The Rape of Innocence

Child protection is one of the most urgent and serious responsibilities of parents, children, the community and government. We celebrate the ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child this November. It establishes the right of every child to a life of peace and security, dignity, fulfilled needs, a happy family, education, freedom, protection from abuse and poverty, right to health, justice and play and happiness. The Convention binds all member nations to respect and implement the rights of the child and act in the best interests of the child.

Before the Convention, the awareness and recognition that the child is the most vulnerable and  needy and the extent of child sexual abuse was unrecognized by the general public. It was the great secret never to be talked about, to be hidden like a pestilence behind closed doors. In many societies, it still is. Reporting of child sexual abuse is improving slowly but has a long way to go. It was and is taboo for many. It is the unspoken evil that, like a monster, would haunt anyone who talked about it. The best way to deal with child sexual abuse, rape and sex slavery was to bury it away and cover it up. Perhaps paedophilia was and is so prevalent that society thought it of little consequence and still does. The paedophiles were and are in positions of power and can influence and condition the rest of society to remain silent. That is why the Convention is so important.

There is now an awakening in society. Many nations have new strict laws and awareness. Children were taught to remain silent and never complain against adults even if they were abused. We heard the old strict caution given to children, “Silence is golden,” “Children could be seen but never heard.” Brave and courageous are the children that come forward and protest and complain. The #MeToo movement creates an environment where speaking out is encouraged. Why has it taken so long? Yet, it is only a tip of a great iceberg of silence that remains, freezing most in fear and shame. Our task is to warm the climate and help them unfreeze.

Millions of people went through school and college and were never warned against child sexual abuse being so prevalent. The Ten Commandments do not explicitly condemn it. Jesus of Nazareth did and placed children as the most important in the Kingdom and said abusers should be cast into the sea with a millstone tied around their necks (Matthew 18:1-7). He had it right and took a strong clear position on it.  But that was ignored by Church leaders over the ages. Not surprising then that clerical sexual abuse of children was and is such a frequent crime that it was ignored and covered up. We have to stand against it and expose it everywhere.

A new educational curriculum in California will teach young children about their bodies and how to protect themselves. Some parents reject such education as if children should not know they can be hurt and abused and must report it. They can and ought to be taught to do so. The LA Times reported, “Roughly 200 protesters showed up outside the state Capitol on Wednesday, some with their children in tow, holding signs that read “No to Explicit Sex Ed” and “Too Much Too, Soon.”

People in less progressive societies do not teach their children to resist abuse and report it. Some consider it even “permissible” for a man to do it. Paedophiles love the fear and silence that surrounds child abuse. It allows abuse with impunity. In India, a child is raped every 15 minutes.

In the Philippines, a child or woman is raped every 75 minutes and little is done to challenge the culture of silence. About 80 percent or 32,000,000 children suffer from violence. Seven million of these children between the ages of 10 to 18 are sexually abused every year. Twenty percent or 1.4 million are under six years old. Boys are more likely to be raped, according to a UNICEF study. They will grow up with anger and hatred in their hearts and be more prone to be violent in their family or society and turn to crime and insurrection.

What do small children know and say about it? If given a chance, they will tell the powerful truth. In a recent court case in Olongapo City, a three-year old girl and her six-year old sister, under the protection and care of the Preda Foundation, testified against their biological father. She clearly told the court what happened. “He poked his fingers into my “pepe” (vagina).Then her six-year old sister testified clearly and said she saw the rape happening and tried to pull her father off her little sister to no avail.

The judge, Judge Gemma Theresa B.Hilario-Logronio, said in her decision that the children were clear and consistent in their testimony. The children’s father was convicted to life in prison. This is a strong fearless judge that applies the law based on the clear testimony of the witnesses and with supporting medical evidence. A few weeks ago, she convicted another rapist, a live-in partner of the mother of a 13-year old child cared for by the Preda Foundation, and gave two sentences of life in prison.

Justice is a powerful healing for victims of sexual abuse and just enlightened judges are an essential part of the healing process. We have to create an environment where children are empowered to come forward and tell their ordeal without fear, to a welcoming and supportive court and community. Creating this is the duty and moral obligation of all of us.

The Most Important of All

There is one day of the year set aside to remind us of the horrible painful truth that there are millions of children around the world working in the fields, factories, brick kilns, construction sites and sex clubs. The clothes we wear, if made in a poor developing nation, are likely to have been made with some form of child labor. The millions of single men on sex tours abuse working children to satisfy their perverted sexual fantasies; it’s a cruel world of exploitation of those declared to be the most important of all in God's family and equal to Jesus of Nazareth.  

