(Conclusion)
Norma Escobido, family health officer of the Department of Health, has been with the agency for 35 years but has only been working with its Women and Children Protection Unit (WCPU) for two years. This has been her toughest assignment. She goes around the country, visiting WCPUs in DOH-administered hospitals.
She talks to rape victims and tells them about their option to pursue their attackers in court. “Only roughly 10 percent of them file cases,” she said. These few women find that government agencies are unable to use the evidence they have collected.
Instead of encouraging victims of violence to submit themselves to the criminal justice system, state agencies do the opposite—they frustrate the victims and confirm that it is so much easier to leave the matter to fate and divine retribution.
Lawyer Ricardo Sunga III, Free Legal Assistance Group coordinator in the National Capital Region of the and a law reform specialist at the University of the Philippines Law Center, said there are two roadblocks to the use of DNA evidence to prosecute guilty parties, and even to defend those accused who insist they are innocent.
First, not all trial courts are open to the use of such evidence. Older judges are specifically hesitant to use physical evidence that can be processed by high-tech equipment.
Second, not all lawyers are willing, or even aware, that physical evidence can be used to bolster their cases. This is true especially for those in the provinces whose only recourse is the testimony of the victims.
Dr. Raquel Fortun, forensic pathologist from the UP College of Medicine, has an even stronger opinion. “We need an overhaul of the entire criminal investigation system,” she said.
She describes police efforts to deal with crime scenes, much less DNA evidence, as “shallow.” She said, “We cannot even solve cases that are piling up every day. How can we even begin to look into cold cases?”
Fortun has been lending her expertise to the government, working with the police and the National Bureau of Investigation, from as far back as the Ozone Disco fire in 1996, and from as recently as the Sendong flooding which hit Northern Mindanao last December. “You would think much has changed. But nothing has. They still only go for the obvious,” she said.
Rizza Pamintuan, a ward assistant detailed to the Philippine General Hospital’s Women’s Desk, keeps telling rape victims to tell their prosecutors that the kits are available and can be used for the case. Why the prosecutors do not have that initiative in the first place is mind-boggling.
The WCPUs, especially in the provinces, expose the employees to the hazards of going against powerful politicians, soldiers or policemen, or tribe elders who want to protect their erring members. They would go to great lengths to stop the victims from haling them to court.
More than dangerous, the job is frustrating. “Many times, the victims of violence decide not to file cases even though we have advised them that this is what they should do. Some of them appear ready to file cases. Then, almost always, they change their minds,” Escobido said.
This is because the aggressors are the husbands, fathers, uncles and grandfathers who beg the victims to just forgive them. Said Escobido: “We Filipinos place so much value on keeping the family honor and avoiding shame. We also feel powerless when faced against influential people. Rape is deeply personal and shameful. It is in our culture to keep the shame within the family.”
In the absence of anything solid on which to pin their case against their attackers, the victims almost always choose to forgive, and “move on.”
Luningning Banocia Banocia, who has been a social worker with the Rizal Medical Center since 1982, said the law is good but the implementation is poor. For instance, social workers face a dilemma when they send the victims back home when the aggressor is a family member living in the same home. “We do not have a shelter here for women who do not want to return to their houses,” Banocia said.
Sometimes, the attackers themselves bring the victims to the hospital and lurk around the corridors as if to make sure their victims will not bring them to the police.
Crucial to the decision are the mothers in the family, Banocia added. Unfortunately, they are “much too in love with the fathers, or they worry about who will bring home the money. They do not want to be talked about by the neighbors. So they would rather stay silent and keep it to themselves,” she said.
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| Inside this room are hundreds of rape kits that would likely find their way to the hospital's medical waste a few years from now. |
This is why cases of abuse, despite the laws that seek to prevent them from happening, are still underreported, Escobido said.
Indeed, Fortun said many Filipinos are fond of saying, “Ipagpasa-Diyos na lang natin ang lahat (Let’s just leave everything to God).” This results in no cases being pursued when the aggrieved party decides not to fight, when in fact it should be the state that files a case against the perpetrator—regardless of how forgiving the victim is.
Economics seems to be another root of the problem. WCPUs, according to Escobido, fall within the DOH’s gender development budget. But they compete with other units of the hospital for these funds, such that most of the WCPUs cannot even afford a regular complement of social workers, obstetricians, psychiatrists and administrative staff. The more active WCPUs—in East Avenue Medical Center, Baguio Medical Center and the Vicente Sotto Medical Center in Cebu—are all backed by international NGOs.
The WCPU of the Rizal Medical Center had to be augmented by a local Rotary Club to be functional. When the assistance stopped, the unit’s operations had to be merged with the Social Services Unit of the entire hospital.
Banocia has sought meetings with the hospital administrators, asking them to assign at least a small room to the WCPU. She has not been successful.
The Women’s Desk at the PGH is not wholly funded by the UP-PGH system either. The hospital has provided the room and pays Pamintuan’s wages. Everything else comes from donations—international NGOs and advocate-senators who prop the office up through office supplies and other operational needs. Then again, these forms of assistance are not regular, their sustainability uncertain.
At least the PGH makes use of rape kits, the improvised version of which costs P150 per box. The original idea was to collect 15 different samples and store them in Zip-lock containers. But these containers are expensive. PGH decided to do away with blood samples and use bond papers and glass slides that would be contained in small manila envelopes instead. The white boxes contain 12 of these envelopes.
But testing these specimens for prosecutorial purposes is another issue altogether. In UP, it costs P8,00 for a DNA analysis of a single sample. If the kit contains 12 samples, this translates to P96,000 per patient. In the event that the victim decides to use her kit to go after her rapist, all the way to court, she may just have to find a way to shoulder the costs.
Pamintuan believes that the use of the rape kits, as well as handling and storage, should be included in the amendments to the rape law. Who should have custody of them? What are the conditions under which they must be stored? Who decides whether they should be used in court?
But the Women’s Desk has bigger, more immediate problems. The room where the hundreds of rape kits are stored is not even assigned to it. It is assigned to the Surgery Department, which has repeatedly hinted at wanting to use the room for itself.
There are just too many boxes. Even though the prescription period for rape is 10 years, Pamintuan has had to throw boxes away as medical waste once they hit the five-year mark. Even then, the space is not enough. She recently resorted to putting some of the boxes at the top of her office shelves.
When the next victim walks into the door, Pamintuan, as she has been doing for the past 10 years, will assist her as best as she could. The ward assistant will continue to accompany her to the OB department to have her samples collected.
But the process will continue to be frustrating until these government agencies make it easier for victims submit themselves to the criminal justice system instead of just walking away in exasperation—a violation, all over again.
(The author is an editor of Manila Standard Today and a student at the Ateneo de Manila University’s M.A. Journalism Program. She submitted a version of this story for her Investigative Reporting class under VERA Files trustee Luz Rimban. VERA Files is put out by veteran journalists taking a deeper look at current issues. VERA is Latin for “true.”)
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