IN LAPU-LAPU City, a 17-year-old high school student is being accused of raping three girls, ages seven, six and three, on separate occasions when he was babysitting them. But the police said social workers still have to assess whether he acted with discernment before formally charging him.
In Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, a nanny was ordered jailed for 22 years for the murder of the 10-month-old baby that she was babysitting.
She had fed him and put him to bed but he woke up after five hours and started crying. She tried in vain to hush him and, frustrated, wrapped him in a blanket, stuffed him in a drawer, shut it and then went back watching her favorite television show. The child died from suffocation, a death that the judge described as “very brutal and cruel.”
Meanwhile in Lapu-Lapu City, the police said they will still have to determine if the 17-year-old occasional babysitter acted with discernment when he pulled down the shorts of his seven-year-old ward and then inserted his genitals into her own.
In Turkey, a man has been fined for saying “I don’t love you” to his wife. According to a BBC report, “the spouses–who are divorcing–both sought compensation from each other over insults apparently hurled during the marriage. A lower court had ruled they were both bad as one another, but the Supreme Court of Appeal said the man’s remark about not loving his wife amounted to “emotional violence,” and ordered him to pay her compensation. The woman said her husband’s comment had left her “emotionally wrecked,” and that he had often left the marital home. For his part, the man said his wife had repeatedly “cursed him.”
Meanwhile in Lapu-Lapu City, a 17-year-old high school senior, who has no history of being mentally-challenged, cannot be charged with rape for sexually abusing three girls, the oldest of whom is seven and the youngest three until social workers are convinced that he acted with discernment.
Maybe, the police and the social workers just want to make sure that when he pulled down his pants, he knew what he was doing then and what he would be doing immediately after; that when he had an erection, he was certain what it was about; and that when he penetrated the girls, he was not thinking that they were playing “balay-balay.”
Pag-sure mo diha sa Lapu-Lapu uy!
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I seriously doubt if Saudi Arabian women have even heard of Andrew E but it seems that they’re really taking the Filipino rapper’s advice to heart: humanap ka ng pangit.
A report in The Weekly Voice said that the wives in that rich Middle Eastern country “are insisting that their housemaids aren’t good-looking.” The reason, as you must have guessed, is that they don’t want any competition for their husbands.
Wives are demanding to see photographs of prospective staff to ensure that the arriving maids are not beautiful, the Voice reported, because “of fear that a pretty employee could cause problems within the family.”
Significantly, and I hope that this is not a putdown on Filipino women working in Saudi, the requirement (to preview the recruits’ photographs) applies only to those coming from two countries.
“Some wives have already contacted us to say that if their husbands want maids from Chile or Morocco, they must first see the maids before accepting them,” the paper quoted the director of a recruitment office in Jeddah as saying. “Their main condition was that these maids should not be pretty.”
I hope Filipino wives – and husbands would not insist on the same practice. Can you imagine placing a “Help Wanted” ad that lists down the qualification, “Must Be Ugly”? I doubt if any applicant would show up.
(frank.otherside@yahoo.com)