Preda Fair Trade organization has campaigned for years to free children from the worst forms of child labor like unpaid slaves in sex bars and clubs. They are in the most hazardous situations where they have to dress in bikinis, pole-dance, be groped, laughed at, molested and be exposed to life threatening diseases and even physical assault. In many bars, they are sold to highest paying sex tourist.  

Beth-ann was given by her father to a distant relative when she was 12 years old and she was never sent to school. Instead, she was turned over to the Mamasan of a sex hotel and brought up there as a sex object for local and foreign men. When rescued by the age of 15 by the Preda social workers, she had the mentality of a 9 year-old, illiterate and unable to relate to adults having been a sex object for most of her life. There are thousands like her in many countries.

She is slowly recovering and trying to live a normal life outside of the sex bar and bravely learning to read and write and finding a new set of behaviors and values. There are thousands like her who are still slaves, working in sex bars with the connivance and licensing approval of local government officials who benefit from the sex industry themselves and frequently are hotel or bar owners.  

Child labor is, in most situations, the evidence of extreme poverty and exploitation of the poor and the marginalized people. The children are offered jobs as domestic helpers in the city, a down payment is made to the parents in a remote village and the children are carried off to the sex bar or brothel. Another destructive form of so called sex-work for young teenagers is making pornography.  Their images are sold live on the internet for pedophiles to view them. It’s a billion dollar business and the children are the work force.

How is it that until 1989, child labor was generally accepted as necessary, desirable even and it took thousands of years for the Convention on the Rights of the Child to be written and passed. I was a delegate to the drafting conference in Helsinki.  Then Convention No. 182 on the worst forms of child labor was written and passed by the International Labor Organization (ILO) and passed as international law by the United Nations in 1999.  I marched through Geneva to lobby the ILO to pass Convention 182. It bans the worst forms of child labor. However, it is still being violated around the world. Millions of children are unschooled and work in every kind of labor situation to help their families survive.

How is it that children have been held in work bondage for thousands of years and forced to work and be sexually abused. What has been forgotten are the extraordinary statements and acts of Jesus of Nazareth in regard to children. When asked who is the most important in the Kingdom of God, Jesus placed a child in front of them and said a child is the most important of all. He gave them the inalienable right and place of greatest importance in God's family.

“The most important in the Kingdom is this child”, he told his followers. “To accept one of them is to accept me”, he said. What an extraordinary declaration made at a time when children were considered the property of parents and as non-persons with no rights and only part of the work force. The Church did not oppose it or declare it as intrinsically wrong or have a dogma about it, despite the practice of child labor being a direct contradiction of the Gospel values and of Jesus himself.

Children were number one in Christianity at the beginning, until the institutionalization of Christianity that is. It took secular society in 1989 and 1999 to recognize the inalienable rights of the child. Sadly, it was not the Church who advocated and established in international law, these rights of the child. Instead, it has a nasty history of child abuse, a contradiction of the teachings of its founder. It is now that Pope Francis and enlightened church leaders and child rights advocates are vigorously undoing that past and trying to make amends for that most unjust and abusive past.

We were all children once and may have memories (or suppressed memories), of childhood hardships, drudgery, hard work and even abuse. We can be happy that we have survived and we can understand more easily the suffering and plight of the millions of children who continue to suffer abuse, illiteracy and life of hard labor. They may not survive.  This we can prevent and undo.

We must draw on the spirit of truth and empowerment and be prophetic, missionary, active in speaking out and defending children and promoting their rights. They are the most important in God's kingdom, (Matt.18.1 -5, Mark 9.33-37, Luke 9.46-48) and have a place of honor that must never be taken away from them. 

The Day I Rescued Josh

The great challenge for child care workers worldwide is to get the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child respected and implemented especially by law enforcement and jail management officers. It is the 20th anniversary of the convention that is now the basis of all child protection law for all nations, but many ignore it in practice. Twenty years ago, dedicated people were determined to enshrine the rights of the child in a United Nations Convention that would guide all nations. I was a delegate in Helsinki during the conference to finalize the NGO draft proposal of the Convention. A year later, it was passed and soon the Philippines had a new child protection law based on it and that is a great help in my apostolic work visiting jails and brothels and rescuing abused children and bringing their abusers to justice.

I visited the Philippine youth detention center (CRADLE) at Bicutan under the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology last week. I had a court order to take the custody of a minor and bring him to the "Preda New Dawn" recovery and education center. I asked if they had a copy of the Convention of the Rights of the Child and they seemed not to have heard of it.

