BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
ONLY ONE Catholic priest is in jail while on trial for rape and sexual assault — in Cagayan. He is charged with multiple counts of rape and sexual assault involving a 15-year-old choir girl in 2022. Bail was not approved. The priest admitted the sex acts committed in a hotel in Tuguegarao but said it was consensual. But it emerged that the priest had videotaped those acts and was blackmailing the girl not to reveal the abuse. Church authorities offered the teenager a scholarship if she would drop her complaint, but she refused.
It is obvious there can be no consent by a child under such emotional stress and fear by a person in authority and ascendancy. There is no speedy justice. Court hearings are spaced so far apart that they would continue until 2025. That’s why we need a law establishing children’s courts; family courts are unable to cope.
The Department of Justice declared that Filipinos who set up online child rape shows for foreigners, like those for 59-year-old French pedophile Bouhalem Bouchiba, will be brought to justice. That’s more empty promises. Law enforcement agencies have failed to detect thousands of livestreaming shows of child sexual abuse, and Bouchiba’s case is evidence of that.
When it comes to online child abuse, the greater sinners are the stockholders and management of telecommunications corporations like PLDT, Globe Telecom and DITO. They have a history of noncompliance and non-implementation of Republic Act 11930, or the Anti-Online Sexual Abuse or Exploitation of Children and Anti-Child Sexual Abuse or Exploitation Materials Act. Since 2009, they have been mandated to install software to block images and livestreaming of child abuse and identify and report the abusers to the authorities.
Bouchiba’s case powerfully proves that these firms don’t block child sex shows, flout the law and go unpunished. They can switch off the internet and start a revolt. They are the most dangerous potential subversives of all. No prosecutor would dare challenge them for noncompliance.
There are thousands of Filipino child abuse victims who are pushed aside, unhealed, helpless and get no justice. Their suffering is ignored by a government that does not provide safe and protective healing centers for them. That is the challenge that Congress must meet. We need a law establishing such professionally run healing homes.
The only way forward is to stand with the child victims every time, bring the perpetrators to justice and win convictions. The empowered young survivors at the Preda Foundation’s homes win an average of 20 convictions a year.
Implementing the law and convicting pedophiles will save many children and rebuild the tarnished reputation of society and the institutional Church, and both can end the sinful toleration of pedophile priests once and for all./PN
