‘Idyllic enclave’ with dirty secret

Described as an “idyllic enclave” tucked away on the slopes of Mt. Makiling in Laguna, the Philippine High School for the Arts is a peaceful haven with an iconic theater surrounded by smaller buildings scattered throughout the property.

But its serene atmosphere hides a horrible secret: years of physical, psychological, emotional, and sexual abuse allegedly committed by adult faculty members and staff against its students.

Created in 1977, the PHSA is a government-funded institution (P114.75 million in 2021) run as a boarding school to prepare young people for a career in the arts where they all enjoy scholarships. But such cushy conditions come at a steep price, at least for many students who only now have been coming forward with their stories of abuse and—more seriously—years of denial and prevarication by the administration. This despite their verbal and written complaints, backed by reports of concerned parents and even of the Commission on Human Rights.

Now, matters have been elevated to a far more serious official level.

Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte has asked the National Bureau of Investigation to look deeper into the allegations of abuse at the PHSA, which surfaced in an online journal VICE World News.

In response to the reports, the PHSA says it is “examining the current and prior information on the matter.” In a separate statement, the school administration said it was “unfortunate” that the reports of the cases of abuse have surfaced. Abuse survivors, it said, may “file complaints with the proper forum,” specifically with “the School’s designated committees.”

This seems but part of the PHSA’s years-long pattern of bureaucratic delays, the insistence that complainants go through the whole rigamarole of getting statements notarized and submitted for review or else denying the allegations outright without conducting a transparent investigation or hearing.

It took the death of a former PHSA faculty member to get former students to speak out. Alumni report that it took them many years, for some more than a decade, to just recognize the abuse they endured and recover from the psychological and emotional trauma. An employee working as a “house parent” against whom several accusations have been leveled, has even been promoted and is now part of the school administration.

The impact on the students, who were children we must be reminded of, has cast a long shadow on their lives. One survivor tells of undergoing a nervous breakdown that lasted for two months when “all I could do was cry, eat, sleep.” Other alumni recall other incidents of abusive and inappropriate behavior. Faculty were not above bringing preteen theater students to edgy stage productions where sexual acts were portrayed. Others recalled their teachers throwing temper tantrums during rehearsals and even having the teen-age students simulate sexual acts. “My takeaway here is, it’s really a whole ecosystem. There’s a string of predators, and then they produce more,” says the survivor.

Inquirer columnist Anna Cristina Tuazon took exception to the defense offered by PHSA that allegations of sexual molestation against faculty members was “consensual.” “This belies a total disregard of the power imbalance between a teacher and a student where sexual activity is deemed permissible,” she noted. “That and the fact that the student was a minor at that time should have been more than enough to rule out consent.”

In his and the school’s defense, PHSA head Josue Greg Zuniega, himself an alumnus, insists the school is “very safe” and that students may be “needlessly panicking” over reports of abuse.

He even seemed to blame the students, implying that today’s teenagers are “different” from those in the past, being “more daring” in their private lives. “These potential abuses, who knows if they do it to one another among themselves?”

Decrying the lack of government response to the reports of abuse at PHSA, the Child Rights Network, a coalition of advocates that includes Unicef and the CHR, said the careless attitude toward the welfare of students at the school “is enabling the continuation of these horrid abuses.”

Here’s hoping the hornet’s nest stirred by the scandal will result in a serious and comprehensive investigation, not just in PHSA but in all institutions of learning, holding all those responsible to account and changing the culture of abuse and impunity that is supposed to nurture the country’s young.