KTV : The Demystification of the Crime of Rape

Where do we go to when our own judiciary and courts of justice of our own country discriminate against us? Karen Tayag Vertido (KTV) has the answer for us and for this she spent fourteen long years of her life fighting for her rights that now benefit all of women in this country and the world. Karen, then Executive Director of the Davao Chamber of Commerce & Industry, in her 2007 communication to the U.N Cedaw Committee said that in 1996, she was brought to a motel against her will and raped by a former political head of the same organization she was working for. The Davao community supported her and launched the “Justice for Karen Movement.” Then, after eight years of court trial, the judge acquitted the defendant.

The way to go for Karen, who was counseled by women leaders, particularly, Atty Evalyn Ursua, was to write the United Nations Cedaw Committee in 2007 as a victim of discrimination as defined in the CEDAW.

The law invoked is the Optional Protocol to Cedaw which is a separate treaty to which the Philippines is a signatory and it allows women who have been denied access to justice at the national level to have their claims reviewed at the international level.

The United Nations Cedaw Committee composed of international experts, in their decision or Views promulgated that our country violated the rights of Karen in the local court decision acquitting the defendant. The Cedaw Committee, in affirming the story of Karen in her communication to this U.N body, effectively sets new standards on how the world should view and address the crime of rape and as well, demystifies the following fallacies on rape :

Fallacy One : Victim must always try to escape the rapist during rape.
Truth : There is no standard victim reaction to rape.
Fallacy Two : Rape by intimidation cannot be committed against
women who are not timid.
Truth : The character of the victim is not an element of the crime of rape.
Fallacy Three : In rape by threat, there must be clear evidence of
direct threat.
Truth : The essential element of rape is lack of consent and not the
element of force.
Fallacy Four : If you are a friend of the victim, you cannot be raped ;
Or that if you are friends, the rape is consensual.
Truth : A relationship is not proof of the consent of the victim of rape.
Fallacy Five : There is a standard of “normal” or “natural”
behaviour on rape victims.
Truth : The court should not discriminate against those who do not
conform to these standards.
Fallacy Six : If rape has reached the moment of ejaculation, there was
no resistance.
Truth : Ejaculation is not an element of the crime of rape.
Fallacy Seven : A senior citizen is not capable of rape.
Truth : Sexual prowess is not an element of rape otherwise rape
committed by old men go unpunished.

This United Nations body found that Karen was discriminated against and recommends that the Philippines pay Karen a financial compensation for all the social harm that she suffered in the way our judicial system has handled her case. The Cedaw Committee recommends that the Philippines should develop a sexuality and violence education training program for judges and prosecutors in the Philippines. To Congress, the Cedaw Committee recommends that the laws against rape in our country be reviewed and that our country allocate enough funds for enforcement.

This Cedaw Committee view is now part of a human rights standard that the entire world can emulate and the Philippines is given within six months to turn in a written response and to provide the Committee with an update on its action taken and more importantly to publish this U.N. Cedaw View and translate it to our various local lingua francas.

Who is afraid of reproductive health ?

There is a whole story to the change in language from population control to reproductive health. This is a story that is part of the triumph of women not only here but all over the world after several centuries of continuing discrimination of women. The paradigm shift in language represents a re-thinking from demographics and numbers towards the promotion of the individual rights of each human being. Family planning per se will not improve the health of women as it is not a guarantee that mothers will not die of causes related to pregnancy and child birth. And so, reproductive health which is the broader picture is more than just fertility and family planning. Reproductive health is about the right of a woman to health. This right is now associated with basic principles of dignity and bodily autonomy and the ability to make decisions for ourselves; to be able to make decisions after being fully informed and, yes, after being fully empowered as a woman.

