Stories and Statistics of Children Behind Bars
by Father Shay Cullen

Image courtesy of Preda

The Philippine congress is debating to lower the minimum age of criminal liability from 15 years of age to nine years. Those promoting the change in the law say children are criminals and are being used by drug syndicates to commit crimes because they cannot be prosecuted. This is not true. The police should go after the drug lords, not blame the children. It seems that the criminal masterminds are immune and untouched, some are police, while the children are being jailed.

The advocates of the proposed new law claim thousands of children are into criminal acts and into drug peddling and crime. It is not true, the statistics below published by Reuters recently shows the truth that very few minors are involved in crime.

The children may be jailed or shot dead as young as nine years old if the law passes as they will be considered criminal suspects. Researchers from the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Council (JJWC) in 2016 visiting the detention centers interviewed the children and discovered that many suffered acts of abuse and even torture.

Eric is an 11-year-old street child. He looks only about six. He is malnourished and stunted like thousands of children living in poverty in the slums and on the streets of the Philippines where the wealth is in the hands of the few.

His schooling is almost zero and he has difficulty writing his name. He committed no crime but ran away from home because his stepfather beat him. He was picked up on the street by officials and was then put in a detention center and then the bad things happened to him. He was treated as a criminal and locked behind bars with other children.

They had just the empty cell, no education, no pictures just bare walls, only boredom and fear of punishment. There were no beds and he slept on a wooden bench or the floor. There was no exercise yard, they were not allowed outdoors into the sunlight. They were allowed to stretch their hands out the barred window into the sun. There were no books, comics, toys, learning materials or TV. They just had boredom and detention, cut off from the freedom they loved.

Full article on Preda website.

 

Suspects are not Humanity, says Justice Secretary

by Fr Shay Cullen

Small children of nine are to be branded as criminals and to be held responsible for childhood mistakes. Stealing when they are hungry and abandoned. Fighting back when they are abused and bullied. They cry when there is no one to feed them. What are they expected to do to survive? That’s the plight of thousands of abandoned boys and girls in the Philippines today.

According to Representative Pantaleon Alvarez, the Speaker of the lower house of the Philippine Congress, the country is crime-ridden and it can be blamed on criminals who start at the age of nine. The law must be changed to lower the minimum age of criminal responsibility from the present 15 years old to nine years old.

The reason cited is that children are used by syndicates to commit serious crimes because at 15 and younger they cannot be prosecuted. This is not true. There is no evidence to support such a statement. All research and statistics point in the opposite direction, that children are not to blame for the crimes of adults. Children below 15 cannot discern what is unlawful.

But the Congress representatives want to please President Rodrigo Duterte who believes that even children are criminals. Several members of his cabinet do not agree with the lowering of the minimum age and they oppose it. Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez advised the cabinet secretaries who are against it to resign if they don’t agree with the President.

Many disagree. The secretaries heading the government agencies are there to advise, support, guide, object as necessary and suggest the right and true way of good governance. When they comment on presidential proposals, they are required to be rational, study the data and science and be guided by it. They are not dummies or robots, as the Speaker would have them to be.

Full article on the Preda website here.

Justice for Abused Children

by Fr Shay Cullen

Preda Girls Home

She was a very traumatized and broken 15-year-old child, continuously raped and abused by her own father until she was rescued by the Preda social workers and brought to Preda Home for Girls. Had Gina not had a refuge free from fear and safe from her abuser, her own father, she would have run away from home and surely would have been a victim of human trafficking.

As many as 70 percent of children abused in their own home that run to the streets are picked up by pimps and traffickers and sold into sex bars.

But Gina was saved before that happened. In the weeks before June 2007 she was raped repeatedly and suffered acts of abuse by her own father. Her mother left the three children with their unemployed father while she worked as a domestic in Manila. This is the plight of many families where the mother works away from home or abroad as an overseas worker. The children are left unprotected and vulnerable at times.

In the Preda Home Gina was welcomed, given affirmation and support and helped to feel at home and safe and secure. No further abuse would happen to her. This made her relax and cry with relief that she had been rescued and was understood and believed.

She had emotional expression therapy over several months and brought out all her anger and pain directed at her father. She had extensive counseling. She gave her life testimony and joined in the many group activities at the home. There were values training, education on children’s rights, music, art, sport, games, discussions and outings to resorts, to the beach, and other positive experiences. These are all part of the Preda human development program. Legal cases for dozens of victims are on-going. Many others are archived in the court because the arrest warrants for the suspects have not been served.  So justice is stymied.

