Year: 2022

UCAN News

Fr. Shay Cullen
May 16, 2022 06:19 AM GMT

Child abuse continues to thrive because many in society, including the Church, turn a blind eye

There was a time in 2019 when people were getting the flu and thought little of it until it began to spread and hundreds and then thousands and hundreds of thousands were suffering and dying. No one was ready for what was to become a deadly pandemic that could hurt, wound and kill.

Hospitals and clinics were at full capacity and people were on ventilators and dying at the doors of hospitals. It can mutate, transform itself into another variant, more deadly, more vicious, and find new ways to transmit itself to new victims.

The coronavirus is a perfect simile for the crimes of child sexual abuse. Child abuse is a secret crime hardly ever seen or detected. Abusers change their methods of hiding and covering up crimes, especially in institutions. Schools, colleges and churches have almost perfected the art of covering up such criminal behavior. Most people do not recognize that it is everywhere and children are silent suffering victims. When it is suspected or detected, many people turn away. They do not reach out to the victim, no matter how many symptoms of abuse the child has.

Teachers, parents, duty bearers and child care workers must be taught to recognize the symptoms of child sexual abuse and be open to listening to every child that appears troubled, unruly, disturbed, rebellious and those that withdraw, stop studying, remain silent and stop playing.

Everybody must have the commitment and conviction to help a child get assistance and report the abuse to the authorities. 

Online abuse is mostly done by relatives of the children. The acts are videotaped, photographed or sent live over the internet to rich pedophiles getting sexual gratification from the child abuse.

It is allowed, permitted and enabled by the morally bankrupt, uncaring and allegedly a few depraved executives of telecommunication corporations. It is shameful for any Filipino to be employed by them these days. They refuse to obey a law that mandates they install filtering or blocking software to prevent abusive images from passing through their Internet Service Providers. We survive in a corrupt society and must help child victims survive.

The most recent horrific cases involved an 11-year-old girl horribly abused for foreign pedophiles, a Swiss and a UK national. They also paid for young boys seven and 10 to be sexually exploited online by their mother. I hope the legal officers at the Swiss and UK embassies will take an active role in helping get justice for victims. They can get the testimonies of the victims in the care of the Preda Foundation. An average of 16 children at Preda homes in the Philippines get their abusers convicted every year to life in prison.

How wonderful it would be if foreign embassies and their attached law enforcers could investigate their abusive nationals and get convictions, too, and stop their pedophiles raping Filipino children.

The question is how much do they really care? The greed for money and the insatiable demands by rich foreign pedophiles are behind the sexual abuse of thousands of Filipino children. German police found as many as 30,000 pedophiles accessing child sexual abuse material online and identified 70 of them, many connected to the Philippines.

With exceptions, most families, citizens, government officials and agency heads, including many bishops in the Philippines and other churches have an uncaring attitude, indifference and a culture of apathy surrounding the sexual abuse of children. That is because, besides the few eight great bishops, they have many clerical abusers whom they hide away from the law and accountability and are not active defenders of child or human rights. Shame on them. 

The clerical abusers are still being allowed to travel abroad, go to another parish or diocese or retire in the comfort of a church-supported rest house, all to avoid the shame, embarrassment and damage to the reputation of the diocesan institutional church.

Just a few brave courageous bishops and priests, from the 90 active and 40 honorary bishops and other clerics, are outspoken against child abuse and stand for human rights. The rest are allegedly silent. The abusers go free and the crimes continue. Only a few clerical child abusers have faced a prosecutor. Not a single cleric has been convicted of child abuse in the Philippines in the past 40 years or more, correct me if I am wrong. The abusers walk free and allegedly the child is thrown aside, their parents paid off.

Children suffer without help because of the apathy and because there are very few professionally accredited child care therapeutic homes for the protection, healing and empowerment of child victims/survivors with legal assistance like the Preda homes. There are thousands of hospitals, clinics, and health care centers for every kind of illness but there are practically no clinics, shelters, or therapy homes for the healing and recovery and legal assistance for child sexual abuse victims.

The reason is that society denies and ignores the pandemic of abuse and the medical profession is primarily a privatized, expensive, money-making business. The majority of child sexual abuse victims/survivors are very poor children — no money to be made there.

Most psychology graduates work for human resources departments in big corporations, no child help centers for them. The rich hide away their victims successfully. The scandal and shame on the family would be too much, the child is left to endure the abuse.

In the Philippines and elsewhere, thousands more are victims of sexual slavery through human trafficking and they, too, are allowed to be groomed, recruited, and lured over the internet and taken by pimps and traffickers into the sex business.

