A prayer for children

I believe one sector that government should focus on are the disadvantaged children. Lately I was sad to read the news that minors are being recruited as soldiers by the Moro rebels and the New People’s Army as well. This means they are being trained to use arms and to fight the government. In another report by a human rights group, we learned that seven percent of the victims of extrajudicial killings in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao are children.

I really feel so bad for innocent children who become victims of poverty, violence and domestic abuse. From my car, not only once have I seen little girls pushing caritons, vending sampaguitas in the rain or scavenging. Small babies are carried by beggars, who are most of the time not their own mothers, and made to bear the heat of the sun to move people to give more alms. The parents themselves push their children at a young age to help earn income for the family. It is not surprising therefore that there are reportedly 20,000 child prostitutes, four million child laborers with 2.4 million working under hazardous conditions and 1.5 million streetchildren. As if this is not enough, we learn of children being kidnapped or even sold by their impoverished parents and their organs extracted and sold in illegal markets abroad.

The effect of the abnormal situation that children of young age are made to go through is no less than traumatic. With most of them not having the benefit of education, they are doomed to a life of vagrancy, prostitution, physical disability and sickness due to exposure to hazards in the course of their work.

The efforts of certain government agencies like the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), the Department of Labor (DOLE) and non-government organizations like the Council for the Welfare of Children, Bantay Bata Foundation, the Virlanie Foundation to name a few, in monitoring the plight of these young victims, and giving them protection and help, seems inadequate to completely remove children from the streets, the hazardous working circumstances; from exploitation, abuse and violence. In fact, the numbers are increasing. This will continue as long as families languish in poverty and want.

My heart goes out to the silent and helpless victims of our society — the children. Innocent and young as they are, they deserve the utmost respect as human beings, most of all from their own parents and families. In their tender years, they should enjoy youthful mirth at play with their peers and educated with the basic values so that they will become responsible members of society in the future.

In the West, the patron saint of children is St. Nicholas. Devotion to him rescues children from calamity and returns them to the care and keeping of their families. May he give our disadvantaged children a miracle and relief from trouble and despair. May they fulfil the hope of this generation for a better future.