Commodification of children
By Eric F. Mallonga
November 15, 2004
Barrister Geraldine Van Bueren, University of London’s Child Law Director,
posits that cultural perceptions and treatment of children have often led to
their exploitation and dehumanization. Traditionally, children have been
treated by their parents as inferior beings who should abide by parental
dictates.
It is because there have been no cultural restraints on parents that children,
especially those of tender age, have been enslaved in hazardous forms of labor
to support the family. Parents have, in many instances, become principal
abusers and exploiters of their children, while other authority figures, such
as teachers and priests, have figured among their tormentors.
The most dangerous form of child labor is commercial sexual exploitation of
children, wherein children are used to gratify the prurience of pedophiles. The
Child Rights Convention (CRC) prohibits all forms of child sexual
commodification, which include using children for prostitution, child
trafficking for sexual purposes, in nude dancing for sexual entertainment, and
in other pornographic performances and materials.
Such practices are not exclusive and are often interlinked that they create a
chain of sexual exploitation. Thus, children—who are paid to dance naked inside
a beerhouse establishment, such as Metallica and Ms. Saigon pubs, which had
been closed down through a joint DSWD-NBI sting operation—are also prostituted
to generate more revenues. Bar fines were paid by beerhouse customers for them
to bring the child entertainers outside the establishment for sexual
gratification purposes. Not a few of those children were brought out by foreign
customers, who took pornographic pictures or videotapes while abusing them.
These pornographic images have been subsequently sold in the sex market.
But commercial child sexual exploitation is difficult to investigate, and
solve. Exploited children usually come from backgrounds of poverty and abuse.
Their earnings are used to support their families. Rescuing these children from
such exploitative environments might be equated to depriving them of the source
of support for themselves and their families. They also reveal heartbreaking
stories of incest and rape by respected figures of authority within the
domestic and community settings. Cultural and religious taboos further impede
prosecution of criminal complaints against perpetrators because churches
falsely propagate blind obedience to parents as unbreakable commandments.
Family disgrace is given a more paramount consideration over the protection of
the rights of children. Thus, children within the commercial sexual industry
are unfairly conditioned to accept these sad realities.
The University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development
Studies, which wrote on a Rapid Appraisal on Child Pornography, pointed out
that child pornography, and the accompanying prostitution of children, in this
country started in the 1970’s, when American soldiers residing at military
bases in Angeles and Olongapo Cities took pornographic pictures of children
they used as sexual objects. But what catapulted the issue of child pornography
and prostitution were the shocking cases of pedophilia in Pagsanjan, Laguna, in
the latter part of 1980’s when homosexual and heterosexual predators among the
thousands of Hollywood staff of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” started
a word-of-mouth advertisement among their colleagues abroad that children were
sexually available in Pagsanjan and presented pictures, films and videotapes as
proof of their sexual conquests. Despite its claim of “moral” governance,
America has a history of “liberating” countries with its sexual perversions,
which include the Philippines among its conquests.
Sadly, even our Supreme Court appears to have hewed to the belief that children
of tender age can be prostitutes. In one case, the Supreme Court acquitted
Austrian pedophile Heinrich Ritter on grounds that a child, at least aged
twelve, could voluntarily consent to the sexual act. In that case, the young
victim died from a genital infection seven months after Heinrich Ritter broke a
dildo vibrator in the child’s genital organ. The rotor of the vibrator was
never removed from the poor child’s organ. The Supreme Court found that the
child’s family could not even prove the child’s birth date, much more the
sexual abuse. The prosecutor proved statutory rape by adducing a baptismal
certificate, which proved the child below the age of twelve years. The
statutory rape was sustained by then-Judge Alicia Santos, now Appellate Court
Justice. But the Supreme Court overruled the judge’s decision and concluded
that the birth date was not conclusively proven by a baptismal certificate, and
therefore the statutory presumption in the rape of a child below twelve years
could not apply in this particular case.
With legal developments, it is hoped that, when put to the test, the Supreme
Court shall no longer declare that young children can voluntarily engage in the
sex trade. Hopefully, our society shall look upon children as victims to be
protected and empowered, and not as knowing participants to commercial sex.
Certainly, children can never be commodities for sexual abuse and
exploitation—whether they “agree” or not.
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