Robbed of a Childhood

Juvenile crimes are on the rise because of poverty and weak law enforcement.
by Luz Rimban

I FIRST met the boy more than two years ago. My family and I found him inside our van as we opened its door to take a ride one night. He told us that he had chanced upon our vehicle while walking through the parking lot of our apartment complex, looking for a place to sleep. The van door happened to be open, he said, so he went in. Impossible, we thought, since the van was always locked, car theft being rampant in the community.

Our children noticed that a pack of candy we left inside the van was now half-empty, the candy wrappers strewn all over the floor. But there were telltale signs of a more serious misdeed. Not far from where the boy claimed to be sleeping, the car tools had been bundled and wrapped in a T-shirt, ready to go, and the car radio half pulled from its berth. We did not want the offense to go unpunished.

We summoned a barangay tanod who took us all to the police detachment a block away. The boy gave us his name, and for this article, we shall call him Joey. He said he was 14 years old, his father was away in Mindanao in search of work, his mother was a sometime Japayuki, and he and his two younger siblings, a boy and a girl, had been sent off to live with friends and relatives. At that time, Joey was staying with the friend of an aunt in an apartment not far from ours.

At the police station, police and barangay representatives urged us to let Joey go. "Patawarin n'yo na, bata naman (Forgive him, he's just a child)," was a line we would hear again and again. But my husband and I thought, if we were to heed the advice, the boy would not learn his lesson. There was also a lesson here for our children, who were being directly exposed to crime for the first time in their lives. Still, we said we would forgive him if the boy admitted to the offense and apologized. He stood his ground—he was just looking for a place to sleep. He would not even say sorry for trespassing into other people's property.

Joey's guardian arrived not long after. "Forgive him," she said, "we'll see that he gets punished." But we weren't sure what kind of punishment she had in mind, and whether it would eventually teach the boy his lesson. We insisted on filing a case. Committing him to a juvenile facility run by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) would keep him off the streets, or at least away from cars.

By the time the police officer entered the case into the blotter, the boy had given his real name. "Joey," it turned out, was only an alias.

That evening, Joey became another statistic in the Philippine National Police (PNP) books, which have since been showing an alarming increase in the number of juvenile offenders like him. In 1997, the PNP Directorate for Investigation reported 1,693 complaints received and arrests made on youths aged 11 to 20 for the entire year. But in the first quarter of this year alone, there were 1,384 complaints against and arrests of juveniles nationwide. For the second quarter, there were 1,425. Indeed, crimes involving juvenile offenders have become everyday fare in newspaper and broadcast reports, with snatchers, pickpockets and shoplifters seemingly getting younger each year.

The Penal Code defines a juvenile offender as any person under 18 but over nine years of age at the time he commits the offense. Joey fits the profile of the youthful offender who now appears more frequently in the police logbooks. The Ateneo Human Rights Center, culling data from the PNP, the DSWD, the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP), the Philippine Action for Youth Offenders (PAYO) and other child rights groups, has found that most juvenile offenders were male, between 14 to 17 years old, belonging to a dysfunctional, low-income family, and arrested for crimes against property, usually theft and robbery.

That more than half of all juvenile offenses involve robbery and theft says something about the dire economic straits Filipino families face, says Major Ildebrandi Usana of the Women and Children's Concerns Desk at the PNP Directorate for Police-Community Relations. "If you look at the economic dimension," he says, "they steal because their families are in need and are hungry. They are the ones trying to find solutions (to their families' problems)." It's become a question of survival, he adds.

In its Situation Analysis on Children in Conflict with the Law and the Juvenile System, the Ateneo Human Rights Center observes, "A convergence of circumstances more often places the child in a situation leading to the commission of a crime. A dysfunctional family relationship, poverty or peer influence, create conditions which may push the youth towards conflict with the law."

JOEY WAS forced to spend that night in the empty cell of our neighborhood police detachment. He was lucky. More often than not, other arrested juveniles are thrust into the company of adult suspects, some of whom are hardened recidivists, in cells where there are no provisions for youthful offenders.

The next day, the case was brought to a fiscal for inquest. Again, we heard the same line. "Patawarin n'yo na, bata naman," said the fiscal, before allowing Joey's guardian to post bail.

The fiscal's statement, like those of the police, is to be expected in crimes involving juvenile offenders. In trainings conducted by United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), PAYO and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), personnel involved in the criminal justice system are advised to try to settle cases involving juvenile offenders and make them apologize to prevent a long drawn out court case that could traumatize the child.

Such an approach is called diversion, where youths are spared a formal trial but made to perform community service instead. Besides, such cases only clog the police and court dockets because complainants eventually lose interest in the cases.

