BY SHAY CULLEN
(Continued from April 10-11, 2021)
THE street children like Angelico live in constant stress, anxiety and fear of capture and abuse. They develop mental health conditions that few people know or care about. They are the throwaway children, considered useless to society, being illiterate, diseased, malnourished and suspected of having “criminal minds” like stealing a banana or bread to survive the bitter pangs of hunger. The real criminals are corrupt authorities who abuse them and ignore their plight as they live and die on the garbage dumps and in the sewers.
The neighborhood informal police (barangay tanod) see the street children as pests, thieves and potential criminals and harass, arrest and jail them in youth detention centers to await trial. Many are detained without charges but held behind bars as young as 10 on suspicion of breaking curfew hours. That’s when they run away from the sex abuse and beating in their family homes and hide out in the market and back alleys. That’s when they are offered food and shelter by human traffickers and pimps who hold them in another kind of captivity for sexual abuse.
How can they not be on the streets at night when they have no homes? The authorities frequently arrest the children with trumped up charges, like curfew-breaking or being couriers or delivery boys for drug pushers and jail them in the Bahay Pag-asa, houses known as house of hopelessness. Inside, they suffer beatings, sexual abuse and torture as documented by the Philippine Commission on Human Rights.
Many of the estimated 250,000 homeless street children and many more uncounted, among the 4.5 million homeless people in a population of 110 million, live like garbage to be thrown away as if they were not human beings and children and people with rights and human dignity. Their rights are being violated every day by authorities that are supposed to protect and help them.
Angelico survived by his resilience and conviction that he was a good boy and somehow, he made his way back to the provincial town to his adoptive parents and after an emotional encounter they accepted him for a while. But the relationship had been broken. They could not live together and Angelico went out to live and survive on his own again in the market which is no easy life.
The authorities in the provincial town are more caring than those in the city and they found Angelico and brought him to the Preda Foundation home for boys where he was accepted and given welcome, affirmation, kindness and understanding in a family that have shared his hardship and rejection. He is now happy, is studying, having therapy, learning practical skills in vocational training and enjoying freedom from fear, hunger and want. He does art, plays games and basketball .He has found a happy childhood with many others. Angelico’s adoptive parents have come to visit and family therapy is on-going, a happier future is now possible. (www.preda.org)/PN
