Short answer. Yes. The article on exploitation of minors punishes any person who causes a boy or girl under sixteen to perform any dangerous feat of balancing, physical strength, or contortion. No employment, payment or audience is required — causing the child to do it is enough.
What the law says
Any person who shall cause any boy or girl under sixteen (16) years of age to perform any dangerous feat of balancing, physical strength, or contortion.
Revised Penal Code, Article 278 — Exploitation Of Minors. Read the full provision →
The first paragraph is deliberately wide
Art. 278 opens with any person who shall cause any boy or girl under sixteen (16) years of age to perform any dangerous feat of balancing, physical strength, or contortion. Every one of those broad words matters. Any person, so no particular relationship to the child is needed. Cause, so arranging or directing it is enough without doing anything yourself. And the paragraph says nothing about payment, a show, or a crowd. The elements are the child's age and the dangerous character of what the child was made to do.
The paragraphs aimed at the performing trades
The article then turns to people in particular callings — acrobats, gymnasts, rope-walkers, divers, wild-animal tamers, circus managers and those in similar occupations. Such a person may not employ children under sixteen in exhibitions of those kinds where the children are not his own children or descendants. A further paragraph closes the gap that would otherwise leave, by reaching a person in those same callings who employs his own descendant under twelve years of age in such dangerous exhibitions. The trade is regulated on top of the general prohibition, not instead of it.
Handing a child over to that world
A fourth paragraph reaches the ascendant, guardian, teacher or other person entrusted with the care of a child under sixteen who delivers the child gratuitously to someone following one of those callings, or to a habitual vagrant or beggar. Where the delivery was made for a price, compensation or promise, the article directs that the penalty be imposed in its maximum period. A guardian or curator convicted is also removed from that office. So the person who supplies the child is treated as an offender in his own right, not merely as a witness to somebody else's.
What else is likely to be in play
Two practical points. The fines in this article, like peso figures throughout the Code, were revised by later legislation, so the amounts printed in older copies are not the current ones. More importantly, separate statutes on child protection and on child labour cover much of this same ground and can carry heavier consequences, so this article is unlikely to be the only provision considered. Whether a particular feat is dangerous, and the child's age at the time, are the factual questions everything else follows from.
Related provisions
- Revised Penal Code, Article 277 — Abandonment Of Minor By Custodian
- Revised Penal Code, Article 278 — Exploitation Of Minors