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PSYCHIATRIST Lourdes Ignacio, who chairs the World
Association of Psychosocial Rehabilitation, asked me to deliver a
lecture this week on laws specifically providing for a psychosocial
recovery process. My research came to a dead-end. There was almost
no legislation that even covered a psychological process for the
recovery or rehabilitation of crime victims. The few laws that made
mention of a rehabilitative process never even provided for any
substantial explication or categorical explanation or a clear chart
for the recovery of a person traumatized or harmed by some criminal
offense. It has always been the criminal justice system that has
been utilized as a silver bullet to crime or wrongful action without
exploring the larger consequential repercussions or implications of
such acts on the mental and psychological health of the victim and
providing for the victim’s well-being and recovery.
Psychosocial recovery is an
urgent need of child victims, more than retribution and penalization
of criminal perpetrators. Albeit it is conceded that the recovery
process of child victims is faster whenever the victim has been
publicly validated in his or her instinctive recognition in the
wrongness or intrinsic evil of an act committed against the
child’s person, the criminal justice system is not the panacea to
the victimized child’s recovery. Legislators should already start
addressing more substantial issues on victim recovery and
rehabilitation; provide more programs and procedures for their
restoration with corresponding budget clauses other than the
punitive sanctions.
The traditional perspective,
embodied in the Child and Youth Welfare Code of 1974, recognized
forms of abuse and violence on a child as a mere act of negligence
or neglect. But abuse is not just neglect. Neglect comprises an
omission of fundamental responsibilities owing the children as a
result of their having been born. When parents do not provide enough
food for the children—that is neglect. When parents do not send
their children to school or even when they send their children to
school, they fail to monitor the child’s educational
progress—that is neglect. When parents do not provide their
salaries for the children’s basic sustenance even as the parents
have enough money for vices—that is neglect. Abuse is an act of
commission, an act of aggression, an assault on the physical
integrity or mental integrity of the child. It is not just an
omission.
When the Anti-Child Abuse Law of
1992 (RA 7610) was approved, it declared special protection and
crisis intervention for children, and criminal sanctions for
perpetrators. It provided multifarious definitions of various forms
of child abuse. Yet there are fundamentally no special protection
measures or crisis interventions for child victims despite the
avowed state policy except for a singular provision on protective
custody by social workers. Unfortunately, social workers have been
sued with habeas corpus petitions as highly trained Family Court
judges have merely reintegrated sexually abused children with their
incestuous families, mostly promiscuous and licentious fathers and
stepfathers.
Traditional paradigms remain.
Children are still viewed as chattels of their parents so they will
continue being reintegrated by the judicial system with their
abusive parents in utter disregard of the physical dangers and
consequential destabilization of the children’s mental and
psychological well being. Laws, which claim to be pro-victim or
pro-child, have been promulgated by a thoughtless Congress. Many
penal laws have been approved: Anti-Rape Law of 1997, Rape Victim
Assistance and Protection Act of 1998, Anti-Trafficking in Persons
Act of 2003, and Anti-Violence Against Women and Their Children Act
of 2004. But these laws are mostly penal in complexion rather than
restorative and rehabilitative. These laws provide for inherent
contradictions. They might manifest the moral revulsion and societal
outrage at criminal acts perpetrated on children. Yet, in the same
breadth, they inherently fail in providing for sufficient
protection, rehabilitation, and crisis intervention of the
victimized children for their anticipated and expeditious recovery
except for the criminal accountability of the abuse perpetrator.
In reinventing possible
approaches to genuine protection of children, I formulated a
possible policy recommendation of Meaningful Human Intervention (MHI):
Intervention into the case of a child need not constitute a criminal
justice or retributive approach. It need not even be a social
welfare intervention or treatment approach. It need not be medical
or legal. Certainly, it need not be punitive and negative in
complexion. Rather, it should be positive and beneficial to the
child involved. It needs to be human, which means it will need a lot
of caring, nurturance and patience, which is not the usual
professional strategy of avowed pillars of the criminal justice
system. Being human, the intervention must be meaningful, which
means that it has to consequentially result in positive and
substantial transformation of the child involved. Legislators should
start turning their attention towards State intervention—does the
law addressing child victimization uplift or elevate the child,
rather than just punish the perpetrator? Only when there is
Meaningful Human Intervention can the law be considered adequate and
the legislator considered competent in the field of child
protection.
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