Stolen Childhood
By Father Shay Cullen SSC
Fr Shay Cullen of Ireland is a Columban Father working in the Philippines since 1969. He helps children imprisoned and abused by a corrupt judicial system. PREDA (www.preda.org) was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001.
Little has changed in the Philippine prison system since that day several years ago when I found a 6-year-old named Rosie behind prison bars clutching a drink can and crying her heart out for her mother. A dozen or so other street children were sprawled on the hard concrete floor, unconscious with exhaustion and hunger.
The toxic fumes they inhaled from a plastic bag filled with industrial glue, taken when local police rounded them up, had knocked out some. The cheap drug was their only remedy for the constant pangs from their empty stomachs. Rosie was too young for that. She had been taken from her mother who earned a living as a street vendor selling peanuts to tourists. She was expected to turn over her earnings to get her child released. It was extortion of the cruelest kind.
The Cries of the Oppressed
These were children of God robbed of their dignity and rights. It served as a stark reminder of the words of Jesus Christ when He told us that when we see the children of God, we see Him and whatever we do to them we do to Him. That night behind prison bars, I met an abused and abandoned God. There in those children, the God of the oppressed, the persecuted, and the innocent cried for freedom and love. It is the fate of thousands of children today, a fate Jesus willingly shared to remind us of our dignity, to tell us who we really are.
I was filled with anger and frustration as I worked to have those children released and brought to the children’s home I had set up in Olongapo City. Today, there are an estimated 20,000 children imprisoned in the Philippines. The prisons, such as the national penitentiary of Bilibid, south of Manila, are hellholes of abuse and neglect for children as young as 9. I know, for I have been jailed myself.
Robbed of dignity
In some city jails, the young girls are brought in from the streets to be sexually abused for a price by the guards and the adult male prisoners. In prison, sexual assault of young boys is all too common. Some are turned into child prostitutes while others are physically abused, leaving scars and psychological wounds in them all. This brutal experience can lead to a cycle of abuse and violence that fills the streets with young juveniles in continual conflict with the law.
Fighting back
Our organization, PREDA (Peoples’ Recovery, Empowerment, and Development Assistance Foundation), is doing all it can to save these children. Part of our work is organizing jail visits and investigating the case of imprisoned children with our jail rescue team.
We find many minors held in illegal detention whose rights have been violated. Some suffer from abuse, like the 8-to-12-year-olds brought to cemeteries by police and threatened with execution. Then they are tortured with cigarette burns until they confess to some crime for which the police want a conviction to get a reward and promotion.
Other young teenagers are jailed without evidence; they can be detained for weeks before seeing a prosecutor, lawyer or magistrate. Our efforts have helped release several children, but we find many more behind bars. It is not all doom and gloom for the imprisoned children of the Philippines and elsewhere if we work together to help them.