Manila Child Prisoners ITV Investigation

[ginapeterb]

Many of you may have seen tonights ITV News investigation into the Child Prisoners of Pasay City, funnily enough I had just come down from the shower, when I saw the familiar shanti town around the lake that we all pass when we head down to Makati from NAIA, I thought to myself "I know where that is, its Manila !!!" and true enough, the report was at the back end, but they mentioned an investigation into Child Prisoners, over 20,000 child prisoners are thought to exist in Manila, of course these are conservative estimates.

It was of course a little shock to see Pasay City beaming into my front room, instead of passing through it in an airport taxi, ITV Investigators have gone undercover and filmed the children on Smokey mountain, anyone who knows Smokey, knows its a garbage dump the size of 4 football fields, where children scavenge daily for things to sell.

The ITV Reporter finally made an appointment with the Philippine Embassy in London, with the Charge de Affairs, she agreed initially to the appointment, but later declined when she was told what was in the tape.

She said "I will pass the tape on to the appropriate authorities in Manila" no surprises there of course, there is a further report tomorrow night 9th August on ITV most regions at 10.30pm, into th street children of Manila.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Children is threatening to send envoys to Manila to monitor the situation, however the Philippines is not the only country criticized in this matter, there at least 15 others with similar records on children, which range from imprisonment, child prostitutution, slavery, abuse, sexual abuse, and others.

Perhaps members can watch and give their opinions.

[ginapeterb]

Manuel is 12 years old, and Felix is 13. They are always hungry, and for them, water is a precious and rare commodity. They live and sleep on the cold, concrete floor of a cramped cell with dark, dirty walls and a ceiling covered with crawling spiders and cockroaches. The fetid air buzzes with the whine of mosquitoes that irritate and sting without mercy. A dim yellow bulb emits a faint, sickly glow amid the grim darkness that shrouds their hopeless lives.


Boys imprisoned for petty offenses pass away their time in Navotas, a prison in metropolitan Manila.
Manuel and Felix’s faces light up when I and the social workers from PREDA arrive. They want to see what goodies are in the plastic bag we brought. They are ravenous, so food and drink are first.

These boys, like thousands of other children in the Philippines, are jailed because they are homeless. I am one of the cofounders of PREDA (Peoples Recovery, Empowerment, and Development Assistance Foundation), and our organization’s work includes advocacy for imprisoned children.

These children were conceived recklessly and left to fend for themselves like wild birds with nowhere to go and nothing to live for. Abandoned, they were convicted by the government for the crime of vagrancy and other misdemeanors such as sniffing glue and petty theft—but only after most of their human and legal rights were shamelessly violated.

While they devoured the food, we talk with nearby adult prisoners. Some have tuberculosis; others, hepatitis or AIDS. I fear for the children and become depressed—then angry—at this senseless man-made misery that could so easily be rectified but about which so few truly care.

Seeing Jesus In The Oppressed
In my own life, I am almost ashamed to live as I do: secure, well-fed and with all the necessities of a decent life. I am more ashamed when I find myself complaining and thinking I am deprived. We live in opulent luxury compared to the hardships endured by these children living in prison or on Manila’s streets.

I now understand why Jesus Christ told us to forget ourselves and help others. We can never enter the kingdom of Heaven, Jesus said, unless we become as innocent as one of these children. He identified with them. He appealed to us to see Him in those who are poor, in prison, and who are hungry and deprived.
Some jails for Filipino children are better than others. Some have fluorescent lights, a TV, and a little more space, so only a few need stand while the others sleep.

Medics come from time to time to flush out the prison cells and administer drugs, especially when an epidemic breaks out and the media report it. Sometimes the prisoners get out for a blessed gulp of fresh air and a quick view of the sky and a ray of sunshine.

Unthinkable Conditions
In some prisons, however, basic human needs and dignity are absent. In addition to a chronic lack of justice, there are no plates and spoons, so the kids eat off a newspaper with their hands. There is no water in the cells, so they cannot wash or cool off from the oppressively humid heat. The toilet is frequently a stinking hole in the corner, or a filthy toilet bowl or bucket with no running water.

