Children must be protected from exploitation in porn
(republishing, copying, no restrictions)
By: Father Shay Cullen
One day in October 2006 I was called to assist in looking for a victim of sexual abuse in Angeles City. The suspect is a British national with a nasty reputation of sexual abuse of women and very young girls. He is just one of the thousands of sex tourists that flock to the city seeking young children to sexually abuse and exploit in the sex industry approved and sanctioned by local government who issue licenses and permits to them.
When investigators examined the cartons stacked to the ceiling they found hundreds of video tapes being sexually abused by the suspect himself. Many of the youngsters are clearly under age and as young looking as 9 and 10 years old.
The accused British national is now on trial for the alleged sexual abuse of one of the children but not for the mini-mountain of pornographic tapes that depict him committing the acts with the underage girls. There is no law in the Philippines prohibiting or criminalizing the possession or making or distribution of such child pornography. In 1995 there was none in Ireland either. I had a press conference in Boswells Hotel in Dublin with Eogn Ryan TD and Senator Henry to propose one. Two years later it was the most effective law. The section defining what child pornography is used in the proposed Philippine law.
Child porn is easily available in the Philippines and there is no law to effectively quash it to the delight of the pedlars and abusers. That is about to change.
Senator Jamby Madrigal, the most outspoken and empowered woman in the Philippines is Chairperson of the Senate Committee on Youth, Women, and Family Relations. Her committee has prepared and she is sponsoring, a law that makes it a criminal offense punishable by life imprisonment, to induce or use a child,15 and younger, in the making by whatever means of images, real or stimulated, of explicit sexual activities. The act of producing the child pornography earns a life imprisonment also.
The possession of such images is also a crime with a penalty of six (6) to 12 years. The publishers and distributors of child pornography will get 12 to 20 years and massive fines and the confiscation of all their property used in the dirty business of making money from such child exploitation.
One of the best provisions is that anybody with personal knowledge of the crimes may file the charge against the suspect. Even a person who is not a Filipino citizen can do it. It does not have to be the victim or her relatives as is the case with child abuse and rape. In such cases the unfortunate victims are too traumatised, shocked, frightened or powerless to make a complaint against a rich or more powerful sex tourist or abuser.
The law penalises internet service providers (ISP) too if they know web sites with child pornography are on their servers and do not report this to the authorities and co-operate in the investigation. They will loose their license and pay a big fine. But this section does not go far enough. But it does not oblige them to remove the web site themselves nor block access to them by their customers.
This is a provision that I personally lobbied for when invited to contribute ideas to the committee in the preparation stages. There is an existing practice whereby highly ethical ISPs like British Telecom (BT) deploy software that can detect and block a customer trying to reach a child porn web site.
Called ‘cleanfeed’ the project uses a software easily
available. They work in co-operation with the Internet Child Protection
agency Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) that locates the child porn web
sites and loads them on to a special data base from which the software
detects and blocks access to them. This is what we want everywhere and
especially in the Philippines. The law ought make it mandatory for the
ISPs to deploy blocking software. There is still a chance that the fiery
and committed Senator Jamby Madrigal will yet include it in the revised
version of the proposed law. More power to her and all who can use it
for the welfare and protection of children.
