Kids Behind Bars
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Kids |
Fr. Cullen helps |
Little has changed in the Philippines prison system since that day several years ago when "I found a 6-year-old, named Rosie, behind prison bars clutching a drink can and crying her heart out for her mother. A dozen or so other street children were sprawled on the hard concrete floor, unconscious with exhaustion and hunger.
The toxic fumes they inhaled from a plastic bag filled with industrial glue
- taken when local police rounded them up - had knocked out some.
The cheap drug was their only remedy for the constant pangs from their
empty stomachs.
Rosie was too young for that.
She had been taken from her mother who earned a living as a street vendor
selling peanuts to tourists.
She was expected to turn over her earnings to get her child released. It was
extortion of the cruelest kind.
The Cries of the Oppressed
These were children of God robbed of their dignity and rights.
It served as a stark reminder of the words of Jesus Christ when He told
us that when we see the children of God, we see Him and whatever we do to
them we do to Him.
That night behind prison bars, I met an abused and
abandoned God. There in these
children, the God of the oppressed, the persecuted, and the innocent cried
for freedom and love. It is the
fate of thousands of children today, a fate Jesus willingly shared to remind
us of our dignity, to tell us who we really are.
I was filled with anger and frustration as I worked to have those
children released and brought to the children’s home I had set up in
Olongapo City. Today, there are an estimated 20,000 children imprisoned in
the Philippines. The prisons, such as the national penitentiary of Bilibid
south of Manila, are hellholes of abuse and neglect for children as young as
9. I know, for I have been jailed myself.
In some city jails, the young girls are brought in from the streets to
be sexually abused for a price by the guards and the adult male prisoners.
In prison, sexual assault of young boys is all too common. Some are turned
into child prostitutes while others are physically abused, leaving scars and
psychological wounds in them all. This brutal experience can lead to a cycle
of abuse and violence that fills the streets with young juveniles in
continual conflict with the law.
Fighting Back
Our organization-called PREDA (Peoples Recovery,
Empowerment, and Development Assistance Foundation) – is doing all it can to
save these children. Part of our work is organizing jail visits and
investigating the case if imprisoned children with our jail rescue tram.
We find many minors held in illegal detention whose rights have been
violated. Some suffer from abuse, like the 8-to-12-year-olds brought to
cemeteries by police and threatened with execution. Then they are tortured
with cigarette burns until they confess to some crime for which the police
want a conviction to get a reward and promotion.
Other young teen-agers are jailed without evidence; they can be
detained for weeks before seeing a prosecutor, lawyer or magistrate. Our
efforts have helped release several children, but we find many more behind
bars.
It is not all doom and
gloom for the imprisoned children of the Philippines and elsewhere if we
work together to help them.
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Fr. Shay Cullen of Ireland is a |
By Fr. Shay Cullen
