DAVAO CITY—The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) is set to launch a new government program to “rescue” street children and minors to keep them from turning into recidivists, or worse, into petty street criminals.
Director Derrick Arnold Carreon, chief information officer of PDEA, said the program would place rescued children in conflict with the law (CICL) into halfway homes called Balay Silangan reformation centers and engage them in gainful activities.
“We need to tap into the private sector, into their corporate social responsibility programs, because we need support to their education and skills training,” he told the BusinessMirror at the sidelines of the First National Anti-Drug Summit here on Sunday.
The program was already coordinated and discussed with other government agencies, including the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), which has the primary task of tending to the welfare of children and those minors engaged in criminal activities.
The program called Operation Plan Sagip Batang Lansangan/Batang Solvent would attempt to end the “continuing cycle of CICLs caught and rescued in various criminal offenses, where they are placed in halfway homes, given counseling, returned to their parents, where they live again on the streets to continue committing crimes.”
This time, parents of rescued minors would be subject to different government intervention programs, aside from being reminded that they also face criminal charges for the criminal offense that their children may commit.
Some 1,954 minors have been rescued, the police terminology for arrest on the case of children, from the period-July 1, 2016 to December 31 last year, a PDEA presentation during the summit shows. Of this number, 1,060 were categorized as pushers, 522 as “possessors” of illegal drugs, 264 as users, 97 as visitors of a drug den during an antidrug operation, six as maintainer of a drug den and three as drug den employees.
“It’s unfortunate, in the case of a raid we did in Navotas where the parents brought their children along, and where some of them actually lit and passed the shabu to the user or client,” Carreon said.
Law enforcers, he lamented, have been placed on a difficult spot “of being blamed why they did not do anything to stop this.”
“We are placed in a tight spot, being criticized why we are not able to stop this practice of parents already involving their children in these activities,” Carreon said.
The program would be implemented this month in the five districts of the National Capital Region, and would tap, in the meantime, the services of police personnel assigned in the children and women’s desks of the police stations. The PDEA would also ask the social workers assigned in the halfway homes of DSWD-maintained centers in Metro Manila.
“The Balay Silangan in Navotas is already functioning well, and we won’t have much problem there,” Carreon added.
To implement the program on a wider scale, the PDEA would need to hire persons “with the skills of handling children, like those in the children and women’s desks, the PDEA official said. Hiring of the additional personnel would be done after the Commission on Elections ban, he added.
Carreon said the program would not run into conflict with the congressional proposal amending the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act of Sen. Francis N. Pangilinan, saying the PDEA-initiated program would look into the welfare of the CICLs.
“We would not mind if this program would eventually get absorbed by a wider program on children rescued from the streets,” Carreon said.