Gains and setbacks

March as Women’s Month always comes wrapped in felicitations, a feel-good preen sheet that marks how far women have come from those days when their most exalted place was behind their men. And indeed, Filipino women have much to celebrate, starting with good marks in the Millennium Development Goals that show how they routinely perform well in education and literacy, with a higher survival rate in secondary and tertiary education.

The MDGs also indicate how Filipino women are now more empowered in political and economic roles, as evidenced by the welcome changes that Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales, Justice Secretary Leila de Lima and former Commission on Audit chair Grace Pulido-Tan brought to the bureaucracy, and the fact that three are now in Forbes’ list of 50 most powerful businesswomen in Asia.

But have the gains of the women’s movement benefited Filipino women at the ground level? Recent news give us pause.

There’s the weekend fire in Bulacan that took the lives of four siblings aged four years to mere months, left unattended while their mother cooked dinner outside their rented shack and their father plied his jeepney route. It makes for a tragic case of children paying the ultimate price for poverty and its twin—the parents’ apparent lack of access to means and information on planning their family. Having a child every year, as this mother did, is not something that most women, given the limits of their health and the demands on their time and energy, will or can go through.

Two years after being enacted into law, Republic Act No. 10354 or The Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012 remains largely a paper legislation, dooming thousands of Filipino women to unplanned pregnancies that they can only accept with resignation and a blind faith that God will provide. What’s keeping the RH Law from being implemented so that it will finally realize its declared policy of guaranteeing a person’s right to health, including reproductive health? Have the national and local budgets included appropriation to guarantee “universal access to medically-safe … and quality reproductive health care services,” including relevant information on methods, devices and supplies?

In certain areas in the South, military operations against renegade Moro guerrillas have resulted in the displacement of thousands of families, illustrating as well how women’s voices are often drowned out by war drums. The women recount being roused by mortar fire, bundling up their children, and crossing rivers in the middle of the night to escape the crossfire. Evacuation centers are filled to bursting.

And, as in the case of the families displaced by the Zamboanga siege in 2013 and still languishing in evacuation centers, the cramped conditions have led to outbreaks of illness and the sheer absence of privacy has exposed women and girls to rape and sexual abuse, often resulting in teenage pregnancies.

Also disturbing is recent news about the arrest of an Australian man in Malaybalay, Bukidnon, on child sex abuse charges, and the discovery of the remains of a 10-year-old girl buried under an apartment he had once rented. More distressing still is how his then girlfriend, a Filipino then only 17, procured young girls for him and even took part in the violent cyberporn video that he sold to clients abroad. Not that women as predators are anything new. A flourishing cyberporn cottage industry in Cordova, Cebu, was discovered in 2013 to have been led by a woman who used her own children and those of her neighbors to build her salacious enterprise.

How could these women have taken part in exploiting other women younger than they and girls more vulnerable than they, and even their own kids? The lure of easy money may be irresistible in the context of extreme poverty, but the women and their partners trot out a handy excuse: The kids are only eye candy for men half a world away—as though being made to strip and perform perverse sexual acts in front of a camera were not traumatic and reprehensible enough. Have these women so internalized their oppression, their demeaning, that they see no evil in foisting it on others?

In an age when more doors are opening for women, when technology offers more choices, when information is a click away, it is a sobering thought that as Filipino women advance inexorably toward economic and social liberation, many others in the grassroots continue to be weighed down.