THE government’s campaign against online sexual abuse and exploitation of children (OSAEC) will get a big boost with the establishment of a National Coordination Center (NCC) exclusively tasked to run after abusers and formulate programs and policies, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said yesterday.
Justice Assistant Secretary and spokesperson Jose Dominic Clavano said the NCC held its first meeting last month.
The NCC-OSAEC is part of Republic Act No. 11930, also known as the Anti-Online Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Children (OSAEC) and Child Sexual Abuse or Exploitation Materials (CSAEM) Act, which became a law last year.
“Last December, nagkaroon ng first regular meeting sa National Coordination Center on OSAEC at doon napag usapan ang mga plano (Last December, the first regular meeting of the National Coordinating Council on OSAEC was held to talk about various plans),” Clavano said.
He said prior to the establishment of the council, the campaign against OSAEC was part of the responsibilities of the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking (IACAT).
Clavano said the NCC, though it would still be under the IACAT, would deal exclusively with OSAEC cases.
“Ang National Coordination Center ay nakatutok lang talaga sa OSAEC, dati kasi kasama lang ‘yan sa mga responsibilidad ng IACAT (The National Coordination Center is focused alone on the OSAEC issue, before it was just one of the responsibilities of IACAT),” he added.
Clavano said IACAT has transferred the records of “several hundred cases” it filed against OSAEC offenders to the NCC.
Last year, DOJ Undersecretary Nicholas Felix Ty said the department and other concerned agencies will establish a national database or registry of foreign sexual offenders as part of the overall drive to stamp out OSAEC.
Ty said there is a need for the establishment of such a database of sex offenders to protect and keep the public informed and which authorities can use to monitor and track them.
He added that aside from local law enforcement authorities, their foreign counterparts can also have accessible information about sex offenders in the country.
Earlier, Immigration Commissioner Norman Tansingco said they barred more than 150 foreign sex offenders from entering the country in 2023.
In 2022, the country’s Special Envoy to the United Nations Children’s Fund Nikki Teodoro said the Philippines has become “number one for child trafficking, and online pornography” after cases of child exploitation rose by over 280 percent.
In 2021, the DOJ reported that more than 370 OSAEC victims were rescued by authorities even amid the restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to the arrest of 74 suspected traffickers.
