Prioritize bill penalizing corporal punishment on children, solon asks
Putting a minor inside a sack as a form of disciplinary treatment is among the common form of corporal punishment that Filipino parents impose on their child, a partylist solon said yesterday.
Bagong Henerasyon Partylist Rep. Bernadette Herrera-Dy said the death of two-year-old Kean Gabriel of Davao City would have been prevented had Congress passed a bill penalizing corporal punishment on children.
The measure was approved on third and final reading during the 16th Congress but was not enacted.
Kean Gabriel suffocated inside the sack hours after his stepfather, a certain Sonny Boy Mendoza, put him inside as punishment for being “makulit” (pesky).
Herrera-Dy strongly appealed for the prioritization of a bill penalizing corporal punishment on children, stressing that Kean Gabriel’s death presents one of the many strong arguments for the measure.
Herrera-Dy re-filed House Bill 516 or the “Positive and Non-Violent Discipline of Children Act” as she noted a “dangerous rise” in incidence of cruel punishment imposed on minors, many of them documented in the Internet.
Criminal charges were set to be filed against Mendoza and the boy’s mother, who was tagged as the suspect’s accomplice for failing to stop her husband from subjecting Kean Gabriel to “barbaric physical punishment.”
A child rights activist, Herrera-Dy said there is a strong possibility that Kean Gabriel’s life could have been saved had Congress passed the bill prohibiting adults from subjecting children to physical and mental violence that includes corporal and cruel punishment.
“Corporal punishment is very common in the Philippines. The most abusive acts were those inflicted by parents in the name of discipline,” explained Herrera-Dy.
She noted that “confinement in a sack,” aside from slapping or hitting the child, has been among the more common methods of punishment imposed by parents and other adults on an “errant” minor.
She said HB 516 proposes to strengthen the country’s laws, policies, and programs in respecting the child’s rights, human dignity, physical integrity and equal protection of law in compliance with the Philippine’s obligations to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Under the bill, corporal punishment refers to cruel and unusual punishment or act that subjects the child to indignities and other excessive chastisement or subjecting the minor to physical punishment.
Among the proposed prohibited acts are forcing the minor to kneel on stones, salt, or pebbles; squatting, deliberate neglect of child’s physical needs, imposing tasks that minor is incapable of doing, slapping, pulling hair, shaking, twisting joints, dragging or throwing a child and imprisoning or tying up the child.
HB 516 proposes as penalties the imprisonment of violators in the maximum period that is provided under Republic Act No. 7610 or the Special Protection of Children Against Child Abuse, Exploiting and Discrimination Act.