The Children of the Streets

​Why and how are people, who do not know about human hardship and suffering, indifferent to helping the poor and brand 12 year-old children as criminals when they are just children, get elected to high offices? The reason is likely to be that they never suffered deprivation, hunger, and abandonment. They led privileged lives of entitlement and are mostly the children of rich political dynasties that seem to reign forever.

They get elected because they have hundreds of millions of pesos to glad-hand voters. Politicians in the Philippines have dozens, some even hundreds of paid and unpaid people working on computers to influence the electorate. They do it through social media spreading fake news against their opponents to bolster their own images and to win elections.  What kind of a person is it who wants to brand a 12 year-old as a criminal? The answer is a politician who has no knowledge or interest in the social realities that drives children to survive alone or in gangs on the streets.

​To justify passing a law reducing the age of criminal responsibility to 12 years of age and to blame the children for adult crimes, they claim the children have criminal minds. The children are living on the street and “steal” food and things, small stuff, to sell and get food. No one gives them food. They really need to eat, at least once a day, which is a human right. There is no free feeding program for street children.

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