Full post on Preda website here.

Respect for Life and Human Dignity

by Fr Shay Cullen

Payatas Dump, Quezon City, Philippines [Wikipedia]

Bennie had a thin, hollow face, the picture of malnutrition at 22 years of age. He had never been to school for more than a few months, could not read or write and he was a one-meal man. He ate once a day. He was dressed in shorts and a dirty t-shirt. His flip-flops were worn thin. They were his only possessions. He pushed a small wooden cart along the back streets of Manila picking up discarded plastic bottles, bits of metal that fell off a jeepney or a truck. He was a discarded piece of humanity himself.

On a lucky day in a garbage bin outside the gate of a mansion he found an old computer keyboard. Finds like these were the treasures of his long walk. That was a big day for him and he sold it at the junk shop with the other bits and pieces he picked up. He joined his fellow scavengers and together they cooked what they found in the garbage – a plate of pagpag and a little rice. Pagpag is made from the throwaway leftovers from the plates of diners that end up in a restaurant’s garbage bags in a back alleyway. It is retrieved by the very poor and boiled in a big pot on the side of the road. It makes an excellent meal– for the hungry poor.   

Preparing pagpag

After eating his pagpag Bennie decided he would celebrate. That night he went down an alleyway to buy a small sachet of marijuana from the local re-seller named Joey who was not much better off than him. Bennie just wanted to ease the loneliness of life, the ache in his back and legs, the pain in his feet and to forget for a short while the misery of his daily search for junk and his one meal of cheap pagpag food. There was nothing else in his life.

Continue here.

What is the Happiness of Christmas?

by Fr Shay Cullen

The Nativity, El Greco [Web Gallery of Art]

What is it that makes Christmas so beautiful, so cheerful and a happy time especially for children? It has to be the gift-giving, the time when children look forward to gifts and signs of love and caring and sharing. The children of some well-off families receive so many gifts through the years that it has no special impact on them to receive more. There are the children of poor families that a gift at Christmas is a joy they never forget because they have so little in this world. And so that is what Christmas is about: the change of heart and mind when the rich and the well-off reach out to the poor to do something to make this a more just and equal society. It’s about caring and sharing.

It may not be much to ask but with the millions of displaced children in the world today, hundreds of thousands hungry and starving, it will be our duty and honor and a blessing for us to be able to share with them. To give from our abundance and not to keep it all for ourselves is the spirit of Christmas. This is what should be with us all our lives- helping others not just ourselves. It’s a natural virtue to care and share with our own families, but to help the stranger in need is an act of great goodness and virtue. That is being the good neighbor.

A frugal Christmas is in order and we are challenged to have the courage and the love of neighbors and to stop and ask, “Who is my neighbor?” Well in case you have forgotten that important teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, I remind you it is the traveler who was beaten and robbed and left for dead.

Continue here.

Fr Shay Cullen, ninth recipient of the Hugh O’Flaherty Humanitarian Award  

5 November 2016 [Photo: Don McMonagle]

An Award for the Human Rights Workers and the Poor

by Fr Shay Cullen

Delivered on the occasion of the awarding of the Mons. Hugh O’Flaherty International Humanitarian Award, The Avenue Hotel, Killarney, Ireland, 5 November 2016

Dear friends and supporters and defenders of human rights,

I am honored tonight to be here to receive the Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty International Humanitarian Award. I accept it not for myself but on behalf of all those who are working and risking their lives to defend the rights of the oppressed people and to win freedom for those who are victims of human rights violations.

I accept it for those courageous people who resist oppression and whose lives are at risk of summary execution, those abused, the unjustly incarcerated and for those who are refugees from war and hunger.

I thank Matt Moran for making the nomination and for his commitment in supporting the work of Preda Foundation. I thank Jerry ‘O Grady and the members of the awarding committee and the Killarney Chamber of Commerce for their commitment and dedication in giving support for these people in great need through this award.

I thank the Columban Missionary Society that made it possible for me to serve in the Philippines and to implement the Preda mission, and to do what I do.

Full post here.

Columban Fr Michael Sinnott, kidnapped in Pagadian City, Philippines, on 11 October 2009 and released 32 days later, received the award in 2010.

