Leaders of the House of Representatives have sought a congressional probe on the “alarming” situation of online sexual exploitation of children in the country.
Tingog Sinirangan partylist Rep. Yedda Marie Romualdez, chairperson of the House Committee on the Welfare of Children, and House Majority Leader and Leyte Rep. Martin Romualdez, led the filing of House Resolution No. 1336 to look into the surge of OSEC cases in the country.
“There is a need for the House of Representatives to exercise its oversight mandate to investigate the rising incidence of OSEC in the country, look into the quality of policy implementation, and review existing and related laws to keep up with the complexity of OSEC,” they said.
Under HR No. 1336, the Romualdez couple urged the House Committee on the Welfare of Children and other appropriate House committees immediately conduct an investigation on the increasing OSEC cases in the Philippines, including its prevalence during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.
“The full scale of the OSEC situation is still unknown, but the Philippines has been described as the global epicenter of the OSEC trade,” they lamented.
Deputy Majority Leader and Pangasinan Rep. Christoper de Venecia, chairperson of the House Committee on Creative Industry and Performing Arts, also joined the Romualdezes in filing HR No. 1336.
Citing the data from Department of Justice-Office of Cybercrime, the House leaders noted that in 2018, at least 600,000 child sexual abuse materials from the Philippines were shared and sold online, marking a 1,300-percent increase from the previous year.
“Sexual predators and OSEC facilitators rarely get convicted. Out of the thousands of cyber tips received by the DoJ-OCC in 2017, the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking only reported 32 cyber trafficking convictions,” they stressed.
The Romualdez couple and De Venecia attributed the surge of OSEC cases in the country to a variety of factors such as poverty, cheap Internet and smartphones, easy Internet access, and lack of built-in safeguards or security mechanisms in social media platforms and other digital applications.