Sad to say I found the need of much improvement. The jail is small with overcrowded cells, the youth detainees are held behind bars without much recreation, sports or sunlight. During my visit, it was only at lunch time they were allowed out of the cells to eat a light meal with a single piece of chicken (or pork), the size of golfball, a cup of rice and a small banana. The officers on duty were watching television instead of caring for the needs of the inmates. None of the youth had been convicted of a crime they were awaiting the stuck up wheels of justice to start turning.

The rescued youth, (call him Josh, not his real name), had
serious case of scabies, an infectious skin disease. I was informed that one officer was transferred after sexually abusing a female teenager detainee. The few girl detainees have no secure room and wander the open spaces in the corridors and some have been sexually molested by the male detainees in the toilets. They should be removed from that facility.

The guards and female warden gamely poised for a photograph and when they realized I was taking video, the lady warden got angry and confronted my female staff and detained us and called senior officers. When eventually we were released and left with Josh, he told us how he was beaten up by one of the guards. A report will be filed with the Commission on Human Rights.

There is an urgent need for the implementation of a more intelligent and educated non-punitive approach to assist children in conflict with the law. Giving them respect, counseling, help and skilled training while their court case is pending, is the way to restore their self-esteem, dignity and turn them from doing down the path of crime. Josh was held in that prison for one year having been accused of stealing an item worth USD$27 or about twenty Euro.

Saving abused children is another important way to implement the Convention. One day I was mistaken for a tourist while I was walking along the street in Olongapo City in the Philippines. It was then a big town that lived off the nearby US Naval Base on Subic Bay and sex bars were everywhere, pimps touted young women openly on the street. One pimp came up to me and to my horror offered me two small children about 12 years old. He told me I could do anything I liked to them. He laughed when I said I was going to call the police, and he was gone before I could do anything to get help to save the children. The child sex industry is condoned and tolerated to this day and that must change. I was determined from then on to change the terrible situation of enslaved children in the power of sex abusers. We must never condone cover-up or tolerate abuse.

The Convention On Children's Rights Must Be Implemented

I first became involved in child protection and working for the drafting and approval of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in the 1980s. The twentieth anniversary of that convention is being celebrated this month.

One day, I was mistaken for a tourist while I was walking along the street in Olongapo City in the Philippines. It was then a big town that lived off the nearby US Naval base on Subic Bay and sex bars were everywhere, pimps touted young women openly on the street. One pimp came up to me and to my horror offered me two small children, about 12 years old. He told me I could do anything I liked to them. He laughed when I said I was going to call the police, and he was gone before I could do anything to get help to save the children. I was determined from then on to change the terrible situation of enslaved children in the power of sex abusers.

After that experience I arranged for the Preda Foundation that I started in 1974 to expand its services and help child victims of trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation and child abuse. Preda now operates a government-approved and licensed child-care Centre with an active 24 hours on call rescue team. The victims are brought to the protection of safe and caring residential homes with a full team of female social workers, counselors and therapists that protect the children and help them recover. The Preda para-legal staffs are busy trying to bring the abusers to justice. There are 56 abused girls in the homes at any one time healing and recovering in safety. Some have been rescued from sex bars, others from their own homes where someone with access abuse them. The youngest is four years old and she was rescued from an abuser and she was found to have a venereal disease.

At the same time, Preda child rights education teams visit communities and schools daily to teach the rights enshrined in the "Convention" using multi-media presentations, brochures and comics to get the message across. Before the passing of the Convention there was not much worldwide concern or awareness worldwide about children's rights to be affirmed, loved, cared for, be protected, get a name and an education and health care. Millions were enslaved in child labor and millions more were jailed as adults, millions more went hungry and sick. Many were deprived of their basic human rights as children. Sadly this is still the world wide reality, while much has changed because of the convention, it is not enough.

Twenty years ago, dedicated people were determined to enshrine the rights of the child in a United Nations Convention that would be the basis of law and oblige nations everywhere to bring their national legislation into line with the convention and to report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

I was a delegate in Helsinki during the conference to finalize the NGO draft proposal of the Convention. ( see www.preda.org ).

There was great happiness when it was finally passed by the United Nations. The work had just begun to make it the basis of new child protection laws in the Philippines. Years later, Republic Act 7610 came into law, then it was followed by other child protection laws. However, no matter how strongly the rights of the child is stated in law if there is no political will to implement them they remain dead and children remain vulnerable and increasingly abused and exploited. Tragically with some exceptions, that is the situation in the Philippines. There is generally little implementation of the law. Corruption, a thriving sex industry where thousands of minors are sexually exploited by local and foreigners continues. While the other provisions of the convention, education and health care are being implemented, however weakly, mostly by non-government agencies, there is so much more that has to be done. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is one of the most important documents in the world and we must continue to work to have it upheld and respected everywhere.