THE House of Representatives Committee on Justice. What an impressive if inappropriate name.
If anything, justice might be the last thing we should expect from this body.
On Thursday, January 17, Oriental Mindoro Representative Paulino Leachon, the committee chairman, signaled that the, this time, appropriately named Lower House was on the cusp of railroading a bill lowering the age of criminal liability from 15 to 9 years old, saying he hoped the measure becomes a law before the 17th Congress ends.
Leachon’s announcement came a day after social media went abuzz over the photos of a drug raid in an urban poor community near the Navotas fish port that showed children lined up alongside adult suspects.
While the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) insisted they were there to “rescue” a dozen kids who supposedly admitted to both using and peddling drugs, not a few netizens questioned why no social workers were present during the operation to see to the welfare of the minors or even if their parents had been informed.
Indeed, the turnover of the kids to the Social Welfare department after they were marched off with the older suspects sounded more like an afterthought, an attempt at damage control, than anything else, especially after the PDEA spokesman “inadvertently” posted a photo that clearly showed the children’s faces in violation of all rules regarding how minors should be treated.
As if on cue, no sooner had Leachon spoken than Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo eagerly weighed in, vowing to attend today’s session and “move for the passage of a bill that will lower the age of criminal liability from 15 years to 9” at the request of President Rodrigo Duterte.
Now, that is an image so rich in irony – one of the most kleptocratic presidents acceding to the wish of the most murderous to make persons way too young to make meaningful life decisions, much less adequately discern right from wrong, pay for crimes of which they are more victim than perpetrator, while she gets away with plunder and him, for now anyway, with what to my mind qualifies as genocide.
Ditto with a legislative chamber many of whose members are more known for breaking than making laws and for transforming public service into lucrative family enterprises.
This reminds me once more of a former congressman who claimed the reason so many journalists have been murdered in the country was because so many are corrupt. So I politely raised my hand and asked: “If corruption justifies murder, why then are so many of you still alive?”
Never mind that the overwhelming majority of children in the conflict of the law are poor and early on are exposed to more than their fair share of adverse experiences that may not only stunt their cognitive development but also make them easy prey for exploitation and abuse by adult criminals - in or out of uniform.
Shocked? Come on, who hasn’t heard at least one story of child beggars or even snatchers handing over their take to a police “protector”?
Although simply blaming poverty is also a copout, like one comment I came across that claimed: “mas malala na yata ngayon ang mga batang lumaki sa squatters kay sa mga well to do.” For sure, that Ateneo bully didn’t grow up in the slums. Neither did the current killer in chief, nor Gloria, nor the architects and conspirators of the pork barrel scam, nor the Ampatuans and too many others to count or name. Probably the only ones who can legitimately claim to have risen from rags to filthy riches are Imelda and the immortal Johnny Ponce Enrile. Nahhhh, I’m kidding – there are surely more.
Thus far, and this is but the latest count so far, more than 50 minors are estimated to have been killed in the course of the bogus “war on drugs.” In another arena, the counterinsurgency campaign, children routinely find themselves joining forced evacuations, caught in the crossfire, or are even accused of being rebels themselves.
This accursed legislation would legitimize their further victimization.
But it is, of course, immensely easier to just dump all the blame on the children – after all, they are the least capable of defending themselves – than to clean up the mess that pushed them into dire straits. Especially if cleaning up that mess would inevitably involve exacting accountability from those responsible for creating it in the first place.
Over the past two and a half years, we have been witness or subjected to outrage after outrage, from obscene insults to the burial of a tyrant on hallowed ground to brazen corruption, crushing taxation amid the worsening quality of life to mass murder supposedly to cure a drug problem that has, instead, grown much worse even as those responsible for this are not only left off the hook but actually rewarded.
Yet, none of these has been enough to break our backs.
Will the criminalization of our children be the last straw?
Dare we even risk needing to find out?
Unless you can stand the thought of rushing to the police station instead of the principal’s office the next time your kid gets in trouble, it might be a good idea to send a clear signal to those who claim to represent us that, NO, they do NOT have our blessings to criminalize our children and that there will be hell to pay if they do.
For once, if we allow this to become law, we will have truly given up our collective soul as a people and a nation.