As a legal tradition, the separation of the church and state in the Philippines is more than a hundred years old. That we are a secular state was first enshrined and promulgated in the Malolos Constitution in 1899 as an icon provision during our birth as a free republic as presided over by President Emilio Aguinaldo. It was a reaction to the abuses of the clergy as immortalized in the character of Padre Damaso in the novel of Jose P. Rizal. But, any social institution - like the church or umma – can be an agent of good social change. So, the issue is whether what the church religious hierachy is teaching is for good social change or not. It cannot be denied that religion promotes patriarchy and our evidence for this are the passages that are strewn all over the writings of major world religions. This has resulted to the promotion of secularization in governance without infringing on our freedom of religion.

Therefore, even as our Catholic religious hierarchy continue to guide the faithful, our clarion call to the religious is to listen to what the church membership ( half of them women) are saying. In the Philippines, there is already a growing critical mass of support for the promotion of the reproductive health of women. Politicians should pay attention to this.

The objection of the religious hierarchy is related to the inclusion of the artificial means of contraception as a part of the family planning wholistic package. The proposed government policy is advocating for the right to informed choice. Informed choice cannot be had without the government allocating funds for the education of the public and for making available the basic delivery of health services for the reproductive health of women, which is half of the entire Philippine population. Pray, tell us, what is wrong with that? The opposition to the artificial means of contraception is related to the question : When does life begin ? This is a whole issue for another post all together.

Ondoy & Onwards

My cousin who lives here in Davao City in Bangkal bought a lifeboat in the wake of Ondoy. Such was the fear brought about by the horrors of the Ondoy storm even as we empathized with the flood victims, some of them our very own friends. Parents, children, everyone and all were traumatized. A lifeboat will not address the problem at the core. Still, we have to capacitate ourselves in disaster preparedness by organizing our neighborhoods and communities. We have been saying this before and it would be worthwhile to say it again – one year after the Ondoy floods. One of the major causes of such disasters is the unchecked urban sprawl and bad urban planning. Floods should be something that we should be preparing for – not unlike the planning of the ark of Noah of the Old Testament.

The architect's perspective is that function follows form. So, we are learning from architects again, particularly from Anna Maria Gonzales : that there is a reason for the stilts in our Bahay Kubo to keep us away from floods; that there should be a space in the perimeter of our homes for water drainage; the space around our houses should not be poured with concrete but should be just soil and vegetation to allow for water to drain; and our walkways should not be poured with concrete but just paved with grass or stepping stones or bricks.

Our asphalt jungle and cemented roads are causing the floods. Our garbage is preventing the run off of water to the watersheds and drainage systems. The concept of mega cities is bad urban planning. Urban experts are saying that our cities should be small and beautiful. I have been to some of the most beautifully planned cities (Vancouver, Amsterdam, New York ) in the world and their central business districts are small. I mean, the garden which is the Central Park of New York City is four square kilometers or as big as Baguio City; and less than a mile from central Vancouver is Stanley Park, a very, very big park planted with forest trees. Of course, the canals of Amsterdam were built to prevent floods as this city is seven meters below sea level.

It is never safe to build on edges of any waterway. And this is true of the coastal areas found in the central business district of Davao City from Magsaysay Park towards the banks of the Davao River in Bolton and Bankerohan and beyond. Not only that our human settlements are not observing the five meter easement, houses are built on parks and shores without building permits. Our people are not only building human settlements in places reserved for parks, their homes are in the sea and these could be danger zones in times of Southwest monsoons and strong storm surges. Goddesses forbid, these are accidents waiting to happen.

It has happened before with Typhoon Nitang in the early eighties. How can I forget? I spent a couple of years working with 231 families displaced by Typhoon Nitang. It was one of first cases handled by our center. These 231 families were hit by tsunami like waves caused by typhoon “Nitang” that destroyed houses & properties of these families. These victims were forced to move to a privately owned land and as expected, the landowner sued them for forcible entry. So, a delegation of women residents of this community, whose husbands were busy attending to their means of livelihood which was mainly fishing, sought the help of our center to defend them. Anyway, these families never went back to building homes in public shores. And it took them Typhoon Nitang to realize this. Therefore, this should be an indication for city planners to imagine another scenario for the coastal areas in our central business district currently inhabited by informal settlers who are technically living in danger zones as defined by our current Urban Development Housing Act (UDHA).