Life for a child in a Philippine prison is like a death sentence. There are 12 minors on death row and a thousand adults.

But, thank God, the Catholic Church and civil society have successfully campaigned against the death penalty.

Filipinos, by in large, are people of gentle compassion and kindness who love justice. I see it every day in my coworkers who risk much for human rights.

But a history of political corruption and dictatorship has left a legacy of unjust laws, empty coffers and a sea of pitiless political hearts. Our mission is to change as much of that as possible.

Fortunately, we are beginning to make some progress.

Rays Of Hope
It was a happy day this April when the passenger van arrived from two prisons in metro Manila, and five young boys nervously stepped out. They stared in silence and wonder at the panoramic view of Subic Bay as the red fireball of a setting sun lit the sky like a beacon of hope and salvation. They had arrived at our “PREDA Home for Youth in Conflict with the Law,” our safe haven from their cruel detention.

Now they are enjoying sports, literacy classes, vocational training and a normal childhood. We have so far rescued and returned 150 children to the custody of their families.

Many months of determined lobbying and legal action opened a window through which these children escaped the Philippines’ unforgiving legal system. PREDA’s social workers help them in court overcome the charges against them. The oppressive system melted a bit when we found a judge with a heart.

Only a few facilities exist to care for the youth offenders; many more are needed. Many children are as young as 11 years old who have committed no serious crime. Often, they are sexually abused by the adult inmates.

“Restorative justice” is a way of seeing dignity and goodness in young people just as Jesus saw in everybody. This understanding and nonjudgmental attitude does not condemn and punish. Rather, it gives affirmation, hope and a real chance for a decent life.

These children are now happily studying, playing basketball, swimming and earning pocket money doing occupational therapy projects. It’s a new life for those once condemned as sinners and outcasts.

[ginapeterb]

He was about 8 years old, dirty faced, frightened and trembling as he tried to squeeze himself into a corner by the jail cell door and disappeared. A small flickering television outside the locked gate cast a weird red glow over the scene. Louie had obviously been taken out of the tiny overcrowded adult cell only minutes before we entered. He had been gravely warned by the police not to tell me or else. The cell clearly wins the Guinness record as the smallest, most crowded and inhuman on earth.

It is three feet wide and fifteen foot or so deep. The bodies of the prisoners are piled on top of each other, legs twisted and tangled arms askew. I could not see an inch of the floor; there were 17 inside this cage. Had animals been confined here the owners would have been charged and imprisoned for cruelty.

Buried in the tangled heap of sprawling bodies were two 16-year-old minors who barely were surviving in this hellhole of stifling humidity. How they did not suffocate is a miracle. There is just a tiny opening high on the wall for air, and mercifully a rusty old fan hanging from the ceiling worked to dispel the putrid air that stank of unwashed bodies. There is no toilet, shower, or even a washbasin to relieve the stifling heat. I saw no drinking water.

Louie and Roland, I found out, were arrested the previous night at about eight o’clock. Roland said he was 16 but looked a lot younger. They were accused of stealing scrap iron sheets, but both boys were so small it would have been practically impossible for them to even lift an iron sheet.

They had not eaten for almost twelve hours and were weak and famished. Their hungry furtive looks raked the rice pot cooking on the near by stove. “That’s for the police,” the cook told me. Not a grain of rice that fell from that table was going to the boys. I sent for food to a nearby restaurant; but when the chicken and rice arrived, Roland and Louie, starving as they were, politely restrained themselves from wildly devouring what could be the most precious meal they had every had. I got Louie and Roland out and into the care of the social workers. We eventually found a place for Louie and Roland in our boys home.

The previous day, I was at two other prisons. In one, some of the children were suffering from an excruciatingly painful skin disease that was driving them insane.

