Kids behind bars

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Hazel Thompsons photographs of jailed Filipino children are so arresting that it is no surprise they won this years Observer Hodge Photographic Award (and are on display at the Newsroom in Farringdon Road).

There are only a handful of pictures, but if they help arouse public opinion against the estimated 20,000 children who see the inside of a jail every year in The Philippines, or the one million children currently imprisoned illegally in jails across the world, they will have performed an important job.

Thompson gained entry to four prisons by pretending to work for the Jubilee Campaign, a British NGO. The first time I went into an overcrowded cell, I gasped, she admits.

She says the pictures speak for themselves, but thats not really true. To get the full horror of the situation, you need to know that boys as young as nine, arrested for crimes as trivial as stealing a pair of flip-flops, are thrown into the same cells as hardened adult criminals, including paedophiles.

In one jail, measuring 1 metre by 5 metres, I found two children among the 13 people in this tiny, inhumane space, crammed in like animals, she says.

I saw children detained in overcrowded prisons and inhabitable conditions. In flooded and damp cells, with little light and stifling heat and no fresh air, the children's health is being affected. Many of the children I saw had skin conditions after being months, even years in these conditions.

The youngsters, she adds, are subject to sexual abuse by the guards: others sleep on the concrete floor. Diseases spread quickly and the children are most vulnerable. They are weak and malnourished with their daily food allowance being only P33 (approx 30p). Enduring intense heat, lack of ventilation, little exercise or recreation, having to lean or squat on the floor 24 hours a day brings depression, despair and causes mental and physical breakdown. They live in fear of bullying and beatings by guards and inmates.

The Philippines is just one country among many where such abuses occur. In some countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus was told earlier this month, streetchildren and kids who have been abandoned or driven out on suspicion of being witches or possessed by evil spirits, end up in prison: there they suffer physical abuse, neglect, malnourishment and extortion by police or guards.

Child imprisonment is one of the great moral evils of our time, Representative Todd Akin told the hearing.

Chris Rogers, whose ITV programme on under-age prisoners in The Philippines was also screened earlier this year, spoke at the Washington briefing. This is part of his testimony:

In another jail we found 10-year-old Karim, accused of stealing flip-flops. At first, the prison warden wouldn't let us into the open cell where Karim was being held; even he didn't want to go in there. He said our lives would be at risk because Karim was sharing the cell with rapists, murders and alleged terrorists.

In another city jail we discovered 45 young boys sharing a cell with what appeared to be two adult men and a woman. Some of the boys looked traumatised, sitting in silence and staring into the air, lifeless, perhaps disturbed. One of them pointed to the woman and said to me, He is dangerous. I said, He? Don't you mean she? No, he, the boy replied. The transvestite giggled as he told us he had a special relationship with the boys.

One of the men dragged a young boy out of a wooden box attached to the wall. These are known as privacy boxes; in other words, they are used for sexual privacy. Today those boys are still there, sharing their cell with sexual offenders. The prison insists that it is an important part of a sexual offender's rehabilitation to have responsibility over minors.

* Jubilee Action, runs a campaign called Kids Behind Bars. A report, Kids behind bars: WHY WE MUST ACT, details the plight of imprisoned children in 15 different countries.

* Hazel Thompson's website

* Observer Hodge Award