Sunday, October 07, 2007 Sun.star Essay: A child lost By Erma M. Cuizon Sun.star Essay
AFTER reading news about a newly formed group called the Anti-Child Pornography Alliance, composed of nine organizations (including the University of San Carlos Supreme Student Council), I thought, yes, something’s going to give.
The thing these days is that children seem to find nothing wrong with being used even while they’re themselves probably already attracted to the komiks, magazine, movies that exploit them. Something went wrong somewhere. We lost track of our grandma’s values that we surely could use today.
It has been years since the early days of worry over what children read, see, or hear; now the problem is much bigger. We can’t even talk just about influence on the children in a period of formation, such as the effect of pornographic komiks in young minds. Now the children are “in the game” itself, sometimes even pushed by the needy parents who could use a few pesos of price if the child strips before a camera.
The government in the ‘80s was in the lookout for pornographic komiks published in Manila without any publisher’s name and sold out to the streets.
If this proliferation was eventually cut in the bud in Manila, not quite outside it. The same materials were shipped to Cebu and Mindanao. The government could have put more teeth to the job of preventing the materials from entering the port
In about the same year, the city government, one or two regional agencies, also the Church, were part of a small group formed by PIA Cebu after a Kapihan, a small anti-child pornography group with no name. The group would have wanted to burn all the pornographic komiks to call the attention of mothers. What the pupils bought from the sidewalk vendor in public schools came from that lucrative trade.
The group undertook a regular ceremonial burning of pornographic materials, for whatever it could contribute to forewarn society. At one time, the burning was performed in the plaza just outside City Hall, in Fuente Osmeña, even in a part of Talisay nearest Cebu City.
It asked volunteers, with the police, to confiscate the materials that were surreptitiously sold by sidewalk vendors in Colon and just outside the school entrance. PIA also had a box just at the door of the office where such materials could be dropped by concerned citizens, set for burning. The girl scouts, with guidance from the scout officials, even pitched in and confiscated pornographic komiks from pupils.
The materials were mostly komiks, perhaps mostly for children as audience.
You can’t imagine the extent of filth the komiks carried. And you won’t forget one story there that was about sex between a person and an animal. Or, as a result of child pornography, such incidents as the act tried out by two ten-year-olds who were neighbors in a barangay here in the city.
Everybody knew about the problem, all right, but not the extent.
The komiks industry will be revived, this time supported by the Dept. of Education and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, with NCCA head Cecile Guidote Alvarez promising to make komiks an influence on good values and decency. This makes Carlos J. Caparas happy, as hopefully he’s aware of the problem in komiks production affecting the readers. And the government could make sure the illegal publishers hang.
But the problem has grown. From the published materials and the movies, you now have the untouchable Internet and the cyber porno world it promises to make child-abusing tourists happy.
Look up data on world child pornography and you’ll find out the Philippines can’t be doing worse. In Mumbai, India, very young girls are sold as sex slaves in an active “sex-trade industry,” surely as a result of child pornography. But there’s no excuse in comparison because a child caught in this wicked grime is a child lost, a child hurt for life, whether in India, South Africa, Switzerland, or here.
