Youngest Pinoy kids endure most of violent discipline - UNICEF

Three out of five FIlipino children within ages three to nine were subject to violent disciplinary actions, while two out of five children ages one to two endure similar circumstances, according to the newest data from a United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) situationer October release.

“Even the youngest are not spared from violent discipline,” the UNICEF report says, underlining that children, even at tender ages, face situations that can disrupt their development and well-being.

Violent discipline is any physical violence or aggression inflicted to children, exposing them to harm and other long-term effects on behavior and mental health, as defined by the UNICEF.

The Situation Analysis of Children in the Philippines (SitAn) also reported that overall, 58.8 per cent or at least 23 million of children and adolescents comprised of ages 1 to 14 in  the Philippines experienced forms of violent disciplining in 2022.

Of these figures, more than 50 percent of violent disciplining cases involved physical aggression, at least 40 percent are of physical punishment, and 3.4 percent represented severe forms of punishment inflicted on children.

UNICEF also stressed that any instance of violence against children is unjustifiable, also noting the issues of underreporting, saying current figures may only represent a fraction of the actual cases.

“Any instance of violence or harmful practice against children … regardless of its severity, is one instance too many. Given the limited information and challenges in reporting and monitoring such cases, it is likely that these numbers provide only small glimpse of the true magnitude of children that go through each ordeal,” the agency said.

The SitAn is a joint report by the UNICEF, the Philippine Statistics Authority, the National Economic and Development Authority, and the Council for the Welfare of Children, which consolidates recent data and insights to assess both progress and challenges in protecting and promoting children's rights in the Philippines.

The situationer also tackled further on issues of child abuse, primarily sexual assault and exploitation, child labor, bullying, domestic violence, and child marriage in the Philippines during the recent years.

According to UNICEF, child abuse cases are at a continual rise as around 7,000 cases of child abuse reported from from January to August 2024 is on track to breach the 10,270 child abuse cases recorded in 2023.

The agency also underscored the alarming rate of 7 out of 10 of these cases were sexual in nature, in addition to nearly half a million FIlipino children estimated to have been trafficked to produce exploitation materials in 2022.

Online sexual abuse exploitation (OSAEC) cases among Filipino children also saw a rapid increase between 2019 to 2021, with another study stating 20 per cent of internet-using adolescents experienced grave OSAEC in 2021.

UNICEF stated that the data on OSAEC reinforces the key finding of an earlier study by the agency in 2016 deeming the Philippines as the “global epicenter of live-stream sexual abuse trade”.

Cases of bullying also slightly improved from 4 down to 3 out of 5 Filipino students from 2018 to 2022.

Still, the Philippines has the highest rate of bullying among 80 countries who participated in the 2022 study by the Programme for International Student Assessment.

Violence toward adolescent girls age 15 to 19 has dropped but continue to persist as data shows 1 out of 10 teenagers experienced sexual violence, with 2 out of 10 ever-partnered girls endured violence from a partner, mainly through emotional or psychological means.

In terms of child marriage across the country, around 460,000 Filipina teens had married before reaching legal age, with some 73,000 who had done so even before their fifteenth birthday.

Data also reported that more or less 60% of ‘child workers’ engaged in ‘hazardous, exploitative, unhealthy, or unsafe’ work  from the total of 1.48 million working Filipino children in 2022, a number  that has steadily increased since 2020.