Human Dignity is the Right of All

by Fr Shay Cullen

Syrian refugees entering Slovenia, October 2015 [Wikipedia]

We are bombarded daily by the news and images of violence and mayhem. The bombing of Yemen and Aleppo, the horrific war in Iraq and Syria, conflicts in Sudan in Africa and with the deaths and suffering of migrants and refugees fleeing violence and war. It gives us urgent reason to feel the human suffering and to think and act about our humanity. What are we as a species that we do violence to each other?

As a species, are we more animal than human, more violent than peaceful? Has our intelligence brought greater, more efficient means of killing and exterminating others than building equality and peace, ending hunger and poverty of hundreds of millions of people? It seems we, humans with the big brains and intelligence, are damaging ourselves and our planet beyond repair and recovery.

Are we not like a shipload of humans fighting among ourselves and causing the ship to sink? The aggressors tend to demonize their opponents, to take away their self-worth and self-respect and deprive them of their dignity. They do so to exert superiority over them. Racial hatred is the result and it is on the rise in the world today.

The human has evolved as the most aggressive and destructive species on the planet to the extent of one more powerful group in a community or country striving hell-bent on dominating or even exterminating others they dislike and whom they consider to be inferior, different or dangerous to them. When two or more groups feel threatened by others, they arm themselves and are ready for aggression or self-defense, violence, war and retaliation.

Full post here.

There was Jonathan

by Fr Shay Cullen

Pope Francis with a recovering drug addict
St Francis of Assisi of the Providence of God Hospital, Rio de Janeiro, 24 July 2013 [Wikipedia]

There was Jonathan, a 16-year-old teenager. He was from a broken home where love no longer held together a family. There was poverty that kept food from the table and from the mouths of his brother and sisters.

Jonathan saw the last of his father as he stormed out of their shanty by the Pasig, drunk on cheap liquor to numb the pain of failure. He was a jobless man fired from his work by a corrupt boss and he had no food for his family. He was a useless, broken man, his dignity was taken away.

So Jonathan dropped out of school to find work. But there was no job without a high school diploma. There was nothing for him but to go to the local drug pusher and sell the illegal stuff for a profit.

A little of the crystal grains could give the body a lift from depression and misery, banish hunger in an empty stomach and alleviate the pain of the poor in dire and deprecated slums. Poverty is the best drug pusher of all time.

Jonathan was the distributer of the medication that could alienate the pain and suffering of some of the poverty-stricken and misery-filled people of the slums. Crystal meth, called shabu, brings a short-lived hour or so of happiness and total forgetfulness for many. It brings the spurt of energy to others so they could work longer and ease their body pain.

Full post here.

Also read The Philippine War on Drugs by Fr John Keenan.

Cain and Abel, John Cheere, 1755 [Web Gallery of Art]

A silence that is consent to abuse
by Fr Shay Cullen

In the world today where violence and the violation of human rights is marked by a reluctance to take a stand against evil, not to report child abuse, not to oppose torture and murder, is a failure to confront criminal behavior. It is an indication that we are in a culture of silence and could be complicit in heinous crimes.

The silence that is born of the unwillingness to challenge the abusers and even the abusive authorities has to be seriously examined in individuals and communities. Why is it that thousands of children, one in four, according to some estimates, are sexually abused, beaten, hurt and violated, yet the majority of the cases go unreported, authorities are inactive and justice is frequently denied the victims?

The worst abuse is when an ‘amicable’ settlement is reached between the child abuser and the parents or relatives of the child victim. For a share of the payoff a government official will negotiate a settlement. The child and her suffering are ignored, justice and healing is denied her. This Aregulo system must be stopped.

The silence of the victims in aftermath of heinous crimes against them is because of trauma and fear. The victims of sexual abuse are, in most cases, unable to cry out and seek justice. They are just children, there is pressure from family members not to shame a relative or because the child has been wrongly blamed and has overwhelming feelings of imposed guilt. They carry the secret buried in their hearts all their lives.

Full article here.

The Preda Akbay Theatre Group

The Preda Akbay Theatre Group performs in Heilesheim,Germany

The Preda Akbay Theatre Group on tour around Germany since 13 September has presented dozens of Performances to diverse audiences in schools,community centers and churches.

They have been well received getting standing ovations and thunderous applause for the heart wrenching performance.

The musical play is a serious presentation of the social realities of environmental destruction that cause poverty, hardship and human trafficking. The play expresses the deepest emotions and heart wrenching feelings of the victims of sex slavery and abuse.

They also participated in the Missio organization’s campaign for the Pilipino Family Mission.

The tour ends on 23 October.