The child prisoners face numerous hazards. Besides rape, sexual abuse and beatings from bullies, the youngsters are made into slaves by the guards and elite prisoners. They are exposed to skin diseases, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Mosquitoes, cockroaches and mites spread malaria and infection. Malnutrition and hunger ravage their bodies. The full daily food allowance for each prisoner is P35. The kids get the leftovers of the meager rations. Looking at the well-fed guards, I had no difficulty understanding who got the most of it.

The adults allowed into this wider cell as disciplinarians appeared to be women, but I was mistaken. They were proud to be in control and pranced about in tiny shorts and skimpy vests. One coyly admitted they slept on the floor with the boys or in curtained cubicles.

When released to the Preda home the kids related how they fought off sexual advances and were beaten for not cooperating. Many others kids, they said, were forced to do it. I could only shudder at the thought of what could happen to a small boy like Louie.

One bright hope in all this menace and misery is the courthouse on wheels. This is the idea of Philippine Supreme Court associate justice R. Puno, who has been instrumental in changing the rules of court so that minors can be more easily released to their parents’ custody or a foster home such as Preda. The container-like vans of courthouse on wheels visit jails. On board each van are a prosecutor, a judge and lawyers, all with the authority to access quickly the cases and accelerate the release of over-staying prisoners and decongest the prisons.

It is a bold and inspired initiative that responds to the cries of the kids for justice and relief. A campaign to help us in this work by Jubilee Action is just beginning of your love and support for these children.

[ginapeterb]

Coalition Call for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to Stop the Unlawful Discrimination by the Police Against the Children of the Poorest of the Poor

by Coalition to Stop Child Detention through Restorative Justice, 4 January 2004

Specter of Brutalized Child Prisoners
Today, we witness the specter of children prisoners emerging from police custody as victims of rape, torture, tattooing, and other despicable forms of human rights violations, without redress.

Today, we witness the specter of children of the poorest of the poor languishing in prisons practically all over the country deprived by the state of their human right to have direct and immediate access to legal, medical, social, and psychological services and assistance.

They emerge by the thousands.

Thousands and thousands of children are being illegally jailed with impunity by the police with adult crime suspects and subjected to rape, torture, tattooing, and other atrocities.

At least 36 children—including girls and kids with mental disabilities—are jailed with adult prisoners everyday.

This is according to the Public Attorneys Office who reported having handled 13,300 cases involving children in conflict with the law in 2002.

There were 10,094 children in conflict with the law served by the Department of Social Welfare and Development in 2000 alone. This staggering figure was even less than the recorded number of children who had been imprisoned in 1999—which leapfrogged to 13,073.

Children prisoners numbered 6,410 in 1998, 8,623 in 1997, and 7,057 in 1996, based on DSWD figures alone. But more cases do not get documented at all.

Girl-children also get imprisoned with adult prisoners. Out of the 10,094 children prisoners served by DSWD in 2000—703 were girls.

Virtually all these children have been illegally hauled off to police jails and locked up together with adult crime suspects upon their arrest.

Virtually all these children who would live with us as well as with our children’s children have already been exposed to the virus of criminal behavior due to their illegal detention in cramped police cells with adult prisoners.

They emerge from prison traumatized, scarred for life.

Brazen Illegality
The state practice of jailing children with adult crime suspects in police jails does not only lack any basis in Philippine law. It violates—with impunity—a host of our own national laws as well. Article 191 of the Child and Youth Welfare Code (Presidential Decree 603) mandates that a child “from the time of his arrest be committed to the care of the Department of Social Welfare.”

Section 11 of the Rules and Regulations on the Apprehension, Investigation, Prosecution, and Rehabilitation of Youth Offenders (1995) provides that “a youth… from the time of his arrest be committed to the care of the Department or the local rehabilitation center or in a detention home distinct and separate from jails.”

Unlawful Discrimination
Children prisoners mostly aged 15 to 17 belong to the poorest of the poor. Their dignity and human rights are emasculated by the state on account of their powerlessness.

Statistical findings of the Social Services Development Department (SSDD) of the Quezon City government show that most children prisoners come from families who could hardly support their own sustenance.

