Filipino Women and Kids Treated Like Animals
The Universe
(June 29, 2003)
LAST Thursday, June 26 is the day to remember the victims of torture and abuse of human rights.
Earlier this year, a group of Swedish Red Cross students on a social-educational mission went to the women and child care center run by the Olongapo City government. By accident they stumbled upon the secret jail cells hidden in a back room where middle-aged women and children as young as eight are regularly imprisoned, beaten and deprived of food.
The conditions amount to torture and grave violations of all civilized humanitarian rights. An investigation is unlikely – the center is closed to the press and even national social welfare officials cannot get easy access. The mayor's husband is the Philippine Secretary of Tourism. Officials deny the reports but the photographs and credible witnesses are hard to deny. The police and the municipal social workers collect the street urchins and women and incarcerate them behind bars in conditions not fit for animals.
The Swedish students recently described their feelings. Perna (not her real name) wrote: "When I saw the mentally ill women I was really shocked. It was much worse than I could really imagine. The smell was awful and it was very dirty. I would not even put an animal in a cell like that.
How would this affect the children? Do we want them to grow up and think that it is accepted to treat people like animals just because of an illness? I cannot believe how the social workers can sit in their air-conditioned office having lunch at the same time that these poor women are locked bars in a tiny cell".
Nina had a similar experience: “The first thing I reacted on when I came in was the terrible smell. Then I saw the cells and four women sitting in them on the floor. They asked us if we could help get them out of there".
Lida: "The cells were horrible I wouldn't like to keep an animal in that cell. I have heard that they sometimes put the children there! I had a big stone in my stomach, because this is not the way to treat human beings."
The students photographed the women behind bars and the toilet hole in the cell that was overflowing with excrement.
Church workers, alerted by the students, got to the cells to find the guards eating the food brought for the children. They discovered teenagers behind bars living in the same conditions. In taped interviews with 18 street children who had been locked in the cells for up to three weeks at times said they were beaten, punched, kicked, hit with sticks, drenched with cold water and had to lie on the wet floor. Ants and cockroaches tormented them. The stench of the toilet hole made them feel sick. Nor were they allowed to take a shower, change clothes, or get exercise.
They ate off the concrete floor, were always hungry and ate leftovers, some reaching through the bars like animals to get the food.
Their legal rights are denied and the detention is arbitrary, punitive and illegal. Olongapo City inexplicably received the Philippine award last year as the 'Most Child-friendly City in the Philippines” from government’s child welfare agency.
Meantime, the widely acclaimed musical drama Once We Had a Dream that shows the courage of children that have overcome abuse and torture will be performed by the PREDA-AKBAY Filipino theater group in Carrick on Shannon at the Landmark Hotel on Monday, June 30; at the Model Arts Niland Centre, Sligo on July 1; and then in Bray, Co. Dublin on Wednesday, July 2 at Holy Redeemer. Admission is free.