This human slavery is operated in brothels and sex bars and hotels that all have government permits and licenses to operate. Most operate with impunity protected by the local politicians and corrupt police.

PUBLIC LIVES
By: Randy David
@inquirerdotnet Philippine Daily Inquirer
May 15, 2022

Around noon on June 30, a new government headed by Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will be inaugurated. At about the same time, a new movement that took shape in the final leg of Vice President Leni Robredo’s 2022 presidential campaign will formally launch its manifold presence in the post-election landscape.

The intertwining of these two modern forms of social organization will determine the future of democracy in our country. How they will relate to one another will test the strength of the nation’s formal institutions and the maturity of civil society.

Marcos Jr. will have at his disposal the enormous powers of the presidency—not the least of which is the power to appoint key officials to the crucial national agencies, including the police and the military—plus the nation’s collective resources and the power to borrow more. He will also have the support of a friendly legislature and a Supreme Court packed by appointees of his de facto ally, outgoing President Duterte.

But he must satisfy the high public expectations that have accompanied his family’s bid to reclaim Malacañang. His first problem will be how to bring down the cost of rice and other basic food items—as he promised—in the face of a global fuel shortage and other supply disruptions resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He will find his efforts constrained by the gigantic public debt he inherits from the Duterte administration, even as he must find ways to speed up economic recovery amid a lingering pandemic.

He must raise the morale of a dispirited bureaucracy that has been mismanaged by incompetent political appointees. He has to rely on local government officials whose corrupt ways have just been reinforced by the pouring of unlimited money during the last elections. On top of these, his every move will be monitored by a vigilant middle class that has overcome its timidity.

In contrast, Leni Robredo’s political capital is much greater now than when she was the country’s vice president. She only needs to make a call to harness the energy that her campaign unleashed. The movement that has grown around her is described as organic because it is self-initiated rather than artificially induced. Volunteer-driven movements of this sort typically become stable constituencies for change. More significantly, Leni’s campaign has awakened the idealism of many young people, most of them first-time joiners in public assemblies.

These strengths, however, also tend to be the sources of a movement’s weaknesses. Brimming with energy and drawing its force from a diversity of personal backgrounds and experiences, a movement usually does not have the kind of discipline that a political opposition needs in order to win elections.

Consistency in messaging, objectivity in processing information, diligence in observing priorities, and ability to make quick shifts in strategy were, for this reason, not the strongest features of the Leni campaign. Winning elections, by nature, is a messy game. It is not for the vain or self-righteous.

In his essay, “Politics as a vocation,” the German sociologist Max Weber famously said: “Only someone who is certain that it will not break him when, from where he stands, the world looks too stupid or mean for what he wants to offer it—that in spite of everything he will be able to say ‘but, still!’—only he has the ‘call’ for politics.” Leni Robredo has shown that she is capable of stirring the emotions of her supporters while keeping herself grounded in cold reason. It is a rare quality.

She definitely has the vocation for politics—the ability to strike a balance between what Weber calls the “Ethic of Moral Conviction” and the “Ethic of Responsibility.” Until new leaders emerge from this experience, Leni has the best credentials among all opposition figures at this point. But, for the moment, she does not have a ready political platform from which to air her views on government. Perhaps another woman, like Sen. Risa Hontiveros, the lone elected opposition in the Senate, might be in a better position to play an overtly political role.

Apart from the nationwide network of volunteers Leni plans to gather under the “Angat Buhay” (Uplift Lives) NGO, the Pink Movement may spin-off two other distinct organizational forms—a new opposition party, and a protest movement that is independent of any electoral or ideological project. I foresee the protest movement differentiating itself into specialized organizations, where activists and experts can work together on specific advocacies. The issues are endless: the environment, education, electoral reform, human rights and rule of law, history and children’s books, the defense of the Constitution, transparency in government, labor rights, the defense of women and children, etc.

A little note, from the work of Niklas Luhmann, on the nature of protest is worth quoting here. “Protests are communications addressed to others calling on their sense of responsibility. They criticize practices or states of affairs without offering to take the place of those whose job it is to ensure order.” Protest movements work best when they are autonomous from electoral party formations. The same applies to NGOs. To be effective, they must keep their independence from electoral parties, from the government in power, as well as from political movements aimed at overthrowing the entire sociopolitical order.

There’s much work to be done. Leni Robredo put it aptly in her Ateneo thanksgiving speech last Friday: “This day is not an ending, but the start of a new chapter.”

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