Whoever said that Filipino women do not suffer the same abuse as their counterparts in the Middle East, India and Africa must either be insensitive males or simply clueless.
Our nation may have the most number of women managers and executives in the corporate world. Yet, a great number of its female population is still regarded and treated as sex objects. On a daily basis, young Filipino girls fall prey to human trafficking. They are lured by recruiters into purported jobs abroad only to be sold as sex slaves in foreign countries. Many of these victims are detained for months or years, with little possibility of escape, and offered as sex fare to customers. They are kept as virtual prisoners and their passports withheld from them. The less unfortunate ones end up in bars and sex dens in various cities within the country with better hope for escape. Still, because these circumstances are not too close to home to most families, especially the well-off ones, abuse of women—though it exists and thrives—is taken for granted. It was only when the recent sex video scandal involving Dr. Hayden Kho and Katrina Halili became a hot item hitting front pages when people started realizing that abuse of women is still real. The sex video between the celebrity doctor and the young starlet with whom he had a sexual relationship is an eloquent testament to the fact that women are still a vulnerable lot. It has opened the eyes of young women to the realization that even the men, who they think care for them, could turn them into a sexual spectacle for all the world to watch and ridicule. Just as how Katrina Halili was made into.
Noticed how the male population behaved? The scandal prompted many males to scamper for copies of the video to watch the celebrity doctor and Katrina in the sexual act. And rather than condemning Kho and all those who may have uploaded the video in the Internet and spread it in the market, many even circulated jokes, making light of a grave matter. One text message read “Katrina was swined (binaboy)”. Another text message read: “What do you call a camera used in a sex video? Answer: Hayden camera”
Apart from Kho, many others who had access to the video because of their friendship or closeness with Kho, abused Katrina just as much. One, or some of them, uploaded the video in the Internet while others tried to make a fast buck by selling copies. Katrina was instantly made a commercial item, a fair game.
Some who saw the video said that she clearly knew that her sexual act with Kho was being taped, thus she has nothing to complain about. This, to me, smacks of a disordered thinking. When women complain of having been abused, they are presumed to have given consent to be abused. When a woman is raped, she is accused of having invited the crime to be committed against her because of her manner of dressing or her actions. Men will always find excuses for their abuse of women because historically, all over the world, women have not been regarded or treated as equals with men.
Granting that Katrina knew her sexual act with Kho was being video-taped. Circulating it for public consumption is quite another story. If she did not expressly consent to its distribution for public consumption, her rights were violated.
And I say, thank God for the law on Anti-Violence Against Women and their Children or Republic Act 9262. Kho may be able to escape prosecution from the spread of the video on the Internet but certainly there is no way he can escape prosecution from the long arm of the law on anti-violence against women.
The law defines violence against a woman as any act committed by any person against a woman who is his wife, former wife, or a woman with whom he has or had a sexual or dating relationship, and such act results in physical, sexual, psychological harm or suffering.
This means that even when the relationship between a man and a woman consists only in a singe sexual act between them, the woman is entitled to be protected under this law from any act of violence committed by the man against her. And in this law, acts of violence have been defined so broadly as to cover not only physical violence but also psychological and economic violence as well. Psychological violence refers to acts or omissions that cause mental or emotional suffering to the victim. And this includes, among others, public ridicule or humiliation to the woman. The video-taping of the sexual act, presumably by Kho, and the videotape’s subsequent release into the Internet and the market could constitute the crime of committing violence against a woman under the law. This crime carries with it the penalty of imprisonment and the payment of damages.
Apart from the prosecution of the guilty and the restitution of the victim in the Kho-Halili scandal, this should spark new studies on how to protect women from abuse committed through the Internet. Women can find protection under Republic Act 9262 as long as they were in some sort of a relationship with their abuser. But how can they be protected against abuse committed through the cyber space? The means of gender abuse have become sophisticated and technologically advanced. Cyber sex is very much a thing now.
Our lawmakers should find in this an opportunity to craft laws that can respond to crimes committed through the Internet. One can only hope that this is not a tall order for them whose minds are now preoccupied with the next election more than anything else. –Atty. Rita Linda V. Jimeno, Manila Standard Today
E-mail: ritalindaj@gmail.com Web: www.jimenolaw.com.ph
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