Some women reported that the EJK victim’s children were bullied or teased in school. One
woman despaired to see her grandchild affected by the rumors that her mother, an EJK
victim, had been sexually assaulted before she was killed, and the teasing of her
schoolmates because it. The reactions of the grandmother and the child were not
surprising, or exaggerated: in patriarchal society which ties women’s value to purity,
allegations of impurity against a loved one – first, because the mother was killed as a
criminal, and second, because she was raped – was a heavy blow to the girl child, especially.
In this case, it had been necessary to th child’s healing that she transferred to another
school where people do not know what happened to her parent.
•
Safety and security issues include fear that violence may erupt anytime in the
community, intimidation and being warned not to speak to anyone about what
happened to their family member.
Some families considered or actually transferred residence because of this, in addition to
escaping from the memory of the killing, if this happened inside or within the vicinity of
their houses. This option, however, is rarely an option for the poor. Moreover, it was also
pointed out that the violence and shootings under Drug War, while targetting drug users
and peddlers, can be unpredictable, even arbitrary. As one woman pointed out, the high
walls of subdivisions cannot protect people from the bullets, and that there have been cases
of victims shot because they were mistaken for someone else.
•
Access to government support services is limited, as well as the support services open
to them per se.
Although more than half of the women interviewed said they got government support,
these were mostly for funeral or burial-related needs (e.g. cash assistance, tents, chairs,
food). For the other needs expressed, such as that for a source of income, mental health
services, or even information on the progress of investigation into the death of their family
member, State assistance had been lacking or absent.
A serious lapse in State intervention from the data available was in the provision of security
for the families victimized in the Drug War. The War on Drugs has reached to such extent
that it can be said that everyone was at risk of being victimized. This was further
aggravated by President Duterte’s pronouncements that the Drug War would be relentless,
even intensified over time, and that collateral damages are inevitable.
The poor, in particular, are the most vulnerable. Their socio-economic class – and the
stereotypes of the poor as lazy and uneducated people, and as criminals – has already
distanced them from society and its mechanisms for human rights redress, the legal system
included. In the present Drug War, these stereoypes of the poor continue to play out,
compounded. A case to point is the trivialization of a woman’s complaint that unidentified
men had been roving around their community during her husband’s wake. The police
Panaghoy: The Philippine War on Drugs from the Perspective of Women
March 2019
57
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