The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : She firmly believes that a child won’t lie to get into trouble

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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

She firmly believes that a child won’t lie to get into trouble

Katrina Legarda

Katrina Legarda, representative, International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, is quite a celebrity in the Philippines. And no, it is not because she is a movie star or a politician, though she does appear on TV shows. Believe it or not, Ms. Legarda’s recognition comes from the fact that she is an advocate of women and child rights. It helped, however, that she assisted in the prosecution of a top Filipino politician, who is now serving sentence, for statutory rape of a minor girl. In Chennai recently, Ms. Legarda talks to Ramya Kannan about how it is important to believe a child talking about sexual abuse.

Worldwide, the problem is that there is underreporting of child sexual abuse, Ms. Legarda says.

The Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland in 2002 reported that one out of three women and one out of four boys suffers abuse, she adds. “It is my firm belief that a child may lie to get out of trouble and will not lie to get into trouble. Look at it this way. The child is humiliated, threatened, made to believe that no one will believe her/him. We have discovered in our work that once a child reports and you believe, the healing process begins.”

“However, conviction is up to you. If you don’t want any more victims, then you must convict,” she told a group of judges in Chennai at a meeting facilitated by Tulir CPHCSA.

Protecting a community in the first instance, she said, is only possible with a combination of awareness, education and conviction, right from the level of the lower courts.

Ms. Legarda is also quick to accept that it is not necessarily easy to convict such abusers. Her own high-profile case came to a conclusion that resulted in a conviction for the abuser, but not before the judge on the case and Ms. Legarda herself were offered bribes to call off the proceedings.

However, today, Philippines has managed to achieve a conviction rate of about 85 per cent at the lower courts itself, since the nation’s Supreme Court has ruled that the lone testimony of the child is sufficient for conviction.

“Events so conspired that we had huge support in our country, people went out of their way to help us,” she says.

In Chennai to review the multi-disciplinary training programme on child abuse being organised by the Indian Council for Child Welfare, Ms. Legarda articulated her concerns that internationally there is insufficient attention paid to the rights of children.

“Once you have signed the Child Rights Convention, then you have to follow its regulations. If you do not have a law pertaining to child rights, the international covenant is your law. If it is not being followed, someone should take the State to the international tribunals, demanding that they order the State to put in a system. I have not seen any country go to the tribunals for the child yet,” she says. “You just have to begin.”

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