09/16/2011
“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” — Nelson Mandela
When
I first heard of the “solution” which some senators are proposing to
the “hamog boys” who perpetrate those “bukas taxi” (taxi ambush) thefts
along the Edsa-Guadalupe stretch, I nearly fell off my car seat.
Sen.
Chiz Escudero — enthusiastically supported by Senators Vicente Sotto
and Pia Cayetano, the head of the Senate committee on youth, women and
family relations) — wants to reduce the age limit of criminal liability
from 15 years down to nine. The next day’s headlines couldn’t have said
it clearer: “Senators want prison for youths involved in crimes.”
With
the knowledge that out of every 1,000 children who enter Grade 1, 40
percent would have dropped out by Grade 6 and only 40 percent of that
will graduate high school — of whom 49 percent would be unemployed due
to the collapse of the economic, educational, and justice system that
political leaders are supposed to uphold, I’m beginning to believe it is
these senators who should be jailed first!
Sen. Ping Lacson also
showed his support, arguing, “The age of offenders (is) going lower and
lower (so that won’t help) if we exempt the younger ones from criminal
liability…” Apparently, the young offenders he was referring to are
those used as drug mules who are later let off easily because of their
exclusion from criminal liability.
Sotto, for his part, buttressed
the “drug dealers have been using couriers who are below 18 years old”
argument by saying, “pag nahuli namin, ni hindi namin makuhanan ng
impormasyon... kasi darating agad ‘yung mga abogado ng mga drug dealer
at ipapa-turnover sa DSWD (Department of Social Welfare and
Development), so hilung-hilo ang PDEA (Philippine Drug Enforcement
Agency) at PNP (Philippine National Police) in the issue of drugs…”
I
don’t believe youngsters used in such cases can provide any more
information than the multibillion-peso intelligence networks of the PNP
and PDEA can. It is, in fact, the whole law enforcement and judicial
system that’s at the root, as we’ve seen in the Alabang Boys case, where
rogues from the Justice department and the courts sprung the culprits.
I
can’t imagine law breakers as young as those “hamog boys” acting on
their own. There has to be a freaking Fagin behind them, like in the
case of the gang of child thieves in Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens’ tale
of 18th Century industrial England where poverty and child labor
festered.
How many of our out-of-school, homeless, hunger-driven
youths, including many orphans among the nine to 15 year olds, are
preyed upon and used by sinister Fagins behind the drug, beggar and
pickpocket syndicate rings?
Instead, our senators want to throw
those, who have had little guidance in the first place, into jail
posthaste while they let the largest thieves of the land in power,
water, tollways, port service and telecoms rackets fly free to plunder
and impoverish the nation even more, and to spawn more orphaned, hungry,
and aimless families — children and youth included?
I find it
hard to imagine these senators taking such harsh attitudes on these
juveniles who have never really been given a chance to take control of
their lives. It is our system that has failed them.
Those who
control the system from their perches at the top are most at fault. They
are not only those in the high echelons of government but equally so
those in the economic ruling class, who actually control the political
leaders and have done everything to thwart the establishment of a just,
kinder and socially equitable system in society.
We have a ruling
class today that lives in much greater grandeur than Marie Antoinette
while the culture it promotes is one that is made to be at awe of having
40 Philippine billionaires among Forbes’ most wealthy, forgetting that
this great concentration of wealth has come at the expense of 40 million
Filipinos (70 percent of that children and youth) living below the
poverty line.
The senators, with their multi-hundred million pork
barrel, and the oligarchs, with their trillions, will surely deny it;
but they are plunderers — not only of our wealth but of our nations’
future.
French economist and statesman Frederic Bastiat once said:
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in
society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal
system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
And
my, have they made such a system indeed — with the Epira (Electric
Power Industry Reform Act), eVAT (expanded value added tax), and all!
Only, this “jail the children” law has shown the true extent of their
dehumanization. What have these senators become that they can no longer
put the problem of child and youth law offenders in a balanced, fair and
human perspective?
From Oliver Twist: “Men who look on nature,
and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the
right; but the sombre colors are reflections from their own jaundiced
eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.”
There
are certainly gentler, kinder and more holistic ways to treat erring
children and youth. Unicef and the Payo (Philippine Action for Youth
Offenders), in their studies on out-of-school-youth, thus declare: “The
moral development of out-of-school children in Metro Manila is
appalling… even if they get older, (their) mental-moral capability… may
remain retarded or develop at a very slow pace… The results… make a
strong case for a serious re-examination of the law which imposes
criminal liability on children at the age of nine… Judges should
therefore be cautioned to treat youth offenders with utmost care, on a
case-to-case basis, taking into account their individual levels of
discernment… (requiring) the children (to) undergo thorough testing
before adjudicating their culpability for a crime.”
As a
grandfather, this quote from Harold Hulbert has especially much meaning:
“Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it…” I
sincerely hope this has spoken to you as well.
(Tune in to Sulo ng
Pilipino/Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m. on 1098AM; Talk
News TV with HTL, Saturday, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on
GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8 on “The Agnotology of WTC Building 7”;
visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and
radio archives)
(Reprinted with permission from Mr. Herman Tiu-Laurel)
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL:
http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110916com5.html
