“IT WOULD be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.” Luke 17:2
“It takes a village to raise a child” goes an African proverb. It takes an entire community of different people interacting with children in order for a child to experience and grow in a safe environment.
It pains me no end to see children scavenge for food at night in downtown Bacolod to survive. They are either begging or stealing.
They were made to suffer for society’s failure to rear and raise them properly. I regularly encounter them in the weekly service of He Cares Mission. The first time I met them, I found them unkempt and undisciplined.
Every Saturday, I met them at the Redemptorist Church. They like playing with the flush toilet or playing with the microphones and laptops or crucifixes wherein one instance they broke one. There was one time when a problem boy was running all over the place, stealing fruits from a neighbor’s tree. The girls whispered to me not to mind him; he has a drunkard widower father who beat him up.
At one point, a boy at age 8 bit me so hard that my arm bled. He was scolded by the older boys. That’s when I realized the children are starting to bond as a family. They are supervised by their manongs and manangs. Now expected to be hugged by servants.
I know many of them by name. They look forward to meeting their “Brother Ben” who fellow servants observed treated me as their surrogate father. A boy refuses to call me “Bro” and insisted on calling me “Papa.” He sulked when I suggested that he plays with the other kids instead of telling me his stories.
The kids often chide me when I’m absent. Talk about being an absentee parent. I appreciate how our widower father raised us. A provincial fiscal, the Department of Justice has assigned to serve in another province that takes three hours by bus to get to his office. He returns home every day to be with us.
In fact, when I was assigned as the prayer guide of the Prayer and Life Workshop at the Metro Bacolod District Jail-Special Intensive Care Area, my inmate participants shared how their parents ignored much less guided them in their growing years. The only “love” and acceptance they felt are to be as a member of criminal gangs in their adolescence.
I am thus alarmed with these renewed calls to lower the minimum age of criminal responsibility. Department of Social Welfare and Development Undersecretary for Protective Operations and Programs Group Mae Fe Ancheta-Templa asserted that lowering such has never resulted in lower crime rates in the Philippines.
She cited that Philippine National Police data revealed that the percent distribution of crime committed by adults is higher at 98 percent, while those involving children is only two percent.
I can only pray that Congress wakes up that criminalizing children is not going to solve juvenile delinquency but making it worse.
(bqsanc@yahoomail.com)