Officials running a local government facility in Manila that is supposed to shelter and nurture street children are now under fire for acts of negligence. Observers likened the place to a \u201chell hole.\u201d<\/p>\n
To stress just how bad things are at the Manila Reception and Action Center<\/strong> (RAC), welfare advocates wrote incumbent Mayor Joseph Estrada for the third time last month. This time, they enclosed a photo of \u201cFrederico,\u201d one of the wards, showing the naked boy lying on the pavement, reduced to skin and bones.<\/p>\n Frederico\u2019s appalling condition showed the absence of care that children like him had been receiving.<\/p>\n Operated by the Manila Social Welfare Department (MSWD), the RAC was established some 30 years ago as a place where the police or village watchmen can bring child vagrants and beggars. It occupies a cluster of buildings built in the 1930s.<\/p>\n In February, a month before Frederico arrived at the RAC, the Manila-based NGO sent the first of a series of letters to Mayor Joseph Estrada and MSWD chief Shiela Marie Lacuna-Pangan, raising its concerns.<\/p>\n The letter, signed by Bahay Tuluyan Executive Director Lily Flordelis, called on the officials to improve the conditions at the RAC\u2014or just close the place down if they could not do it.<\/p>\n Estrada\u2019s reaction to the ghastly reports about the misery and maltreatment going on in a youth rehabilitation center funded and operated by his administration was mere nonchalance and a lack of urgency. Estrada was quoted as saying that he had \u201creprimanded the head of the MSWD and RAC for this\u2026 They said they did not mean to neglect the child (Frederico) and that this is an isolated case. I have ordered the MSWD to improve the treatment of children there. This won\u2019t be repeated. If it happens again, heads will roll.\u201d<\/p>\n The criminal neglect in the center that has led to the death of a boy and the starvation of another one to a state that has evoked comparisons to concentration-camp conditions requires more than a perfunctory reprimand. If heads should roll, it should have happened long ago, when the Manila city government\u2019s attention was first called to the alarming case of institutional child abuse in its midst. (Inquirer.net)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Officials running a local government facility in Manila that is supposed to shelter and nurture street children are now under fire for acts of negligence. Observers likened the place to a \u201chell hole.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3464"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}