By Dennis D. Estopace & Oliver Samson
Part One
IT’S 12 o’clock; do you know where your children are online?
If not, don’t fret—the Philippines is renewing initiatives in a war against predators who prey on children surfing the Internet.
The worst among these lot are those in cyber pornography, according to Rosalie Dagulo of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).
“Cyber pornography is a very dangerous situation our children are into right now, because many of our countrymen, especially the parents, think this would not harm children at all,” she said.
According to Dagulo, assistant director of the Protective Services Bureau (PSB), DSWD-PSB studies and cases show that victims of child pornography are still battling the experience that is equally traumatic to a child subjected to sexual and physical abuses.
Republic Act 9775 defines child pornography as any representation, whether visual, audio and written or any combinations of these by electronic, mechanical, optical and any other means of a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual acts.
Any person found guilty of syndicated child pornography, as defined in Section 5 of this Act, shall suffer the penalty of reclusion perpetua and a fine of not less than P2 million but not more than P5 million, the law said.
Acknowledging the threat of child pornography is as real online as it is offline, a dozen government agencies teamed up with three non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in renewing initiatives for the protection of children online.
Superagency
INTERNATIONAL Telecommunications Union (ITU) data revealed that 36.24 percent of the total 96.471 million population of the country are Internet users.
According to Dagulo, the growing connectivity of people, especially children, ushered the creation and enactment of RA 9775, or the Anti-Child Pornography Act of 2009.
The law mandated the formation of the Inter-Agency Council Against Child Pornography, Dagulo said, an interagency council was formed for the fight against online pornography.
The NGOs involved in the council are the Stairway Foundation Inc. and the Philippines affiliates of the International Justice Mission (IJM) and the End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (Ecpat) International Inc.
IJM “supported the investigation of online sexual-exploitation cases and the operational support for successful rescue and entrapment operations related to cybercrime and child pornography,” Dagulo said.
In 2015 IJM Philippines provided aftercare services to 77 victims of child pornography and cybercrime, she added. The services include medical, legal assistance, education, ALS, family intervention, trauma therapy and social economic services.
The council
DOCUMENTS provided by Dagulo said the GO-NGO council includes, among its goals, the eradication of pornography. It is responsible in coordinating, monitoring and overseeing the implementation of RA 9775.
The council seeks to address child pornography with five key results areas, which include advocacy and prevention, and law enforcement and prosecution. The other KRAs are protection, recovery and reintegration of victims; establishment of a research, monitoring and management information system; and, partnership, resource generation and mobilization.
Under advocacy and prevention program, the council has developed and distributed antichild-pornography materials, Dagulo said. The materials included 12,000 copies of RA 9775 handbooks and its implementing rules and regulations. Other materials are advocacy posters and a primer on the law for local government units. Four kinds of advocacy posters were developed in 2014 and no less than 24,000 copies were produced for distribution in the different regions of the country.
“Aside from the government agencies, our major partners in implementing the law are the LGUs in the provinces and municipalities,” she said.
Cases
ACCORDING to Dagulo, the number of cases of child pornography in the Philippines is rising.
She said some 121 cases were reported to the DSWD in 2014, higher by 27 than the 94 reported cases in 2013. In 2012 reported cases rose to 84, from the previous’ years 36.
From January to September last year, the DSWD responded to a total of 129 cases, Dagulo said. We also requested the National Telecommunications Commission to block 314 sites, she added.
According to Dagulo, the Optical Media Board had confiscated in 2014 a total of 71,228 compact discs containing child-pornographic materials. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has recorded that child pornography formed 2 percent of the cybercrime cases recorded that year.
“At present, the alarming issues of child pornography locally and globally, citing a 345-percent increase in child-pornography sites from year 2001, and more than 20,000 child-pornographic images on the Internet every week,” the DOJ Office of Cybercrime (DOC) 2014 to 2015 report said. The report cited a magazine in estimating online pornography was pegged in 2005 as a $3-billion industry.
From April to December 2014, the DOJ-OOC said it was notified by the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) of 12,374 reports of child exploitation, where either the offended party or the offender is in the Philippines.
The NCMEC is a repository of reports of instances of child sexual exploitation, including child pornography, the DOJ-OOC explained.
Image credits: Erik Nelson Rodriguez/TNS