Child rape victim needs gov't protection
Published in Philippine Daily Inquirer
8 May 1999
THE ARTICLE "Court junks rape vs priest," (PDI, 4/30/99) said that I had been completely exonerated from a false and malicious frame-up. Investigations conducted by the Department of Social Welfare and Development and the National Bureau of Investigation in Olongapo clearly show that the 7-year-old child consistently testified that she had been raped twice by her half-brother and 10 times by a houseboy. These teenagers are still at large and one has already raped another child. Why are they not being brought to justice for their crimes?
If Erap is really for the mahirap, he should help and protect that child rape victim. Under Philippine law and every international convention on the rights of the child, she must be given protective custody away from her abusers and they must be brought to justice as well as those who forced her to write a false statement. Leaving the child under the power of her abusers will be seen by the international community as a failure to live up to our commitments.
Those who ignored the child's pleas for help against the two boys who were repeatedly raping her and prompted the child to make a false statement against me are two foreigners. Retired American serviceman Alan Dale Edmonds, who got the child as a baby in Angeles City and who says he is the legal although not the biological father of the little girl, and Harry Joost, a German bar owner at Baloy beach. Joost is a staunch defender of convicted pedophile Victor Fitzgerald and convicted child sex tour operator Michael Clarke. He defends and lobbies for other foreigners accused of child sexual abuse.
Joost is also a long-time opponent of Preda's efforts to protecting abused children and is charged with several crimes before the Olongapo regional trial court.
Edmonds filed as many as 14 harassment cases against Preda in the past 12 months, and almost all of these have been dismissed as baseless.
Edmonds and Joost are scared because Preda social workers have filed charges against them for obstruction of justice, libel and defamation.
Frame-ups are all too easy to arrange. That is why so many people are against the death penalty since false accusations are so easy to fabricate and hard to refute, and it could happen to anybody.
If not for the NBI and the DSWD-Lingap Center in Olongapo and the just
prosecutor Oscar Lasam of Balanga, I too could have ended up on death row. It's
now up to the government of President Estrada to rescue the child who is still
under the
power and influence of those abusers and bring them all to justice.
FR. SHAY CULLEN
Preda Foundation Inc.
Upper Kalaklan,
Olongapo City
