PANAY Alliance Karapatan is gravely concerned over violent incidents involving minors in the Philippines, including the school shooting in Tacloban City and stabbing cases in Panay Island. We express our sympathies and condolences to the affected families, and appeal to authorities to lawfully and swiftly act upon these incidents, giving due regard to the rights and responsibilities of all parties involved.
In the wake of these events, some narratives lapsed into misinformed blame directed at existing legal frameworks, most especially the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act (JJWA). It is misleading to claim that this law totally shields minors who commit crimes. When discernment is proven, the law does not grant a free pass; rather, it establishes distinct pathways for strict accountability, rehabilitation, and intensive intervention, demonstrating that the current crisis stems from a problem that is much deeper than legal leniency.
To our disappointment, the approach of the national government, several local government units, and opportunistic political groups has leaned toward superficial reactive measures, such as lowering the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR), targeting online video games, and heightening police or military presence in or near educational institutions. Turning physical and virtual spaces into heavily policed environments merely aggravates the socio-economic and psychological bases of peer-to-peer violence among minors, and serves to further breed an atmosphere of fear and distress for students.
Public officials must fundamentally shift their perspective. Aside from asking “Ano ang ubrahon sa mga bata?” as a reactionary demand for immediate punishment, it requires far more effort to face the systemic question: “Ngaa nag-amo sini ang mga bata?” True justice and prevention begin when we stop treating children purely as individual offenders and start looking at the environments that failed them. We need to investigate how these young individuals became so deeply neglected, isolated or bullied.
It is easy for agencies to blame children when they commit criminal acts, but difficult for the same agencies to face the truth: decades of band-aid reforms in government programs have failed to support nurturing environments that could have kept or diverted children away from illegal acts. National and local governments have not guaranteed decent living conditions for children and even aggravated the educational crisis; schools became pressure cookers instead of being second homes, and the first homes of children are in barangays where social services are still mostly inaccessible and low-quality until today.
We must put an end to the culture of impunity and state fascism, under which children witness top government leaders spewing vitriolic remarks and coddling rights violators among the military and uniformed personnel. Impunity and fascism breed the tendency for children and youth to consider aggressively attacking peers as an outlet or conflict resolution method. Also, the supply lines of this kind of physical danger must be traced: we must hold accountable those individuals and the lax regulatory systems that allowed guns to find their way into the hands of children.
Ultimately, we make communities and schools safer not by intimidating populations or by locking up more and more kids, but by putting in place the systems and services that ensure the quality of life and overall health of citizens, including our youth and children. The government must pivot away from punitive reflex actions and invest heavily in proactive interventions. This means enabling robust peer support programs, prioritizing mental and emotional health infrastructure in schools and barangays, and addressing community-level trauma. Only by fostering safe, supportive, and equitable environments can we hope to heal our youth and prevent these tragedies from happening again. – PANAY ALLIANCE KARAPATAN, Iloilo City <panaykarapatan@gmail.com>
