BY SHAY CULLEN
AS BROKEN homes proliferate, hundreds of thousands of couples live together without the commitment of marriage, child protection and child support, thousands of youth in the Philippines have become a lost generation. Theirs is a sorry and pain-filled situation of neglect, physical, emotional, verbal, psychological and sexual abuse.
Teenagers and adults have children and abandon them. Men and women go their own ways and leave the children with aging grandparents unable to cope with emotionally disturbed and parentless teenagers.
The abandoned youth are without money, are hungry, need support, friendship, care and the chance of a normal life. They join street gangs to survive. Politicians condemn them as youth with criminal minds. They feel unwanted, rejected and without any positive future. They seem to have been abandoned by both church and government.
Alice is the victim of broken home. Her father abandoned her mother and when she was a 14-year old teenager, he showed up again and took her to live with him in Subic. There, he sexually abused her. When she could take it no longer, she did not find a welcome or assistance in the church to help her or in the government agency but she bravely got help and protection from a friend and was brought to a charitable child protection shelter and later filed charges against her biological father.
She is one of hundreds of thousands of children sexually abused daily. An estimated 100,000 girls are trafficked into the sex industry, annually according to Unicef. Since the pandemic hit the Philippines, much of the evil business has gone online. There, the children are sold like commodities to sex customers and delivered to their hotel rooms or apartments for rape as regular as a pizza delivery. That’s how corrupt this country has become, a children’s playground for online pedophiles sending money for sex from abroad. Local pedophiles are having a continual “fiesta of child abuse.”
The machismo culture has a motto: “Get them young.” The children are sometimes supplied by their parents and frequently abused by their biological father or live-in partner of the mother. Then, they are farmed out to others to abuse. You may not know it but child abuse is as common and as frequent as riding a bus.
The abusers claim the child give consent and they are legally covered. The children in reality cannot freely give consent at a young age but the Philippine law allows sex with a child from 12 years old, one of the lowest in the world. In Japan, it is 13 years old. The accused use this provision of the penal code as a defense if ever they are charged in court which is rare and unusual. Parents can pressure the child to say she “loves the older man.” That provision of the penal code is one reason for the proliferation of child sexual abuse and human trafficking of children. Hopefully, the bill that will change the law will be speedily approved by the Senate and it will change the age of consent to 16 years. (To be continued)/PN
