No Hate, Just Love

Women and children often experience different kinds of violence. These take in the form of emotional, mental, and the most common one is physical. We often hear in the news about battered women, raped women, and abused children – especially in tabloids. News agencies often exploit stories like these, because these are great controversies, and readers often enjoy reading controversial news. Sometimes, these abuses also pushes women to commit suicide. We see many forms of kinds in police stations also. It’s also rampant in our communities, but we chose to be silent. After all, these are personal and family matters. It’s none of our business, so to speak. We have the police to protect them, supposedly. These are the rabid flaws of our system, brought about our wrong beliefs and culture here in the Philippines.

Women and children are supposed to be loved. We do not hurt them. It is important to teach everyone about nonviolent behavior. Like teachers should do to their students. It is very much needed because of the contemporary exposure of children to violence is immense. Television, computer games, and media had continuously give the weak child’s mind of aggressiveness and violence. Sometimes children do experience violence themselves in the environment they are living. Nowadays, the personality of teachers is more valued than their knowledge. Violence Against Women and Their Children Law had save many lives. Most victims of VAWC did not seek help from the police.

The forgoing narration above are all true. It is the obligation of the government to protect its people, especially those who are powerless, and prone to abuse such as women and children. In fact, a law to address this concern has been enacted by the government, with the aim to lessen these occurrences, and most importantly, protect our women and children. This is called “The Republic Act 9262 or Violence against Women and Their Children Act of 2004, or otherwise known as VAWC.

According to Atty. Rainier Mamaňgun, “This law establishes the parameters and guidelines, in keeping with the fundamental freedoms guaranteed under the Constitution and the Provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international human rights instruments of which the Philippines is a party”. The internet also defines Violence Against Women and Their Children as “any act or series of acts committed by any person against women who is his wife which result in physical, sexual, psychological harm or suffering, or economic abuse including threats of such act, assault, harassment or arbitrary deprivation of liberty.”

Yes, we have the Republic Act 9262. Maybe the more important question now is, does the enactment of this law has really served its purpose to protect our women and children? As my own observation tells me, and if you take a further look deep in our community, I can say we still have to see the full effect of this Act. I still see many abuses happening around us. Maybe lawsuits have been logged against the perpetrators, but the very slow judicial system of our country, coupled by the very inefficient law enforcers- the police force, and is taking its toll on our abused women and children.  The dragging system allows the perpetrators to roam our streets, leaving the abused women and children at more risk from these bad people. I hope that in the near future, the Act would soon be fully implemented, and we will see a country with fully empowered Women and Children in the societies.


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