THE CORONAVIRUS is a perfect simile for the crimes of child sexual abuse. Child abuse is a secret crime hardly ever seen or detected. Abusers change their methods of hiding and covering up their crimes, especially in institutions.
Schools, colleges, and churches have almost perfected the art of cover-up of child abuse criminal behavior.
Most people in society do not recognize that it is everywhere and children are silent suffering victims. When it is suspected or detected, many people turn away. They do not reach out to the child victim, no matter how many symptoms of child abuse the child has.
Teachers, parents, duty bearers, and child care workers have to be taught to recognize the symptoms of child sexual abuse and be open to listening to every child that appears troubled, unruly, disturbed, rebellious and those that withdraw, stop studying, remain silent and stop playing.
Everybody must have commitment and conviction that they must act to help a child get help and report the abuse to the authorities. They can, in confidence, contact Preda home for abused children.
Help is available for boys who are victims of online sexual abuse who are being referred there for protection, healing and empowerment so they can recover and testify in court and get justice. Online abuse is mostly done by relatives of the children. The acts are videotaped, photographed, or sent live over the Internet to the rich pedophiles getting sexual gratification from the child abuse.
It is allowed, permitted, and enabled by the morally bankrupt, uncaring, and allegedly a few depraved executives of the telecommunication corporations. It is shameful for any Filipino to be employed by them these days. They refuse to obey the law (RA 9775) that mandates they install filtering or blocking software to prevent abusive images from passing through their Internet Service Providers. We survive in a corrupt society and must help the child victims survive.
A few years ago some horrific cases involved an 11-year-old girl horribly abused by foreign pedophiles, a Swiss and a UK national. They paid for the young boys seven and 10 to be sexually exploited online by their mothers.
I had hoped the legal officers at the Swiss Embassy and the UK Embassy would take an active role in helping us get justice for the victims and bring their nationals to justice. They can get the testimonies of the victims in the care of the Preda Foundation.
An average of 16 children at the Preda homes get their abusers convicted every year to life in prison.
How wonderful it would be if the foreign embassies and their attached law enforcers could investigate their abusive nationals and get convictions, too, and stop their pedophiles raping our Filipino children.
The question is how much do they really care?
The greed for money and the insatiable demand by the rich foreign pervert pedophiles are behind the sexual abuse of thousands of Filipino children. German police found as many as 30,000 pedophiles accessing child sexual abuse materials online and identified 70 of them, many connected to the Philippines. (To be continued)/PN
