‘Still behind bars’

JESSICA KNOWLES, an American Fulbright Scholar with a sponsorship grant from the Philippine American Educational Foundation, prepared the stirring video-documentary No Place for a Child. The images in the production, while not new or unfamiliar, continue to horrify: children lying on the dirty floor of prison cells, packed like sardines; tattooed young bodies scarred with cruel torture wounds inflicted while in detention; young faces etched with ancient eyes that appear to have seen it all, devoid of hope. More importantly, they dishearten. The conclusion to be drawn from the interviews with government officials, and a review of the situation of specific cases of so-called youth offenders, is clear: four years after the passage of the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act, much remains to be done.  Worse, we have scarcely moved at all from the paradigm that condemned our children as criminals to be punished and incarcerated like their adult counterparts, to be processed under a criminal justice system from which they have no hope of being rehabilitated or reformed. They are worthless garbage, to be treated as such.

Former Unicef legal counsel and now Education Undersecretary Alberto Muyot has rightly expressed his disappointment at the failure of the law’s implementation or, more accurately, non-implementation. He manifested his dismay at the continuous imprisonment and packing of children in the country’s darkest dungeons. The law, he says, may be said to have been implemented only because the government has issued Implementing Rules and Regulations to the law, but there has been no actual or factual enforcement. On the other hand, Social Welfare Undersecretary Alicia Bala has explained that the continuing incarceration of children and government’s failure to implement the provisions of the Juvenile Justice Law on lack of budgetary resources. Undersecretary Bala chairs the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Council tasked to implement the law, with an initial budget of P50 million for its first year of operations. Unfortunately, after four years of legal existence, the initial budget has not yet been utilized for the various diversion and intervention programs demanded by the law.

Child rights advocates have long held and pursued the dream in the slogan: “No Child in Jail,” a powerful message that has been splashed in posters and billboards in the nation’s most densely populated cities and streets. This dream, however, was never the legislative intention in the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act although the latter manifests some orientation towards the protection of the human rights of children in conflict with law.  Children aged above 15 years old, who were supposed to be diverted to a more progressive child-oriented rehabilitative system, continue to be indicted in courts and prosecuted, incur criminal liability, and imprisoned under the criminal justice system just like adults. Even under the law, it was still the police and the judiciary, which intervened in the cases of minors. It still allowed for detention as the system’s first line of defense against juvenile crime, no matter how trivial as in jaywalking, littering and public urination crimes.

Children below that age, who were supposed to be absolutely exempted from the criminal justice system, have still largely been farmed out to, and detained in, “youth homes” for a lengthy never-ending diagnostic assessment or safekeeping. The reality is that these youth homes created around the country by social welfare institutions largely replicate the prisons administered by the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology.  Manila Youth Reception Center, Quezon City’s Molave Youth Home, Pasay City Youth Home, CRADLE in Taguig City, and even Cebu City’s Second Chance, are now administered by social workers. Yet they remain prisons with children behind bars in cramped cells where there is not even sufficient sleeping space on the dirty floors albeit their pretentious claim to be homes. There is hardly any true schooling, and rehabilitative activities or practical skills training programs to pave the way for real and durable rehabilitation.

Our democratic public institutions under this new administration of President Benigno Aquino 3rd must foster the basic universal human rights of our children so that a healthy social environment can be created. Education Undersecretary Muyot must now take the lead in providing the proper, healthy social and educational environment for these children at risk. He should give importance to distance learning programs, technical and practical skills training, and meaningful vocational training for the children who have dropped out of elementary and secondary schools as the Knowles’ research shows that children in jails are all school drop-outs. He must address the problem of child abusers among education officials, school principals, and teachers, who instead of inspiring and educating their students, bully and threaten them; these teachers must immediately be penalized and expelled on a zero-tolerance policy on child abuse.

The Social Welfare department must also step up, and exert more effort to provide children in conflict with the law with the promised welfare intervention, diversion, and humane rehabilitation for their proper growth as normal children. One percent of the annual internal revenue allotment, currently four billion three hundred thousand pesos, must be devoted to juvenile justice programs, as required under the law. There is simply no flimsy justification to claim that there is no budget or sufficient funding for the enforcement of the law because the law itself has obviously provided for such substantial allocations. –Eric F. Mallonga, Manila Times

ericfmallonga@yahoo.com