Each and every one of our lives is different. We don’t have the same dreams, the same quirks, the same failures and the same tests. Some have it more while some suffer most. Corazon Aquino believed that there was a quota of suffering, a certain cap to the hardships one must go through before the full fruition of life, but sadly the former president discovered that such quota did not exist. She was stricken with colon cancer and died in pain. Such is the way of life, a succession of tests, a constant reminder that difficulties are there. But one would be left to wonder, what sin would deserve a punishment so harsh, so brutal?
That was my question. I am normally apathetic, oblivious to the different hardships of life, maybe because I had to go through more than others would normally experience or maybe because I had been hardened by the harshness of the realities in our society. But I saw the faces of abuse, I saw pain and hardship, I saw an abstract term personified in the children confined in the Bahay Tuluyan Home for Girls.
Their background is no different than the background of ordinary girls playing jackstone or hopscotch at our neighborhood corners, their lives no more different than our sisters or cousins, but at such a young age many of them had been abused by people who should have been their cornerstones. Some five or six year old girls brutalized by their fathers. Some even peddled in the trade of flesh, then raped by a group of four to eight men. This is disturbing, disgusting at least.
It is such a pity that many of these girls are victims of savage, brutal and inhumane realities. Even with laws that supposedly insulate young children from sexual abuse, still many are brutalized.
Though the institution tries its best to offer help to these children, a serious lack of human connection, might be as damaging as the abuse they experienced. Being confined in the facility with communication only conducted by social workers and by visiting outreach participants, these children miss on the importance of human interpersonal communication, which is vital to the holistic development of their personalities.
The outreach we have done aims to do just that, to improve the communication skills of these children by giving them enough opportunity to share their lives with us. The activity also aimed to give us the chance to get in touch with the reality of this society.
As journalism students this is vital to ensure that we have an open mind on the realities of this society. As third-world country with a slow developing economy and high levels of poverty incidence, people sometimes go to the bowels of humanity and emerges as a very twisted being, which leads them to commit crimes as atrocious as incest.
It leads me to think and reflect on the currents status of this nation, many believe that we are perpetually a nation in disarray, because of the constant bickering of our leaders which leads to mismanagement of the resources of this nation. When we say mismanagement it means the misappropriation of the country’s funds, which leads to societal decay.
This society of ours’ lack accountability, transparency and morality, which then trickles down to the populace that enshrines in them the belief that whatever they do they can go away with it. That is one big problem criminality starts from the top and it emboldens people to engage in criminal and atrocious acts.
So we must start to offer moral changes in the country. The government is in dire need of moral overhaul, the society needs a strong injection of moral leadership that would not only change our lives but change the entirety of its nation.
Changing our society would not only mean better politics or better leadership. It would mean better laws that would safeguard the sanctity of childhood from the monstrosities of sexual abuse and its daunting implications to a child’s development. It would also mean stronger punishments for predators that prey on young children and destroy the essence of their childhood.
Stronger laws would also mean stronger social services system, which would prove vital in the formation and reintegration of stronger and more adept abused children back into society where they would function in the same productive manner that we do.
In an ideal society, all of this would happen, but sad to say the same is not true in our world. So what should we do? What would we need to undertake so that we could ensure greater national development without compromising the values and welfare of the greater populace? What would it take? And do our leaders have enough political will to see programs that would change this nation and would ensure the safety of children?
But before we answer all of those questions, we must first answer the largest question that has riddled both politicians and pundits, are we ready to vote for someone who could really lead?
Because leading is not just limited to our conventional definition of leadership, leadership calls for something bigger, something bolder and something more daring than what we normally do, as they say “desperate times call for desperate measures”. Sometimes I am led to think would we need another dictatorship, another death, another revolution to change our perspectives? Would we need to have another Ninoy and Marcos, a definitive view of what is good and evil just to rally up the critical mass to start and change the society?
To say that the prevailing circumstances are frustrating is a great understatement. It is depressing and disturbing, to hear from young girls the story of how they were repeatedly violated and degraded by men who act like animals and are so engrossed in their sexual fantasies that they are ready to destroy a child’s future to satiate it. It is more frustrating that the system seemingly allows this to happen through gaping loopholes in the judicial system. But what’s more frustrating is that we have been unknowing accomplices to the crime that destroyed these children by just simply shying away from hearing their stories.
At this point I remember Elie Wiesel a Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor as he said this in his book “Night”: “I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. And anyone who does not remember betrays them again.” Though these children are not dead, their childhoods are, mangled and killed by people who violated them and turned an unhearing ear to their stories.
So I choose to tell their stories, I choose to remember their lives, their smiles and their pain. I choose to listen to their cries and I will never stop to tell the tale of a group of children who were raped and violated at such a young age, so that no girl would go through the same pain they did.
