CBCP supports anti-child pornography campaign

You might as well call it the slaughter of the innocents. Getting children to star in pornographic videos is like killing them — not softly — but brutally. You kill their hopes, their dreams, their tomorrow.

And the shocking thing is, it’s being done, right here, right now, in a massive, open scale. You see videos selling child porn in a Makati mall, even, as Optical Media Board (OMB) chair Edu Manzano says, in a bus where children are among the passengers.

These damaging videos, some with the blessings of able-bodied parents themselves — are then sold and shipped abroad to a foreign-based worldwide distributor. And so, our Pinoy children suffer indignities for all the world to see and feast on.

Enough? Not quite. Photos of nude boys are forwarded from one mobile phone to another — a child pornographer’s client, that is. Look ma, no motel rooms to raid. Just a secret location that could turn out to be a child pornographer’s bedroom.

The mere thought of these despicable acts so disturbed Edu he called MTRCB (Movie and Television Review and Classification Board) chair Marissa Laguardia and cried for help. Another alarmed soul, CBCP’s (Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines) Monsignor Pedro Quiterio, couldn’t stand it, too. So he led the inter-faith rally against child pornography with Edu not so long ago.

“The phenomenon is getting bigger. It’s evil itself,” he warned.

And so he is leading a campaign against child pornography in every parish.

Laguardia wants to be counted, too. She appreciates Edu’s efforts in calling her up.

“It’s our moral obligation to take care of the children and not make them work in a hateful way through sex,” she says.

Lawyer Eric Mallonga, founder of the Child Justice League, says child pornographers and parents of those who allow their kids to be exploited this way, have a lot of answering to do before the law.

They can be charged of violating the child labor law, because child pornographer, states Mallonga, is a form of illegal employment.

Child pornographers also violate the anti-trafficking act and the child abuse law, he adds.

Parents who close their eyes and actually allow their children to star in child porn videos, stand a big chance of losing authority over their children under the family court system. Granting these parents are poor. Poverty is still no excuse to exploit children. How else can you respect parents who refuse to work and exploit their little ones like so?

Such parents deserve to be stripped of their authority over their children, and the little ones handed over to a foster family that can give them the right moral values instead, adds Mallonga.

The OMB, for its part, is giving a financial reward for those who give them information on the whereabouts of child pornographers, and optical media pirates as well.

All they need do, according to Edu, is call 925-5007 and 925-5003 and his team will come over and deal with the problem..

It’s a long, uphill battle. But it’s a battle worth fighting to the finish. It may sound trite, but it can’t be said often enough. Our children are our future. They deserve only the best we can give.