NBI opens child-friendly probe room

BAGUIO CITY — The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) opened its first child-friendly provincial investigation room, supported by the United Nations International Children’s Educational Fund, here last Wednesday.

Costing P2 million, the room, according to NBI-Cordillera director Rickson Chiong, is the first of its kind outside of the NBI central office in Manila.

The one-of-a-kind studio, which revolutionizes the way the NBI investigates cases involving children, allows a social worker to talk privately to the young victim about his or her ordeal while NBI personnel records the conversation behind a one-way mirror.

Such a set-up relieves the child-victim of having to go through the traumatic experience of recounting his or her ordeal, especially during court hearings.

"We are committed to look after the physical and social welfare of our children. We are committed to take care of their spiritual, mental and psychological well-being. And we are committed to stop the widespread abuse of our children," said Chiong during the opening of the child-friendly investigation room at the basement of the NBI-Cordillera building at the corner of Session Road Extension and North Drive.

"It is about time that, aside from the members of the five pillars of justice who assist each other in the investigation, prosecution and punishment of child abusers and sex offenders in our country, we should also have facilities of this kind to minimize the trauma that these young victims have to go through after their ordeal," Chiong said.

"This facility is world-class and at par, or even better than the few other studios of its kind that I have visited or seen even in the United States and Europe," said lawyer Alberto Muyot, UNICEF project director in the Philippines, who attended the inauguration of the facility.

Muyot lamented how child abuse victims in the country and elsewhere had to undergo the ordeal of being sexually abused, narrate how they were raped to investigators, relate the same assault in the hands of their attackers to prosecutors, and then had to go through the same mental anguish again by telling this in public during the court hearings.

"Just imagine the hardship that these victims have to go through. How much more for one of them, whom I encountered before, that of a seven-month-old baby who was raped by the foreign boyfriend of her own mother," Muyot said.

NBI Director Reynaldo Wycoco noted the significance of the Baguio facility’s opening a day after the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes and two days before Valentine’s Day.