Her Long Road back from Hell
Philippine Daily Inquirer, Magazine
(January 04, 2004)
Text and Photograph
By Tonette Orejas
Inquirer PCI Central Luzon Desk
FOR Pia Corvera, 19, the new year truly brings on a new beginning. At about this time seven years ago, the testimony of this nursing aide student put away two men accused of sexually abusing her and another girl, both of them barely in their teens in Subic, Olongapo.
On Dec. 18, 1996, Thomas Breuer, a German, and Dutchman Lennart Van Empel were convicted of child sexual abuse and sentenced to prison terms of three and a half years, and one year respectively.
The celebrated trial brought world attention to a problem often dismissed as just another of life's realities. Corvera's story also gave an authentic face and a strong voice to countless street children turned sex workers who ply their trade on the streets as a result of desperation, deceit or greed.
Corvera was recently honored by Missio, the German Catholic Bishops' agency for international mission work, for her courage and bravery in pursuing justice against sex offenders. Her case inspired the agency to campaign against sex tourism and child abuse.
Standing up to her abusers gave Kuwago (literally meaning "owl," the wide-eyed girl's childhood nickname) the confidence to undertake goals that go beyond the more immediate basic meals and shelter she had imposed on herself when she realized how threadbare her circumstances were.
This children's rights advocate speaks of the dreams she now enjoys and of how far she has gone from the days when her only memories of her parents were their absence and neglect.
"I don't know anything about them or how I came to be," Pia says of her parents Juanito and Patricia. All that she knew came from stories told her by her Aunt Terry, her longtime guardian. She was born in 1984 and her mother had tried so sell her, said her aunt who then took Pia to Pampanga and then to Manila in the care of her grandparents.
Her only memory of her father was when he came to the wake of her grandfather in 1992. The coldness of that meeting still hurts, Pia recalls. "Dedma lang kami. Ni hindi ako tinawag na anak. (We ignored each other. He didn't even call me his daughter)," she adds.
Pia shared her grandmother Clara's attention with five other cousins and so learned to fend for herself early on. "I went through a lot," she says. "I slept on the streets and earned some money as a parking attendant and a cleaner." But roaming the streets for a living forced her to drop out of school. Pia only reached Grade 3.
What pained her most was having no one to guide her. "I felt so alone," she says. "It was scary. Nobody told me whether I was doing right or wrong." Being rudderless led her to become more daring. At nine, Day-Day, a friend three years older than her, taught Pia a game children were not supposed to play. Far from being a paradise, the Paraiso ng Batang Maynila, a playground in the midst of Manila, became the setting of her personal hell.
A chronology of Pia's case according to Preda (People's Recovery, Empowerment and Development Assistance Foundation), shows that after she was introduced to the pimp Lani (Teresita Mapalang in real life), the girl was given strict orders to keep the supposed game a secret.
"I didn't know anything
about my rights," Pia says. But deceit she knows well, having seen it in
Lani who sold her and Day-Day to adult men of different nationalities
and perverse behaviors. She describes some of them as "bigatin" or
prominent.
"(Lani) took almost all of the money, as much as 4,000 pesos for every
job we did. She spent it on shabu and she allowed us to watch her use
it," she recalls. She chuckles at remembering how she used to be
overwhelmed by the 120 pesos that Lani handed her after every job. "For
a child earning only five pesos, what can be more tempting than a
hundred bucks?" she asks.
Her Aunt Terry had left for Australia by then and her grandmother was easily taken in by her lies. To dispel the old woman's suspicions about the money she was getting, Pia would say she got it through "diskarte" (doing odd jobs and being resourceful).
But the money wasn't enough to quell the unease and guilt that nagged her. She knew she was doing something bad but wasn't quite sure why and how to come clean about it. "I didn't know who to run to," says Pia. But the money kept rolling in, so she shrugged off her uneasiness and allowed the abuse to go on.
On Jan. 8, 1996, according to her testimony, Pia, then 12, and another prostituted teen, M.C., then 14, were taken by foreigners Breuer and Van Empel to Boracay, the island resort in Panay, where they were sexually abused. Both girls were also used in child pornography, according to the Preda report.
Fortunately, the wife of an official in Boracay, who also happens to own a hotel in the island-resort, decided to report the abuse to authorities. Pia could not recall the woman's name but remembers her fondly. "If not for her concern (malasakit), we would still be living abused lives," she says.
The five-page chronology of Pia Corvera's case shows a classic example of how some policemen, National Bureau of Investigation agents and lawyers in the Philippines could plant landmines in an already difficult road to justice.
But the case also shows how priests and Bishop Gabriel Reyes, Daughters of Charity nuns in Iloilo, social workers like Delia Juanico and their officials like former Social Welfare Secretary Lina Laygo, Lourdes Balanon of the Bureau of Child and Youth Welfare, as well as justice and immigration officials, can move heaven and earth to see the case through.
Preda's Fr. Shay Cullen, an Irish priest, likewise didn't give up on Pia and M.C., and took the case to German authorities. In a matter of nine days, Breuer and Van Empel were behind bars, and Pia was released from her doubts and self-hate.
Home to Pia since has been Preda, where she finds good company among other children rescued from brothels, prison and neglectful families. Away from the streets, however, she discovers that bouncing back wasn't that easy. In class, she was taunted and made to feel unfit until she finally opted for home study to finish elementary school. She breezed through high school with the determination and courage of a warrior out to win the war against ignorance.
Since 1997, she has also found acceptance as a speaker in numerous national and international conferences, as she retold her story to parents, development workers and whoever cared to listen. "Super-interview, super-pa-photo-photo. Nagdadadakdak ako kung saan-saan (Extensive interviews, photo shoots. I give talks everywhere)," Pia says of her campaign to end child abuse.
At the Barreto High School in Subic during a Girl Scout activity when she was asked to share her life experience, a younger schoolmate asked her: "Ate, aren't you ashamed or afraid about what happened to you?" Pia's answer: "Why should I be ashamed or afraid? What happened to me wasn't my fault at all."
Between her encoding and filing tasks at the Preda Foundation, Pia also does counselling work, advising other abused children "to carry on, tell the truth, and believe in yourself and in the goodness of other people. Be brave, God will see you through."
It is something she has seen happen in her own life, she says. She has finally allowed herself to think of the future, Pia says. "My Mommy (Aunt Terry) has bought a house in Cavite and plans to return for good from Australia. We're going to live there-my three brothers, my grandmother and myself. We're going to be a family at last."