More often though, "Patawarin mo na, bata naman" reflects the low priority law enforcers and officers of the court give to juvenile offenders, says Ray Dean Salvosa of the NGO Children and Youth Foundation of the Philippines. Salvosa says that to these people, "it's a nuisance case that reflects the attitude 'children should be seen and not heard,' additional work that would not occupy the same level of priority as, say a murder case committed by an adult."

Salvosa and other child rights activists are promoting what they call restorative justice for the juvenile—a belief that the young offender still has a big chance of growing up a responsible and law-abiding adult, if he is properly educated and reformed. It is a justice system where juveniles should be made to answer for their offenses, but "letting the punishment fit the crime."

At present, juvenile justice Philippine style imposes punishments highly disproportionate to the crime. In fact, in some cases, children are punished as soon as they are arrested. In 1995, the PCIJ exposed how three 12-year-old boys were tortured by personnel of the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission or PACC soon after their arrest for kidnapping for ransom. One of them even experienced having a lighted cigarette butt burned in his arm.

A recent newspaper report told of two brothers, aged 12 and eight, who went to a supermarket to buy a notebook. The younger boy saw a piece of candy on the floor, picked it up and put it in his pocket. The boys were promptly arrested for shoplifting, taken to a police precinct, interrogated like adult suspects and, before being sent home, made to sign a statement saying the investigation was done properly. Both boys were traumatized by their experience.

In the two cases, there were neither parents nor guardians present during the arrest and interrogation, despite a provision in the Rules and Regulations on the Apprehension, Investigation, Prosecution and Rehabilitation of Youth Offenders of Presidential Decree 603 that says this has to be so.

Juvenile offenders—also called "children in conflict with the law"—become victims of the criminal justice system's weaknesses in many other ways. Because the penal system is not fully equipped to take in adult offenders, much less juveniles, some youths end up in city jails with hardened criminals. Salvosa also cites the problem of juveniles in death row. At one point in the recent past, there were 35 of them among prisoners awaiting capital punishment, despite P.D 603 or the Child and Youth Welfare Code which says that a juvenile, even if he is convicted of a capital crime, should always be given a sentence two degrees lower than what adults are usually meted.

Juveniles languish in detention centers and city jails longer than they are supposed to because the wheels of justice grind slowly. Complainants don't appear, public attorneys are overburdened with cases and are unable to give the youths special attention, forcing judges to perennially postpone hearings. Salvosa says this is why a 12-year-old boy has been in a Palawan jail for the last two years without charges ever having been filed against him.

In 1997, Congress passed Republic Act 8369 or the Act Establishing Family Courts to specialize in hearing cases involving children and families. The law has taken effect, with the Supreme Court's appointment of some Regional Trial Court judges to the Family Courts. But their number is not enough to handle the growing number of Family Court cases nationwide. Besides, the law's Implenting Rules and Regulations have yet to be completed. In the meantime, laments Salvosa, "we are socializing our kids in a system that is designed to make them far better criminals than they will ever be. As a matter of fact, our jails are a graduate school for criminality."

JOEY MANAGED to evade the criminal justice system, at least for a time. He jumped bail. He was absent from court proceedings that, true enough, dragged on for more than two years, survived the retirement of one judge, and suffered countless postponements for various reasons, mostly because of the non-appearance of the accused. After a time, the judge ruled that the case would go on with or without Joey; he was to be tried in absentia.

The law caught up with him a few months ago. He was re-arrested and detained at the Molave Youth Detention Center, a juvenile jail for youths awaiting or undergoing trial and the only one of its kind in the country. The next time I saw him was in the courtroom, taller and thinner than when I saw him last.

"Patawarin mo na, bata naman," said the judge. "Besides, he's been in jail for two years." Refusing to be put on the defensive, I reminded the court that he jumped bail, and that he was in detention for only a few months. The judge ruled that the trial would continue.

It was around this time that I finally met Joey's father. He said Joey was 17 now—which made him actually 15 years old at the time he committed the offense. Joey's father cornered me twice after hearings, pleading that we settle the case so Joey could be released and go back to school. He admitted being neglectful and irresponsible, having had no work and leaving his children in the care of relatives for long periods of time. He also confessed to being abusive, beating up Joey and his siblings. He had decided to repent, he said, and asked for a second chance for him and his boy.

But I soon found out why even social workers at the detention center say they will refuse to let Joey rejoin his father, even after the court orders his release. In case conferences with the boy, said a social worker at Molave, Joey revealed he was the family breadwinner, working as a child prostitute with his own father as pimp. He had three to four customers a night, male and female, and even his younger siblings and cousins were forced into the trade as well.

