Estremera: Save our children

THE journalist in me refused to be gagged last month as I read about Davao City having the most number of rape cases with a total of 42 in the second quarter of 2018.

First, because I instinctively know that 42 is a suspiciously low number whether it be in Davao City or the rest of the cities and the country. Thus I contacted friends at Talikala Inc., which has been working with prostituted women and children since the 1987.

I’ve been friends with Talikala since I was a greenhorn journalist, I was just one year into the scene when Talikala was organized, we sort of grew up together, and so I have a stomach-churning idea of how family life of children and the prostituted have become worse through three decades. The new normal is nauseous.

In the early 1990s, it was very shocking to find 17-year-old prostituted girls. The story would be the teenage girl was enticed by someone older, usually a neighbor, to be a GRO (guest relations officer or a waitress) or a masseuse, only to find out that GRO is not just about waitressing but can be taken out for sex and there is such a thing as “going all the way” when you’re a masseuse. That’s very old.

Interviewing Talikala’s executive director Jeanette Laurel-Ampog and Sr. Edna Gado of the Sisters of Mary, the case management officer of Talikala Inc. from where I derived the article I wrote (https://www.sunstar.com.ph/article/1762356), I’d often take a long pause after hearing their stories and ask, “Why?”

The question is always rhetorical, a cry from the heart for some comprehension, which never comes.

While in my early years as a journalist we were already aghast over finding a 17-year-old girl lured into the world of the prostituted by a scheming adult neighbor, now more and more children are first raped by their male family members – fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, stepfathers, mother’s lovers, brothers-in-law, and every permutation there is of affinity and consanguinity or neighbors of all permutations, as well. And once they’ve been sexually abused, prostitution becomes enticing amid the squalor of their environment and the rumblings of their stomachs.

“Nabasa na man, maligo nalang ‘ta (Since we already got wet, we might just as well take a full bath),” is the byword among children much younger than 17, others just stepping into their childhood after the few toddler years. The mantra means: since they’re no longer virgins anyway, they might just as well earn from what has already been abused. Yes, your tummy can churn now.

Plus, it’s no longer the neighborhood con-man or woman who recruits. Children are recruiting children. They recognize whose cherry has been popped, and they gather around in their own unique way of finding peers.

And while before there is the adult pimp, either a “Mama Sang,” an adult woman, or an adult gay, now children are pimping each other, through chat groups. Conversations can go like this: “Naa’y nangita, dili ko pwede. Kinsa’y pwede niini?”

And that is just a glimpse of their world. It gets worst, nauseous to the very core of your gut. And it’s the new normal for girls in blighted communities.

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