PHILIPPINES
Catholic Online
By Abigail James (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
1/14/2015
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)
Filipino children are being ‘rescued’ from the streets only to be forced into cold, cemented, jail cells. With Pope Francis’ visit to the Philippines happening this week, police have started to round up homeless orphans in an effort to make the poverty-stricken city appear more presentable.
LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) – “Street children as young as five are being caged in brutal detention centers alongside adult criminals in a cynical drive to smarten up the Philippines capital,” explained Daily Mail.
Disregarding their own Filipino child protection laws, the locked-up children are placed in filthy detention centers, where they sleep on the cold concrete floors, use buckets as toilets, get physically abused by older inmates, are nearly starved and in some cases, chained up to the pillars.
Adult inmates are kept in a pen directly next to the cell holding boys and girls; they freely pass back and forth through the compounds during certain times of the day and abuse the children.
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