GAINING momentum in the fight for the promotion and protection of Filipino children’s rights is the campaign for the passage of a proposed law that specifically prohibits, defines and imposes penalties for acts of child pornography. 

 

 

 

 

 

CALL FOR AN ANTI-CHILD PORNOGRAPHY LAW IN THE PHILIPPINES
Stairway Foundation, Inc

31 May 2009, Puerto Galera, Philippines--GAINING momentum in the fight for the promotion and protection of Filipino children’s rights is the campaign for the passage of a proposed law that specifically prohibits, defines and imposes penalties for acts of child pornography.

The proposed law follows the Philippine commitment to implement salient provisions of the Convention on the Right of the Child (CRC), including the CRC Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. Signing the optional protocol in 2003, the Philippines was expected to have implemented the Optional Protocol within two years. It is now 2009.

 
About the proposed law

Dubbed as the Anti-Child Pornography Act of 2009, several versions of the bill were introduced in both the upper and lower houses of the Philippine congress in 2007. The senate version, SBN 2317-- already a combination of several bills filed by Senators M.A. “Jamby” Madrigal, Francis “Chiz” Escudero, Miriam Santiago, Manny Villar and Jinggoy Ejercito-Estrada--  has been unanimously approved by legislators on the 24^th of May 2009. The lower house version, however, is currently pending at the House Committee on Appropriations. Once the lower house ‘okays’ the bill, it moves on to the bicameral conference committee for approval before being signed by the Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

The proposed law defines child pornography as “any  visual,  written  material  or  audio  representation,  whether  or  not  it  is  made  by  electronic or  mechanical means, or an actual presentation of  a child” who is “engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activity” and/or “showing  his  or  her  sexual  parts  or  anal  region,  the  dominant characteristic of which depicts a sexual purpose.”

The proposed law encompasses both traditional and new media such as “visual, written material or audio representation” in the form of “writings and pictures, books, magazines, billboards, tabloids, comics, posters, cards, calendars, decals, stickers, paintings, photographs, television shows, motion pictures, computer graphics” and others. The law also specifically includes information technology media such as mobile phones and the internet.

It covers actual presentations of child pornography by defining it as the “live performance or showing of  a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activity, or the depiction, for a sexual purpose, of  the sexual parts  or anal region of the child.”

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) surface as legally liable in implementing the law by committing them notify the Philippine National Police or the National Bureau of Investigations about child pornography acts committed through their servers or facility. ISPs are also required to “install available technology, program or software” that will block or filter child pornography.

Lead agencies to implement the proposed law are the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), the Philippine National Police (PNP) Women and Children’s Desk.

"The ten-day campaign for the passage of the law

From 27th of May to 5th of June 2009, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) leads a ten-day campaign that calls for the immediate passage of the proposed law before the 2010 elections.  Participating organizations have prepared several activities to heat up the nationwide campaign—media and public conferences in various parts of the country, youth forum in Manila, fun run in Fort Bonifacio, signature campaign and online petition, photo exhibits, a youth serenade in congress, discussions with internet café owners in Cebu, candle lighting ceremony at the centennial park in Davao, and the world premiere of an animation film on child pornography and child sex trafficking."

Stairway Foundation’s “Red Leaves Falling”

Putting emphasis on the role of global citizens in the fight to end child pornography and child sex trafficking, Stairway Foundation has produced an animation about two sisters who were victimized by a child sex trafficking syndicate. Trapped and helpless, they were thrown in a dark brothel and used in online child pornography. The animation crucially points out the role of online users of child pornography material in the continuous victimization of children. “Every click to a child pornography child adds up to the millions of DEMAND for children in pornography. This demand fuels child pornography and child sex trafficking syndicates to find more children to exploit,” Stairway executive director Lars Jorgensen exclaims.

Red Leaves Falling premieres on 2^nd of June 2009 at the Carlos P. Romulo Theater at RCBC Plaza in Makati City, Philippines.

Related link:

“Pornography Statistics,” 2006 Family Safe Media http://www.familysafemedia.com/pornography_statistics.html

The site provides world statistics on online child pornography. Although created in 2006, it provides a wide glimpse of child pornography as a multi-billion dollar business that encompasses the earnings of top technology companies combined: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink.