It was a good thing that Provincial Board (PB) member Arleigh Sitoy revised his earlier proposal for a shame campaign against suspected cybersex den operators.
Instead of putting up signs labelling households as “cybersex-prone”, he’s printing stickers that say “God bless this home” and “Not to cybersex” with the aim of “conscientizing” Cordova town residents.
The shame campaign was popularized in the 1990s by Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim who spray painted houses of suspected drug traffickers.
The Bureau of Internal Revenue is doing the same approach today with full-page ads to pressure tax evaders. The jury is still on whether this is effective in meeting revenue targets for the government.
Human rights groups had a field day objecting to Lim’s practice and it somehow faded into the background after being overshadowed by stories of Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte’s infamous death squads, imitations of which also found their way to Cebu City in the mid-2000s.
What Sitoy wanted to achieve in his first plan by humiliating Cordova households would qualify as online bullying in social media.
It would actually be downright libelous to label the dwelling of a private citizen as a promoter of one of the most morally reprehensible activities, which exposes miniors to online porn users, without charges filed in court first.
That campaign would have opened the Cordova municipal government to charges filed by these families.
Sitoy is frustrated at the failure to stamp out cybersex in his hometown, a problem he dealt with when he was still mayor there.
That should make him reflect on why local officials were inutile and why barangay leaders looked the other way when neighbors were finding web camera pornography an easy way to make a living.
Still, there’s no going around the fact that despite the sordid state of exploiting their young, the parents still have the right to due process and ostracizing them with snap judgements in a shame campaign is a violation of that right.
The positive sticker campaign Sitoy wants to pursue now with the assistance of his father Cordova Mayor Adelino Sitoy may be considered soft by hard-liners against crime, but it doesn’t invite any charges from the Commission on Human Rights.
Humiliating people may prove effective in driving out cybersex den operators but it doesn’t cut straight to the heart of the problem which is to stamp them out.
The lure of easy money, and the proliferation of Internet use and web cameras requires a better thought-out strategy.
Local officials need to address value transformation in the community and alternative livelihood rather than instant shame.