In 2002, 189 out of the total 497 children detained at the Molave Youth Home, a detention center for children run by the SSDD—representing 38 percent—came from the P3,000 income group. The others—101 kids (representing 20 percent) and 97 others (comprising 19 percent)—came from the P4,000 and P2,000 income bracket, respectively.

They comprise 77 percent of the entire 497 children prisoners at Molave in 2002.

The same pattern could be observed among children prisoners in 2001 who comprise 74 percent of the entire 538 jailed children of Molave during the period—with 178 kids coming from the P3,000 income group (representing 33 percent), 142 from the P4,000 income bracket (26 percent), and 85 others from the P2,000 group (15 percent).

The bulk of these prisoners—305 children (57 percent)—were jailed for property-related offenses, including 139 for robbery and 120 for theft.

In 2000, at least 121 jailed kids came from the P3,000 income bracket (29 percent), 92 others from the P2,000 income group (22 percent), and 80 from the P4,000 group (19 percent)—comprising 74 percent of the children detainees during the period.

The SSDD studies on the children prisoners’ economic background also showed that—from 1990 to 1999—the bulk of children prisoners comes from families belonging to the lowest P2,000 to P4,000 income groups, confirming the nexus between poverty and crime incidence allegedly involving the young.

This trend reflects the general condition of children prisoners who are mostly concentrated in urban centers. Their powerlessness makes them vulnerable to state agents’ abuse.

The poverty of children prisoners spurs the commission by the state of this crime against humanity that smacks of unlawful discrimination.

Faced with no available space to separately detain arrested children, including those suffering from mental disability, law enforcers mindlessly mix up and detain children with adult crime suspects, unafraid of any culpability on their part for their commission of this human rights violation due to the poverty and powerlessness of their children victims and lack of effective grassroots mechanisms providing redress for this inhumanity.

Lacking in a child rights-oriented political leadership, officers and members of the Philippine National Police callously resort to this brutal state practice with impunity, knowing fully well that children prisoners who come from the ranks of the poorest of the poor cannot defend and protect their own dignity and human rights against their onslaught.

Nobody cares. As these children—as far as the state is concerned—are inexistent.

This is how this crime against humanity perpetrated by the state against poor Filipino children gradually became institutionalized over the last 50 years or so.

The economic marginalization and political powerlessness bedeviling child prisoners call for affirmative action on the part of the state in order to address this injustice.

And this affirmative action should be carried out by no less than President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo at the crucial point of contact by these children with agents of the law.

[Pauldo]

Originally posted by ginapeterb@Aug 9 2005, 10:16 PM
These children were conceived recklessly....

Quoted post

Exactly.
These children were concieved at the behest of the catholic church, who basically deny the Filipino the right to use contraception:
:angry: The church has made it a moral obligation to spit children out on a regular basis.
:angry: It has created a society where having few or no children is a social stigma.
:angry: It's created a society where a mans 'machoness' is measured by the quantity off offspring he generates.
:angry: It was the only country (The vatican) at the world population control meeting in Egypt a few years ago who refused to encourage birth control.
:angry: Its believers, cohorts, powermongers, whatever you want to call them, spawned a tv documentary called "The Myth Of Overpopulation" a few years ago on tv in the Philippines, basically saying that there was no need for population control, that 'god will look after his children'.

All this in a country thats population has boomed by 1000% in the last 75 years, from 7 million to over 75 million :o

All this in a country that has virtually the worlds highest mortailty rate for children aged 4 and under.

I think the police and authorites are just making a lousy mess of mopping up the remains of a problem that is intrinsically caused by the very faith that is supposed to be looking after the peoples of the Philippines :unsure:

The problem needs to be solved by starting at the root cause: Why are there so many unwanted and homeless children?

[Admin]

Do I sense a slight anti-religous feeling there Paul? :)

Religion is more dangerous than a WMD, and it has nothing to do with whether their is actually a God or not.

