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By Carlos H. Conde, Philippine Center for
Investigative Journalism
Conclusion
DAVAO CITY — In 2000 and 2001, Davao City was
adjudged the country’s “Most
Child-Friendly City” by the National Council
for the Welfare of Children, a government body under the Office of
the President.
This year, however, Davao failed to get the recognition
because of what local officials here have dismissed as negative
noises coming from child-rights groups.
The NGOs retort that they had found it ironic
that a city that tolerates the killing of minors as part of a
brutal campaign against crime would be considered
“child-friendly” at all.
Moreover, says Mae Templa, a social worker who
is also with Karapatan’s
Task Force for Women and Children, public
discussion of killings have also “glossed over the real story of
the children, why they are in the streets in the first place.”
The Davao City Local Development Plan for Children (2003-2007) says
that in
2000, Davao had 1,505 streetchildren. This
figure more than doubled the following year to 3,213. According to
the child-rights group Tambayan, most of the city’s streetchildren
belong to gangs, of which there are now some 150.
These gangs have become the bane of the city,
say the police, who blame such groups for the various crimes
committed by juveniles. But the killings of juvenile offenders have
not deterred more young people from engaging in crime. The city’s
plan for children says that the number of minors in conflict with
the law increased by 18 percent between 2000 and 2001.
The Women and Children Division of the Davao
City Police also says that between January and September this year,
749 minors committed crimes, with theft topping the number of cases
at 285. The police say the juvenile crimes constitute a majority of
the crimes committed overall during that period.
Child-rights advocates like Templa, though,
argue that in the case of these youths’ involvement in crime, they
are as much the victims. “They are for example used as drug
couriers and, in a way, the community is involved in that,” says
Templa. She adds that oftentimes, violence is just the youth
gang’s reaction to society’s neglect. “They are,” she says,
“pushed to the periphery.”
Tambayan program officer Pilgrim Guasa agrees,
saying, “Poverty pushed them to the streets, where they are
vulnerable to criminal activities, like drug use. For sure, these
children are not the ones running the drug business.
For one thing, they don’t have the capital to
do it. So they are in fact being used because they do not have
options and the necessary skills to venture outside the streets.”
According to a study done in November 2000
jointly by Tambayan, Save the Children-UK, Caritas, the Stichting
Kinderpostzegels Nederland and the United Nations Children’s Fund
(Unicef), most gang members belong to urban-poor families, and 81
percent of them are out of school due to poverty.
The study showed that 90 percent of respondents
who were minors in conflict with the law had experienced abuse at
home. The children also said they joined gangs because this is where
they find “happiness,” and their gangmates are more likely to
listen to them and understand them.
“Joining gangs is a means of support,”
confirms Templa. She explains that because the structures of
mainstream society including youth groups like the Sangguniang
Kabataan do not absorb these children, they form their own groups.
Unfortunately, she says, in cities like Davao, they usually end up
being called thugs and labeled as society’s problems. Says Templa:
“They have become the scapegoat for the community’s troubles.
That’s very unfortunate.”
Kabataan Consortium executive director Bernie
Mondragon says these youths simply lack the opportunities in life.
For example, he says, if they cannot find wholesome entertainment at
home, they would naturally gravitate to the outside world.
“I tried my best to keep my children here, in
this house,” says Clarita Alia, the 48-year-old mother of three
teenage gang members who were casualties in Davao City’s war
against crime. Nanay Clarita lives in a tiny, cramped shack in the
middle of Bankerohan, the largest public market here.
Since her husband Cornelio left the family in
1996, Nanay Clarita has been forced to work double time. For a fee,
she hauls vegetables using a wooden cart she rents for P10 a day
from the market’s tambakan to the stores that sell these. Her day
often starts as early as 2 a.m.
Nanay Clarita had eight children, six by
Cornelio, one by a previous lover and another one she adopted.
Tending to the children in such a chaotic neighborhood proved to be
a problem. And no matter what she did, the streets would beckon to
the children. “I once bought a television set so they would not be
tempted to go out to the streets,” she says. The tactic worked,
but after money problems forced Nanay Clarita to pawn the TV, so the
children went back to the streets.
Richard, the second of the Alia children, had
been an excellent dancer. “He dreamed of someday being part of a
dance group,” Nanay Clarita recalls. But dancing was not a good
enough diversion for Richard to stay off the streets. He managed to
finish Grade 4 and soon joined the aptly named Notorious Gang.
Richard had had numerous run-ins with the law.
In 2000, he was accused of stabbing another minor; he spent two
months in jail for that. The next year, he was shot and wounded
allegedly by the nephew of a traffic aide.
The shooting was apparently an act of vengeance
by the nephew, who was earlier manhandled by Richard’s younger
brother, Bobby. “Richard vowed to exact revenge against those who
shot him,” Nanay Clarita says. But he never got around doing that
and was killed on July 17, 2001.
Christopher was jailed in 1997 for rugby use,
when he was barely 12 years old. He was sent twice to a
rehabilitation center. The first time, in 2000, he escaped. Later,
he ended up in jail and was released in July 2001. On Oct. 20, 2001,
Christopher became the second Alia boy to be knifed to death.
