Pinoy Kasi : Just kids
Inquirer News Service
August 10, 2004
A FEW months back, right before Holy Week, I was at Harrison Plaza taking a breather at one stall, when my attention was caught by an obviously pirated DVD of Mel Gibson's "Passion of Christ" on display.
As I read through the package, the woman vendor whispered into my ear that she also had X-rated films. (Yes, it did occur to me, initially, as odd that the vendor had assumed that someone who would be interested in Gibson's film would also be looking for X-rated films.)
Without waiting for me to ask for
the films, she eagerly brought out several of them, this time
whispering, "Mga bata, sir." I looked at the DVD covers and was
aghast--they were indeed child porn films, mainly Japanese. My shock
gave way to anger, and I just had to tell the vendor that the films were
totally unacceptable. She smiled lamely, and put the stuff away.
I thought of writing about the
incident but never got around to it. Then last week the papers featured
Unicef's report on how serious a problem child pornography was in the
Philippines.
There's been some outrage expressed
but, by and large, public response, including that of the media, has
been quite muted. The anemic response plus other recent developments
makes me wonder if, perhaps, we Filipinos are actually ambivalent not
just about child porn but also about the broader issue of pedophilia and
sex with minors.
A Lolita culture?
Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Lolita," eventually made
into a film, is about a middle-aged pedophile and his infatuation over a
young girl (who, incidentally, isn't totally guileless and is able to
manipulate her seducer).
I'm using the term "Lolita culture"
to refer to entire societies that may actually consider sex with minors
to be almost normal. In Japan for example, porno films play up fantasies
of sex with schoolgirls, and department store announcers take on a
squeaky little girl's voice because that's considered sensual.
We actually have some of that
Lolita culture--just listen hard to some of our women when they want to
be seductive and you'll see some of them do go into that little-girl
voice. Notice, too, how we dress up little girls, their faces fully made
up, and get them to dance ocho-ocho. Maybe, that's all innocent fun but
my gut feel is that there is a Lolita culture to all this, much like
those American beauty pageants where they get little girls to imitate
older contestants.
There's more to this Lolita culture
and a confusing mixture of values around children, families and
sexuality.
On one hand, we deny the need to
have sex education in schools, claiming this will corrupt the young.
Yet, we also carry on with vestiges of older traditions that actually
make the young sexually vulnerable. Remember that as recently as 1989,
girls could get legally married at the age of 14, and that among Muslims
and cultural minority groups, the law still allows marriage of girls as
soon as they reach the age of puberty.
Even if we've raised the minimum
age of marriage to 18, for both males and females, we're still
ambivalent especially about adolescent sexuality. We fear that
sexuality, yet some of our values and norms hold up that sexuality,
especially that of girls, is a prize for men. Ironically, the notion of
chastity, expressed in female virginity, ups the ante for younger girls,
dangling them as the biggest prize in the male race for sexual
conquests. Listen hard to the talk inside beer houses and you'll find,
inevitably, jokes, even songs, about seducing and conquering young
girls.
Male entitlement
The Lolita culture doesn't just
draw from the machismo value of sexual conquest; even more dangerously,
there are notions of patriarchal entitlement at work, of men thinking
they have rights over young girls.
The most extreme form of
patriarchal entitlement is that of men abusing their own daughters and
young female relatives. But this perverse entitlement takes other forms,
as in the cases of men (often with the consent of their wives) pimping
for their daughters. Sometimes the daughters are directly sent into sex
work; in other cases, they're brought to movie talent scouts, or to
"promotions agencies" looking for "entertainers" to send to Japan. In
all these cases, the daughters are expected to sell their bodies as part
of their filial duty, to help support their families.
It's this sense of entitlement that
tempts advertisers to test the waters in using young girls to sell male
products, as in the Kinse Anyos (15 years) case, juxtaposing images of
young girls and rum. If you're alert enough, you'll find other less
blatant but even more disturbing examples. I've written about how very
young children are sent out at night to tug at your heart strings to buy
that sampaguita. Lately, I've also noticed how, in several parts of
Manila, girls in their early teens are being fielded as well. You wonder
why they have to have lipstick to sell sampaguita, and then realize that
with the lips just a shade too red, and a gait where the hips swing a
bit too much, these girls probably aren't just selling flowers.
Let's link all this back to the
more specific problem of child porn. The other week, the police raided a
Laguna resort and were able to rescue several children who were said to
have been recruited to perform for child porn films.
Several of the kids--the TV footage
suggested they were prepubescent--were actually from Leveriza in Pasay
City. That's the extent of parental neglect; kids aren't just roaming
the streets in their neighborhood, or watching porn in someone else's
house, but actually going off now to do porn.
No doubt, poverty comes into the
picture, but I'd also say we need to look at how our cultural norms may
be contributing to these problems. After all's been said about the
Lolita culture and machismo and entitlement, the bottom line is that we
put children in harm's way because we see them as bata lang, just kids,
docile and resilient.
Given the current debates around
family planning, I just have to add here that this "bata lang" mentality
is also one reason why some couples have so many children. Why worry?
The kids aren't extra mouths to feed, but extra hands, extra bodies to
keep the family going.
Back in the 1980s pedophilia made
national headlines in exposés on parents in Pagsanjan, Laguna, literally
selling their sons to foreign pederasts. I remember talking to a
Protestant pastor from that town, and he told me you could tell which
families had sold their sons to the pederasts--their houses were better
built.
We eventually passed laws to crack down on pedophiles and on the trafficking of children, but enforcement tends to be erratic. The Unicef exposé on child porn will get law enforcement agencies on their toes again, but the problems of child sexual abuse will keep recurring if we don't look into our own communities and homes and into our concepts of who a child is.
By Michael Tan
