WHERE are their parents?
The recent rescue of eight minors from a former call center worker who paid them to perform for online sex videos reifies the social impact of absentee parents.
As reported by SunStar Cebu, the resident of Cansojong, Talisay City is a relative of the minors, who, after their rescue by the Anti-Cybercrime Group-Central Visayas, were turned over to the Department of Social Welfare and Services for counselling.
In December 2016, the National Baseline Study on Violence Against Children, launched by the Council for the Welfare of Children (CWC) and the United Nations Children’s Fund, disclosed that 60 percent of the physical violence and 38 percent of the psychological violence are inflicted on children at home.
The National Baseline Study on Violence Against Children was conducted with 3,866 respondents, aged 13 to 24, coming from 17 regions in the Philippines.
Among the sexual violence conducted on digital platforms is the recording or taking of sex videos or photos without the consent of the involved minors.
Yet, according to the same Rappler report, less than one percent of the victims report the child abuse to the authorities. About 10 percent of the victims talk to their friends or mothers about suffering from physical violence; about 13 percent confide about enduring sexual abuse.
What happens in families where the mother, father or both parents are separated from their children due to overseas work, imprisonment, abandonment or other circumstances?
The National Baseline Study also revealed that local government units have limited funds and social workers to report or respond to cases involving violence against children. In this vacuum, parents and guardians are all the more needed for safeguarding children and stopping child abuse.
The country’s long history of transnational labor migration may have “normalized” the separation of children from one or both parents, resulting in coping mechanisms shared among children of transnational Filipino families. One of these mechanisms is the “virtual presence” of physically absent parents via modern communications, such as computers and smart phones.
These were the findings of an August 2011 study conducted by Elspeth Graham and Lucy Jordan on migrant parents and the psychological well-being of “left-behind children” in four Southeast Asian nations: Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The finding that “left-behind children” in the Philippines have better psychological well-being compared to the children of transnational families in neighboring nations requires more research that can reveal nuanced findings on “contextual factors,” such as “cultural norms relating to the role of women in society and reconfigurations of family life following the departure of a husband and father,” pointed out the paper published on the “Wiley Journal of Marriage and the Family.”
While mothers are the traditional caregivers in families, societal changes affecting Filipino families have also damaged their responsiveness to their children, not just making them desensitized to their needs but even making them active participants in the abuse of their own children.
The absences of biological fathers have led to other men moving in as partners and stepfathers, potential abusers of other men’s children or at the least, desensitized or alienated surrogates that children will not confide in.
A 2017 University of the Philippines Cebu case study of overseas Cebuano fathers revealed that their use of computers and smart phones to contact their children left behind is constrained for months when the seamen fathers are at sea. Communication is often one-way, with fathers initiating the calls or the online chats and the children limited to responding to their parent’s inquiries but rarely confiding details about their life, specially problems.
These realities demand that we need to make families safer for our children.