Bobby had also been jailed, but his charge was
illegal possession of a deadly weapon. Like Christopher, he had been
placed in the rehabilitation center, from which he escaped after
three months. On Nov. 3, 2002, Bobby, too, was stabbed dead.
After Richard’s death, Bobby had joined a gang
called Emergency because he was afraid he would be targeted next.
Each time they ran into trouble, the Alia brothers would not run to
their mother for help. Instead, they would go to their gangmates.
“If not these gangs, who would defend them?” asks Nanay Clarita.
“They told me they could not be alone in the streets because they
would be easy prey.”
“I wish we still had that TV set,” she says,
crying. Yet one look at the family’s miserable shack dispels any
notion that it would be a place teenagers would want to while their
time away in, TV or no TV.
The sad truth is that, aside from the sorry
physical state of the home, there were other factors why Nanay
Clarita’s children found the streets far more appealing. Their
parents’ relationship, for instance, was one of constant
bitterness and rancor. Cornelio, a notorious slacker in Bankerohan,
would berate Nanay Clarita in front of their children, calling her
offensive names and accusing her of having affairs with other men.
Cornelio would also physically abuse her and her children. One time,
he even nearly strangled the then five-year-old Richard to death.
“My children would tell me that if their
father went ahead with his ways, they themselves would kill him,”
Nanay Clarita says. Their father finally left them, but by then it
was already too late to wean them away from the streets and the
gangs.
“I tried to make things easier for them, by
making sure that they had breakfast before going to school, by
buying them notebooks, by washing their uniforms in the middle of
the night,” says Nanay Clarita. “Each time they flunked, I would
re-enroll them but their teachers would tell me I shouldn’t do it
any more because I was just wasting my money.”
Soon, even going to school ceased to become an
option for the children. It was achievement enough that Richard made
it to Grade 4. In comparison, Christopher and Bobby managed to
finish only Grade 1.
It only took a while before the Alia boys became
notorious in Bankerohan.
“Ask any police officer in Bankerohan or the
CSU (Civilian Security Unit) and they would say that my children are
almost always the first suspects in any crime here,” Nanay Clarita
herself says. Neighbors would also accuse the children of being
thieves, sometimes physically abusing them.
Obviously, the Alias had not been beneficiaries
of the efforts of Bankerohan’s Barangay Council for the Protection
of Children (BCPC), which had been cited for “best practice” by
the Unicef in 1999 and 2000.
According to Leon Dominador Fajardo, Unicef area
focal officer for Davao City, the selection of Bankerohan’s BCPC
for “best practice” had been “mainly an initiative of the city
government.” He also explains that the selection was based on the
city government’s implementation of education and feeding programs
for Davao’s poor children.
Fajardo says that the Unicef is “definitely
concerned” about the killing of minors and had informally
expressed this concern to the city government and such agencies as
the Commission on Human Rights. He adds, “We have urged the city
government to squarely face this problem. Children in conflict with
the law have rights. We should never lose hope on them.”
When asked if it is perhaps about time that
something more than “expressing concern” was done about the
situation, Fajardo replies, “We still believe that, as far as
policies and programs for children are concerned, Davao City has
made a lot of contributions that other cities are using as a model.
It is still positive to engage with the city. It would be too hasty
and too careless to condemn the (local) government for what is going
on.”
In fairness, even child-rights advocates
recognize that Davao had the first child welfare code in the
country. It was largely because of this code, which focuses on child
protection and the establishment of programs for children, that it
was twice recognized as the “Most Child-Friendly City” by the
national government.
But the code’s good intentions and aims seem
to be lost on many local authorities, who continue to ignore the
rights of children in trouble with the law, especially if the
children happen to be poor. In a study commissioned by Save the
Children-UK, Karapatan’s Templa found that the city’s juvenile
justice system is not responsive to the needs of young offenders.
“Of the city’s 180 barangays,” observes Templa, “only one
has a special procedure for handling children in conflict with the
law.”
In focus group discussions, it also appeared
that barangays in the city exert little effort, if at all, to
protect these children. Many officials don’t even know there are
laws relevant to children, she says.
This, she adds, “indicates very low
appreciation of children’s rights. They especially don’t
appreciate the rights of children in poverty circumstances.”
“To the rest of the world, these children do
not exist,” she says. This makes them vulnerable to abuse, both by
police and criminals.”
In fact, Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte
insists it is “not true” that minors have been among the victims
of extra-judicial killings. “The problem is that I and the NGOs
operate on a different paradigm. They are concerned about human
rights. I am concerned about crime. And life is never fair. We are
not in a perfect world.”
“I don’t buy what the NGOs are saying, that
we should address first, for example, poverty,” he said in a
recent interview. “If we go into that, into a social study of
poverty, we will all be killed. What happens to society if we
individualize the situation and in the meantime crime goes
unabated?”
Guasa, for her part, says such conditioning by
the city’s leaders of the public’s perception of the problem
just makes matters worse. These days, Guasa says even some of the
mothers of the dead teenagers say their children had their gruesome
ends coming. Nanay Clarita may still be grieving for her murdered
sons, but Guasa says, “I can never forget one mother who told me
that at least she no longer has a problem because her child is
dead.”
First part
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