Joey is not the only child social workers are reluctant to entrust to their families again. Ma. Teresa Mariano, head of Quezon City's social services department, which runs the Molave Center, talks of a case of young Molave ward who acted as his father's accomplice in robbing homes. "The child would tag along, and he would be the one to enter the house through the window," she recounts. "Now they're all in detention. The boy is here, the elder brother and the father are in city jail."

"What can you expect from the child?" asks Mariano. "Do you think he will still have a bright future? You want him rehabilitated but will you bring him home to the same family afterward?"

Law enforcers say it is not only their families who use children as pawns. Crime syndicates are also believed to employ children in felony, knowing that they could get away with crime, or if arrested, be released on bail or recognizance, and if tried and convicted, be allowed a suspended sentence.

Usana narrates the case of a juvenile offender involved in a crime syndicate snatching cellular phones. Upon interrogation, the child gave the police information about the gang, resulting in its leader's arrest. Shortly afterward, someone posted bail for the child. Social workers and law enforcers assigned to the case knew the child had no relatives with the means to post bond. They believe the gang members may have wanted the boy released so they could exact their revenge. Social workers and the police decided to keep the child in custody.

Law enforcers are cautioned against using children as assets or informants against criminal groups, says Usana. Children may not be aware of the dangers of squealing on criminals, that they can be discarded as easily as they were used for crimes.

If adult criminals were behind Joey's offense, then being at Molave keeps him away from them. It may not be the ideal home for children—143 juveniles, squeezed into a facility designed for half that number, share space with clerks from Quezon City's Social Services Department (SSD) who hold office in the same building. But at least Joey is among other children, receives two hours of non-formal education everyday, gets counseling from social workers, and experiences a semblance of home life by sharing in a variety of household chores. By month's end, there will be more space as the entire second floor of the city's SSD building will be devoted entirely for the Molave youths.

Mariano says the city is doing the best it can to help reform the children at Molave, even if the Center is not what child rights activists would like it to be. Steel bars divide the children's area from the SSD, and the children's quarters are nothing but jail cells that to children could look unfriendly and forbidding.

Often, too, BJMP guards who help oversee the children, take them to hearings in handcuffs. Things like this cannot be avoided, Mariano says. BJMP guards herd as many as eight wards at a time to the Hall of Justice nearby and doing so without handcuffs invite escape. The bars on windows are also part of BJMP regulations. Says Mariano: "We cannot disregard jail regulations because that's mandate by the BJMP. If an inmate or a ward escapes, it's not us social workers who will face the consequences but BJMP guards. They get jailed for letting inmates escape."

FOR NOW, each agency of government dealing with juvenile offenders are taking steps to help reform the justice system to make it child-friendly. The PNP is training policemen on the proper the handling of youth offenders. But the 600 so far trained are only a fraction of the 114,000-strong police force that has been used to strong-arm tactics in dealing with the citizenry. Even at the highest rungs of the PNP, attitudes need to be changed. "It's not our job to protect children," a police general said when a proposal for training policemen to be child-friendly was brought up. To which child rights activists retorted, policemen protect politicians, why not helpless children as well?

There is some good news: The PNP and other concerned government agencies, along with 44 NGOs, are drafting a bill that will establish a comprehensive juvenile justice system. Its main feature is the creation of an Office of Juvenile Justice under the Department of Justice. Salvosa says the office will set the national standard for juvenile justice from the recruitment of jail guards, establishment of youth homes and detention centers, and appointment of competent family court judges. "This way," he says, "we'll have someone to blame at the end of the day, unlike now where everyone's pointing a finger at everyone else."

Social workers like Mariano, however, believe that while measures like this will help, in the end it is the family that will have to be strengthened—economically and morally—if the problem of juvenile offenders is to be curbed at the very least.

Quezon City's social workers are stretched thin running outreach programs for the urban poor, which comprise half of city's population. Too often, social workers encounter single parents holding two jobs so they could feed seven children. In such cases, the parent has no time to devote to strengthening his or her child's values, leaving children to their own devices. Many end up on the streets, where they are more likely to turn into juvenile offenders.

Joey is now awaiting resolution of his case. Under the law, he has more than served the sentence for the crime he is charged with: attempted theft. For juveniles, the maximum penalty is two-and-a half months in a youth detention center. But social workers don't want to send him back to his family, and they are considering moving him to a youth rehabilitation center after he is discharged from Molave. Social workers are also concerned about his failing health. They say he has developed respiratory problems, has not been responding to medicines, and has grown considerably thinner. They have had him tested for HIV, and are now awaiting the results.

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