Our children in peril
September 9, 2022 · By Ma. Isabel Ongpin for www.manilatimes.net
Our children in peril
A RECENT talk with Dr. Bernadette Madrid, a pediatrician leading the fight against child abuse and trafficking of women and children, and this year’s Ramon Magsaysay awardee from the Philippines, brought me up to date on the current condition of the problem in the country.
A prevalence of child abuse study conducted in the Philippines in 2016 showed that 80 percent of children in this country suffered physical, emotional (sometimes verbal) and sexual abuse. One in five children, or 20 percent, reported sexual abuse and 3 out of 5 reported they were abused physically and emotionally. These are very high rates. I asked how they compared to other Southeast Asian countries. Only a few of them have baseline studies but what they reveal is that child abuse and trafficking are also high in these countries but are higher in the Philippines. The foregoing also implies trafficking of women and children which is estimated in the Philippines to be 50,000 to 100,000 cases yearly, from a study of piecemeal reports.
I asked Dr. Madrid if poverty was the reason; she said it was more than that, explaining that a socioecological framework of community and culture showed high risk from no single cause. When abuse in the home is prevalent, it causes suffering to young people to get out of the house to escape abusive parents and family. Leaving home and family also means leaving school and becoming vulnerable to abuse — physical, emotional and sexual. The lack of supervision and instability brings on involvement in substance abuse in whatever form — alcohol, drugs. Worse, vulnerability comes when children have mental problems or learning disabilities or if they have physical disabilities. If not given help for school and learning problems, health care and community support in some way or other, they soon become victims.
Community is very important to a child growing up. If it is a violent one, or one with criminal elements, they can take advantage or cause disadvantage to a child. Here is where impunity takes over as children are abused with no one to report or put a stop to it.
Even worse is the modern means of abuse through online use, particularly for sexual abuse and trafficking through illegal recruitment. This has resulted in the Philippines coming out on top in online child pornography, sexual abuse, and trafficking of women and children in the world. In 2020, it was estimated that there were 2 million online child abuse and exploitation cases from the Philippines. During the pandemic, it is said to have increased by 265 percent. This is unacceptable.
Poverty is one factor though not the only factor to which we have to add values and attitudes. Children in Philippine society as a whole are treated as property, chattels really. They are expected to help the family in whatever way the family decides. Thus, you have children out of school working on the streets, in their families’ livelihood activities or need for services, making them forgo their right to education, health care and a good home environment. There is a materialistic element present here where the family demands that the children help it instead of the family helping the children they bring into the world because the family wants a higher standard of living, whatever the cost to the children. Some families which use their children for online pornography or sex think that because it is online and not physical, it is not wrong. This could also be a rationalization. When abused children rebel or escape, they continue with the activity, particularly sexual activity, because that is where they can manage to get their own income to use as they please. They know nothing else from the neglect of education and care. Schooling, higher ambitions, family life itself are thus abandoned and society ends up with a major problem of feral children engaging in lawless and criminal activity.
Dr. Madrid has been in the vanguard of seriously and competently handling this dismal social problem by organizing Child Protection Units in regional hospitals all over the country (there are 20 provinces that have yet to have their own units in their regional hospitals). Each Child Protection Unit has a medical staff consisting of medical doctors, nurses, child psychiatrists and social workers to comprehensively manage an abused child as well as assist the child with the help of other government agencies — the police, the Department of Social Welfare, the schools, the courts, the local government units to rehabilitate the child so he or she can join mainstream society as a mature and competent member.
Legislators have taken note of this grave problem in our society, passing various anti-child abuse and trafficking laws, the latest of which is Republic Act 11862 passed in the last Congress. It expands the country’s anti-trafficking legislation and services, and establishes an Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking that mandates the government agencies and private sector to report suspicious activity for investigation. It does not wait for a crime to be committed but acts to prevent it. Note that the private sector is mandated to do so as well (the hotline for trafficking report is 1343). It also puts all online platforms on the alert to prevent, report, document trafficking for the law to take its course against guilty parties, or suffer the consequences of the law if they do not.
What is incumbent on all sectors is to provide information and initiate or help in the investigation of trafficking and child abuse. Schools must educate children to recognize and report it, teachers must observe their wards for any signs of it and act according to the law. Communities must be put on guard against it. All citizens should know what to do when they come across it. Above all, the re-alignment of values considering children must be taught, emphasized and inculcated. They are to be protected, educated and attended to as future useful citizens in nation-building.
Dr. Madrid at the first Child Protection Unit in the Philippine General Hospital and all the Child Protection Unit staffs all over the country, their generous sponsors and volunteers at work, including those manning the Violence Against Women and Children desks in police precincts nationwide, are on the front line of addressing the problem. Thankfully, they have been joined by our legislators, teachers and hopefully communities nationwide. It is courageous work that is engaged in saving the soul of this country.
