The Visayas has been tagged as a source and transient point of child domestic labor in the country and if the increasing rate is to be the gauge, it should be a cause for alarm.

The statement said from Negrense Ma. Cecilia Flores-Oebanda, president and executive officer of the Visayas Forum Foundation Inc., yesterday at the start of the two-day Legislative Advocacy Seminar on the Rights of Child Domestic Workers being held in Bacolod City.

Citing records of the National Statistics Office, Oebanda said the Philippines currently accounts for about 4 million child laborers, including the 2 million immersed in so-called hazardous situations.

As for Negros Occidental, most cases the VFFI has been responding to are those of residents of Hinobaan town and Kabankalan City, both in the northernpart of the province.

The cases of child labor include those categorized as the worst forms of child labor such as prostitution, pyrotechnics industry, deep-sea fishing, domestic child labor, mining, and agricultural exploitation, Oebanda said.

Oebanda said some of these minors from Hinobaan and Kabankalan have been "trafficked" to various forms of child labor, some in Manila and others in Sorsogon.

Sought for reaction, Hinobaan social welfare officer Jenilyn Bagaforo told the DAILY STAR in a phone interview yesterday that they have, indeed, received complaints from the mothers of minors being recruited for work.

But the cases range only about 20 percent since we have also reprimanded those concerned. What we received are actually only among minors working as trisikad drivers, Bagoforo clarified.

As for Kabankalan, city social welfare officer Adelina Tomaro said there are only "few" cases of child labor in her city, and these are canefield minor workers.

She also said that these cases could not even be considered strictly as child labor because the children work in the farm or canefields only during weekends, thus, their studies are not disrupted.

Negros Occidental social welfare development officer Liane Garcia shares the same view. She said "children in labor" is different from "child labor," with the children being exploited in the former case, and otherwise, in the latter.

Garcia said, though, that exploitation of children is a reality that a society can not do away with.

As for Bacolod City, Councilor Jocelle Batapa-Sigue, chairperson of the Gender and Development Council, said the city government is currently coming up with a database to account for the actual number of child laborers, including those so-called commercially, sexually exploited children, with the effort to take them away from the streets.*GCT

back to top