[peterdavid]

Originally posted by Pauldo@Sep 8 2005, 06:37 AM
Exactly.
These children were concieved at the behest of the catholic church, who basically deny the Filipino the right to use contraception:
:angry: The church has made it a moral obligation to spit children out on a regular basis.
:angry: It has created a society where having few or no children is a social stigma.
:angry: It's created a society where a mans 'machoness' is measured by the quantity off offspring he generates.
:angry: It was the only country (The vatican) at the world population control meeting in Egypt a few years ago who refused to encourage birth control.
:angry: Its believers, cohorts, powermongers, whatever you want to call them, spawned a tv documentary called "The Myth Of Overpopulation" a few years ago on tv in the Philippines, basically saying that there was no need for population control, that 'god will look after his children'.

All this in a country thats population has boomed by 1000% in the last 75 years, from 7 million to over 75 million :o

All this in a country that has virtually the worlds highest mortailty rate for children aged 4 and under.

I think the police and authorites are just making a lousy mess of mopping up the remains of a problem that is intrinsically caused by the very faith that is supposed to be looking after the peoples of the Philippines :unsure:

The problem needs to be solved by starting at the root cause: Why are there so many unwanted and homeless children?

Quoted post


My sentiments exactly.

But even discussions on this topic with my wife's sisters, who aren't what you would call 'religious', but who are brainwashed from birth to be 'catholic' (despite not even being able to name the ten commandments or know who most of the bible characters are), will just refuse to accept that the catholic church is to blame. It is scary, how total the church's control and brainwashing is - they will blame the people for being poor, for not restraining themselves, everything, but not the catholic church for committing all the crimes you listed (plus one you forgot, they actively spread the message in PI that using condoms CAUSES you to catch AIDS). It's like they have an intellectual blackspot.

Thankfully, my wife is a little wiser. But despite that, it's still in the blood. They are brainwashed from day one. The catholic church, like most organised religion, is truly an evil organisation.

[Admin]

The catholic church, like most organised religion, is truly an evil organisation.
:o :o :o Herectic..............I'll be meeting you in hell as well then.......at least most of the rock bands will be there :D

[Pauldo]

Originally posted by admin@Sep 8 2005, 09:15 AM
Do I sense a slight anti-religous feeling there Paul? :)

Quoted post


Just a touch :D

Without getting into rant mode, I really think the whole religious 'program' was invented purely to control the ignorant masses around the world. And jesus, it sure did work.

I mean, what better a control system than promising rewards that can never be seen until it's too late, and punishment that you are PROMISED you will recieve if you even THINK about not believing.

It's a win/win situation: Don't believe, and you get tortured to death. Believe, and you'll work your skinny ass off until the day you die. And I've yet to meet anybody who came back from the dead to tell me "it's true, it's true, I died and went to heaven, and lived in glory and happiness, and I DID inherit the earth" :D ;)

When I first started hanging around with my wife-to-be, we used to take Jeepney rides around the town, and every time we passed a church she would cross herself and say prayers for a safe journey. I used to laugh at her and say "It's THAT clown (pointing at the retard driving) there who you should be talking to, as he is the idiot running red lights and overtaking on blind bends". Such simple people, so brainwashed, so ignorant of the basics in life.

[peterdavid]

Originally posted by Pauldo@Sep 8 2005, 12:16 PM

When I first started hanging around with my wife-to-be, we used to take Jeepney rides around the town, and every time we passed a church she would cross herself and say prayers for a safe journey. I used to laugh at her and say "It's THAT clown (pointing at the retard driving) there who you should be talking to, as he is the idiot running red lights and overtaking on blind bends". Such simple people, so brainwashed, so ignorant of the basics in life.

Quoted post


Mine still does the sign of the cross before she goes to sleep each night. It's actually quite cute. Even though she has admitted that it's unlikely Jesus was the son of God and conceded, intellectually, that most of the bible is nonsense, based on old myth and fairytale. Yet she still won't go to sleep without doing the cross. You can't defeat that level of brainwashing, where even though, intellectually, you know it's nonsense, you are brainwashed with it from day one and cannot bring yourself to risk NOT doing the cross before you sleep.