Sexual abuse against women
The cases of sexual abuses against Filipino women continuously add up and alarmingly, 33 cops are included as perpetrators. Our ongoing monitoring on state-perpetrated violence against women, which covers January 2017 to July 2018, documents 13 cases of abuses – eight cases of rape, three cases of acts of lasciviousness, one case of harassment, and one case of physical assault.
The high number of state-perpetrated violence against women is very alarming. It only reflects how abusive the authorities have become under a regime that sends signal of impunity to its armed forces and blatantly disregards women’s human rights.
More than half of the documented cases are related to President Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s war on drugs. War on drugs becomes an excuse for sexual abuse.
According to the cases we monitored, out of the 13 documented cases, seven are related to war on drugs – either the abuse is committed during a drug operation or the victim is a female drug suspect. These include four cases of rape and three cases of acts of lasciviousness.
Documented rape cases include two female inmates from Olongapo City and Hagonoy, Bulacan, both charged with illegal possession of firearms and raped while in detention. It is contemptible that the Philippine National Police (PNP) has cited the prevalence of rape as an alibi to continue the war on drugs, only to find out that police officers themselves are raping women and contribute to the rising number of rape cases in the country.
Both President Duterte and former Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Ronald Dela Rosa have claimed that drug addicts are those behind the most gruesome rape-slay cases in the country, thus the war on drugs would be instrumental in addressing the rising number of rape cases.
The PNP has claimed that number of rape cases has decreased since the implementation of the war on drugs. They cited that from January 2016 to August 2017, the number of rape cases was in a downward trend, noting that the record on August 2017 is lessened by 200 cases, as compared to the same period the previous year.
Firstly, rapists have no standard description. They can be addicts as well as state enforcers. They can be peddlers as well as politicians. Any man who thinks of women as sex object is a potential abuser. Secondly, rape still proliferates where 75 percent of the victims are children.
The war on drugs did not solve anything. It did not solve drug addiction and crimes. It is a war waged against the poor and the marginalized. It gave the authorities the license to kill and abuse people, especially women and children.
We, together with other organizations and advocates for women’s human rights, call on the public, especially the women, to stand together and fight for their rights. It is high time that we demand accountability and put an end to the culture of impunity