EVEN to a cynical world inured to extrajudicial killings, the savagery of the killing of high school student Christine Silawan had the power to shock. Dumped in a vacant lot in Barangay Bankal in Lapu-Lapu City last March 11, the half-naked body of the 16-year-old bore several stab wounds. Her esophagus, throat and trachea were removed. The victim’s face was skinned to the bone.
The viciousness did not end there. The lot in Sitio Mahayahay where Silawan was found last Monday morning, after her mother reported her missing, has no settlers but is borderless, ringed by several neighboring houses.
After news of the body circulated in the neighborhood last Monday dawn, the teenager’s corpse was viewed and photographed by local residents, long before cordoning of the area was carried out by authorities and coverage by teams of reporters and photojournalists. Local residents flocking to the scene of crime took photos with their smart phones and shared and forwarded the images to the rest of their network.
Genalyn, a resident of a Bankal subdivision, lost appetite for breakfast after she looked through the gallery images showing the grisly remains of Silawan, taken by an exodus of neighbors who walked from their homes to the crime scene.
Many of onlookers speculated how the crime may have been carried out by settlers from Mindanao who are engaged in criminal and terroristic activities. According to theories bandied around among some of the residents, Silawan, a volunteer for mass collections at the nearby parish church in Pajac, was singled out for retaliation by criminal elements among the Moro settlers, who were ratted out by their Christian neighbors and forced into a recent gunfight with authorities over hoarded weapons.
Silawan’s murder and mutilation is the latest fodder feeding simmering tensions and confrontations involving local residents and Moro settlers in the Bankal neighborhood. Genalyn and neighbors worry how these conflicts will explode again and affect their community, but are blind to the actual harm created by baseless speculations, rumor-spreading and religious/ethnic-slurring.
On social media, the malice is even more unsettling, with Silawan, her mother and sister becoming a site of contestation for rival politicians and insensitive Netizens with a predilection for spreading the murdered teen’s unfiltered or unblurred photos and insensitive memes of the victim’s images.
Even celebrity-hunters have turned Silawan into a bandwagon, with “massacre films” director Carlo J. Caparas recently photographed smiling and posing in front of the coffin of the murdered teen, along with a mention that he is “contemplating” making a film about the incident. Whether for the sake of art or social relevance, art has not sunk to these depths.
Ghouls, according to superstition, are grave robbers who feed on corpses. Etymologically, the English word has roots in the Arabic “ġūl,” a desert demon. In contemporary practice, victims of crime and social injustice have been fodder for anyone seeking an opportunity to push interests irrelevant to the dead, their surviving families, or the public.
Victimhood is redefined by new media and the network society. Manuel Castells theorized that in the informational/global economy he calls the network society, the new culture of real virtuality creates gray spaces he calls the “Fourth World,” links that allow the thriving of organized crime, groups marginalized in the new digital affluence and other “perverse connections” that not only traffic on “outlawed commodities” but also on “satisfying forbidden desires.”
Castells urged that the network society yields hollow gains if informational powers and new levels of affluence fail to liberate us from the basest desire to take advantage of other people.
Only education will lead us to explore our inner self and confront that which lurks behind new scapegoats: the same vulnerabilities to old demons and biases.