Pinoy para sa pagbabago. (Act against porno and voyeurism)

Anti-child pornography exhibit launched
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009





AN ANTI-CHILD Pornography Exhibit was launched last Monday, April 20, at the North Wing Lobby of the House of Representatives with the prime objective of prodding members of the House to pass the pending Anti-Child Pornography Act of 2009.

Spearheaded by the Psychosocial Support and Children’s Rights Resource Center (PST CRRC) and the BUHAY Party-list, the exhibit launch began with a speech from Buhay Representative Rene Velarde who emphasized that the need to pass the bill is extremely important because “child pornography leaves a very deep scar in the mind and spirit of a child.”

Featured in the exhibit was the UNICEF and PST CRRC study, Child Pornography in the Philippines which was published in 2005. The said study established child pornography as a pressing problem that affects Filipino children as evidenced by victims of pedophilia from the 1980s to the present. Child pornographic materials have been produced using camera-equipped mobile phones, digital cameras, and web cameras.

The exhibit spoke well of what Anti-Child Pornography is and the way it gradually and subtly creeps and weaves into the lives of our young children. It’s facts and figures struck minds and hearts as it stirred questions and disturbed spectators out of their comfort zones.

Unfortunately, the Anti-Child Pornography bill has been pending for over three years now as other bills deemed “important” by the Lower House have overtaken the passage of the Anti-Child Pornography Act.

The Senate has passed its version of the Anti-Child Pornography Law and is awaiting the passage of the version of the House of Representatives to hold a bicameral session for the Anti-Child Pornography Bill to be passed as a Law.

Aside from PROLIFE Phils.Foundation, Inc, the event was well-attended by Anti-Child Pornography supporters from UNICEF Manila, AKAP-BATA, other members of the HOR, and friends from the Anti-Child Pornography Alliance.

CBCP presses for passage of anti-child porn bill
03/13/2009

MANILA, Philippines - As it welcomed the action of some lawmakers on the matter, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) pushed further Friday the passage of a bill against child pornography.

CBCP Episcopal Commission on Youth executive secretary Fr. Conegundo Garganta said it is high time a strict law against those who profit at children’s expense be put in place.

"We’ve been pushing for this long time ago and it’s about time for lawmakers to take this issue so seriously," he said in an article on the CBCP website.

But Garganta admitted the CBCP is also "dismayed" because of the delayed passage of the bill.

Last November, the Senate passed on second reading its version of the anti-child pornography bill. Garganta said the House of Representatives must also do the same.

He said the government must tackle sex abuse in all its forms and crack down on those who make financial gain from exploiting the minors must be a top priority too.

"We’re getting dismayed because of the delayed passage of the bill. It seems to us that lawmakers don’t really care about this issue," he said.

Garganta said they initially expected the anti-child pornography bill would be signed into law last February, "but lawmakers disappointed us again."

He urged legislators to have the sense of urgency in discussing and passing the proposed measure that would disrupt, prosecute and seize the assets of those who profit from child sex crimes.

"We hope that they will not keep it longer because as days goes on we know that more innocent children fell as victims of this crime," he said.

Fr. Shay Cullen » The Internet: Danger to Children
PUBLISHED ON February 13, 2008

By Fr. Shay Cullen

Thousands of children are abducted, trafficked, sold to criminals and used as subjects for child sex pornography in many developing countries around the world. In Chad, the attempted trafficking of children by French traffickers using charity workers as cover were arrested, charged and convicted in a matter of weeks.Hundreds of thousands of children are sexually abused and the acts are recorded and sold over the internet. This feeds the appetites of child sex offenders putting many more children in danger of being abused. It is an insidious and evil abuse of the internet.

The travelling sex abusers prey on these vulnerable children using the internet as a sex tourist guide to the Philippine sex industry that government seems to tolerate and encourage.

The travelling sex tourists develop their evil appetites while abusing Filipino children and then go back to their own countries and abuse children all the more there. Governments of wealthy tourist sending countries ought to realise that their children are at greater risk from the Asian sex business, the more they ignore it. This is their problem too. However, business investment is apparently more important than children.

In the Philippines, the proposed anti-child pornography law ought to be declared urgent and passed swiftly. Technology makes pornography easily available. Minors and children have the ability and opportunity to access pornography and to be exposed to it. They are vulnerable and unprotected. Every time they use a computer with an unfiltered internet connection. By failing to control the Internet Server Providers (ISPs), governments are exposing children to grave abuse.

Young people are the prime targets for sexual abusers who contact and groom them over the internet and eventually try to meet, exploit and sexually abuse your child or grandchild. Every photo of a child being abused is evidence of abuse and there are millions of such photographs available on the internet. The child is violated over and over as the images are shared.

Cyber sex shops are secret dens and are connected live to paying customers through the internet. With a camera attached, they beam images of children being sexually abused. Paedophiles, thousands of miles away, can order acts of abuse of their choice. Other child sex offenders can join secret internet clubs if they submit a certain number of child pornography images to the controller. This is an incentive for them to abuse children to make such images. Police cannot infiltrate the networks and clubs because it is forbidden for them to submit such images.

Young people who access adult or child pornography on the internet can be profoundly shocked and damaged by what they see. Parents should be shocked too. Their children are being corrupted and alienated from them. Young people may imitate what they see believing it is reality.

When in fact, it is contrived and artificial. These entice young women to act out like a depraved individual in a seductive and promiscuous manner. Other advertisers sexualise children and promote dress and behaviour where the young girls are displayed as sexually provocative, docile, enslaved or submissive.

Many advertisers use women to entice men to buy their products and use sexualised minors to condition the public to accept teenage sex as acceptable. That perverse idea sells more than it seems. Models are getting younger and younger and their sexualised images sell even more products. The brandy advertisement that had the message “Did you ever taste a 15 year old?” was widely condemned and eventually removed from Philippine bill boards.

The industry group with the greatest responsibility for curbing the proliferation of child pornography over the internet are the Internet Server Providers (ISPs). Many ISPs around the world have installed filters to block these sites and a warning is sent to the people trying to access them. In Sweden, the number of people trying to get child porn over the internet dropped from 8000 to 300 a month when they were blocked by a filter and got a warning that their illegal act was being monitored. Customers should only subscribe to an ISP that has filters blocking child porn. Protecting children is their first obligation of responsible corporation not making money and our responsibility is to see every ISP has a blocking filter to protect children.