Boys in Castillejos, Zambales and to
the Preda Home for Girls.
As many as 138 teenage youth were
transferred to Preda coming from jails in Metro Manila in 2012 alone.
Several small girls were rescued and helped to recover and find a new
home safe from the abusers.
The boys or girls are released by
court order and transferred to the Preda centers. This takes much time
and expense. The more preferable way to release the child is before
charges are filed against them by the recommendation of the municipal
social worker using the diversion provision in the law. They are
released from the fetid life threatening conditions of prisons and given
a new start in life.
The Preda Home for Boys and Home for Girls
are far from each other, but they are in a place of natural beauty, open
countryside, where they can recover in dignity, where they are
respected and cared for. Their faith in themselves and their self-worth
is restored. Their trust in adults is healed.
The reason why there
are so many children treated like criminals and jailed with them is
because the public and the authorities have a very wrong attitude and
perception of children in conflict with the law (CICL). The public have
been misled by sensationalized tabloid media and the baseless statements
of the police.
I have challenged police generals at a Senate
hearing to go after the gang leaders of criminal gangs that abuse and
force children to commit crimes. It’s so easy to arrest a child but are
the police scared to go against the real criminals? Surely not, they are
brave and courageous, they’re not into thinking that the street
children are all thieves, robbers and even murderers or members of adult
crime syndicates and deserve punishment and life behind bars. A nation
is judged civilized, developed and moral not by the number of malls it
has but by the way it treats children and women. We have a long journey
ahead. Email shaycullen@preda.org; send letters to: St. Columbans,
Widney Manor Road, Solihull, B93 9AB.
(Fr. Shay’s columns are
published in The Universe, The Manila Times, in publications in Ireland,
the UK, Hong Kong, and on-line.)
source: Manila Times's Column of Reflections by Fr. Shay Cullen
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