The caterers of sensational entertainment—the tabloids and TV news—are correct. There is an upsurge of crimes committed by children and teenagers. Some of these hoodlums commit crimes while high on glue or even stoned on shabu.
Children and teenage car burglary gangs have preyed on passengers of private cars and taxis caught in traffic jams in various parts of Metro Manila. Sometimes they don’t only grab handbags and snatch watches. They also mug their victims.
Young offenders have also been accused of worse crimes than just robbery—homicide, murder, rape and incest.
Some cops have been observed to look away. Worse, they seem to be partners of the children and teenage criminals.
An incident that got a lot of TV viewers shaking with fear and anger is the recent apprehension by Makati policemen of children from 7 to 12 years old said to be members of a car-burglary gang. They were not brought to jail. They were instead turned over to social workers of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). Then they were set free. Why? Because they were minors. And there is a law that exempts minors from being charged or punished as adults for criminal acts.
Because they believe the law lets children criminals go scot-free, no matter how horrible their crime, some lawmakers, local government officials and militant law-enforcement advocates are making serious calls for the repeal or amendment of Republic Act No. 9344 or the Juvenile and Welfare Act of 2006. They want to lower the exemption from criminal-liability age to below 10, some to below 12.
Some law enforcers and LGU officials think RA 9344 makes crime lords and syndicates more effective and free from prosecution by using children and teenage minors in their operations.
Social workers in LGUs complain that they can’t cope with the increasing number of “children in conflict with law” dumped into their offices by the police.
Children arrested by the police used to be housed in proper reformatory type homes run by the Social Welfare department. With lack of money and the devolution of social welfare operations from the national government to the LGUs, there are now few such homes. And many of these were often being criticized for being run like prisons and being inadequately provided for to the detriment of the children and minor residents.
So what happens now is that children and minors arrested by the police quickly end up back in their parent’s squatter-dwellings or in the streets where they and their parents literally live.
Mayor Sarah Duterte and her dad, former Mayor and now her Vice-Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, despair of their helplessness against children and minors who have formed gangs and kill each other apart from victimizing citizens.
As a result, these teenagers and children are the targets of Davao City’s “Death Squads.”
The Philippine National Police and the National Police Commission are agencies under the Department of Interior and Local Governments. Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo has admitted that his people are among those who wish RA 9344 amended.
The age of discernment
Before RA 9344, children nine years old and older were criminally liable under the Revised Penal Code (RPC). Teenagers and children older than nine were subject to prosecution and punishment. The Revised Penal Code would only treat them leniently if the young offenders were proved to be unaware that they were committing a crime.
Under the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act of 2006 all 15-year-olds or younger children are exempt from being charged with committing any crime. And minors older than 15 but younger than 18 can only be held criminally liable if they are proved to have done their criminal deed with full awareness—“discernment”—that what they did was wrong.
Enactment of R.A. 9344 gained the Philippines a lot of praise in 2006 from the UNICEF, the world body’s children-welfare agency, and international child-welfare advocacy NGOs. It made its author, Senator Francis Pangilinan, a hero among local child welfare activists and Fr. Shay Cullen’s PREDA Foundation.
UNICEF, Social Welfare and PREDA views
We agree with the UNICEF, Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman and PREDA Foundation’s Fr. Shay Cullen.
They say it is the duty of the state and of society to safeguard the moral and physical welfare of children and minors. They believe the Pangilinan law must not be changed. The state must do a better job of policing and jailing crime lords and corrupt policemen who use children. And the state must run homes for “children in conflict with the law” where they can be reformed and given human dignity.
Senator Pangilinan steadfastly defends his brainchild legislation. He says correctly that the problem is not the law but its bad implementation because “even its key stakeholders” do not understand the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act of 2006 and “therefore are not able to implement it properly.”
Fighting the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights move to recommend the suspension of the law, Sen. Pangilinan said that the essence of the law is to ensure the accountability of youth offenders, not to let them get away scot-free.
“Nowhere in the law does it state that we should simply let youth offenders go, regardless of their age. Nowhere in the law does it state that children in conflict with the law are ‘exempt’ from any kind of justice. What the law says is that children offenders must not be judged in the same manner and method of judging and imprisoning adults,” he explained.
“The law provides for a separate justice system for children and youth, with the belief that our youth should not be condemned to lives of criminality by throwing them into the same jail as hardened criminals,” he said.
The Philippine state, its government, and Filipino society as a whole deserve to be condemned for failing to establish a separate justice system for children.
