Eleven-year-old Jerry’s crime was breaking curfew laws after fleeing violence at home. His punishment? Being sent to a youth detention center, where he says that he endured sexual abuse.
Officially called “Houses of Hope,” proponents in the Philippines say that such facilities are places for reformation and education, but critics slam many of them as “hellholes” where children are treated like caged animals.
Rights groups say Jerry should never have been detained under current laws, but warn that a proposed bill to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 12 would mean that thousands more children would be sent to overcrowded and underfunded centers — leaving them vulnerable to mistreatment.
Photo: AFP
“I felt so dirty. That was the first time it happened to me,” Jerry said, as he recalled the night that he was pulled from his bed, forced to the bathroom and attacked by older boys also held at a decaying center in Manila.
“I cannot forget the sexual abuse,” he said, adding that he left home to escape beatings from his father and ended up sleeping on the streets. His mother works in Kuwait.
Under existing law, Houses of Hope are primarily to hold young offenders aged 15 to 18, but charities say that younger vulnerable children from troubled homes, like Jerry, are sometimes swept up in the dragnet, even for minor misdemeanors, and struggle to recover from the experience.
Watchdogs and former wards warn that planned legislation to criminalize children as young as 12 and then detain them with older teens, and in some cases adults, would put those least able to defend themselves at risk.
“There is a higher potential for abuse because the government is not prepared,” Melanie Ramos-Llana of Child Rights Network Philippines said.
“You put more children into Houses of Hope, which are not equipped, lack personnel and programs, and you will have problems. Jails or detention centers are not places for children,” she said.
Mixing youngsters who have committed minor infringements with older criminals could create a “school of crime,” said Louise Suamen, a youth advocate with the Bahay Tuluyan Foundation.
“If you are a child subjected to this environment, you can learn violence or abusive behavior,” Suamen said.
A bill to give authorities the power to prosecute younger children stalled in the session of the legislature that wrapped up last month, but it is a key plank of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s tough-on-crime stance.
After sweeping May’s midterm polls, Duterte’s allies dominate the Philippine Congress and have vowed to advance his agenda in the session that opened yesterday.
However, critics insist that conditions in many of the facilities are identical to or worse than the jails that adults are sent to.
“Children are detained in these so-called ‘Houses of Hope’ like animals in cages,” said Father Shay Cullen, president of the PREDA Foundation, which helps boys like Jerry. “These are really hellholes of subhuman conditions.”
Children previously held in the system, including Jerry, said that they suffered abuse in youth centers. All the boys are identified using a pseudonym because they are minors or were when held.
Justin, who was 17 when he was brought to a youth center in the capital in 2017, said that other boys beat him on the pretext that he had broken house rules.
“They would punch us in the chest, stomach and sometimes the chin. It was so painful. I learned to be callous there because of what they did to me,” he said.
There are 55 government-run Houses of Hope nationwide, but this is well short of the 114 that the government has estimated that it needs to properly house troubled juveniles.
According to official data, only eight comply with social welfare rules. These guidelines include having one social worker for every 25 children and providing one bed per resident, along with nutritious meals, clothing, toiletries and rehabilitation programs.
“Some of the Houses of Hope that we saw were worse than prisons. They have no programs,” Philippine Juvenile Justice and Welfare Council Executive Director Tricia Oco told a Philippine Senate inquiry in January.
Tristan, 15, was relieved when he was transferred to a House of Hope in Manila after being held in an adult jail on a drug trafficking charge that he said police fabricated.
“I thought it would be a lovely home, but it was a prison,” he said.
Nathan Andres, 21, who was detained as a juvenile for rape, said that targeting 12-year-olds is not the answer.
“We are like the flowers we craft from old papers,” he added. “People think we are garbage, useless, but actually we still have value.”
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