Running healthy for the Senate
Only 11 of 37 aspirants have expressly made health part of their legislative agenda
By Dong delos Reyes, Contributing Editor
Of the 37 Senate seat-seekers for the 2007 midterm elections, 11 are running healthy-that is, they have included public health among their legislative concerns. The rest can be labeled "unhealthy."
With PhP35,000 in monthly paycheck, about a million pesos a month to pay for support staff and some PhP200 million in pork barrel funds per year, a stint at the Senate ought to be an enriching experience for any hopeful bet lucky enough to win in this year's senatorial race. Tempting, such largesse of pelf and power.
Thus, 79 Senate hopefuls-several of them were jobless-showed up like symptoms of a disease at the Commission on Elections to be listed up as official candidates; 42 were dropped from the Comelec list, deemed as nuisance candidates. Taxpayers can now sift a dozen among 37 remnants-they come from a mixed bag of 13 political parties, each vowing to lessen or maybe wipe out poverty, combat graft and corruption, and, as most prepoll campaign sound bites go, even make your wishes come true by way of legislation.
Two earlier opinion surveys showed that most voters could only muster eight names even from a list of 64 likely candidates for the Senate. That means majority of the 50 million voters will leave empty four slots in the official ballot that calls for 12 lawmakers in Congress's upper chamber. That may also mean that despite a heap of hopefuls to choose from, there's not too many that people can rely on as up to the task of lawmakers.
Lesser chaff can be winnowed off edible grain if voters focus on the platforms these aspiring Senate workhorses, dark horses, and plain donkeys are neighing out. Popularity and personality can be ignored to lend credence to a Sufi saying: "The true sign of intelligence is knowing what things to ignore."
Pore over the list of legislative tasks they have set to tackle once elected. Those tasks ought to be a measure of their competence, probably earnest sincerity to hammer out meaningful change for the nation.
So what's their uptake on public health? The state of people's health can point up programs of governance that are already in place-from maternal and child care programs that curb infant mortality to outreach schemes that instill sound nutrition, hygiene, and quality of life. The state of public health can also point to soundness of policies being implemented to better livelihood and incomes, food security including democratized access to education, health care, and other services.
Unfortunately, public health is doled out a pittance one percent of the national government's yearly budget-or one centavo for health for every peso earmarked for government spending.
Says Kapatiran candidate Dr. Martin Bautista: "How can you expect us to compete in a global market when you have skinny people, sick people, children who don't get vaccines? And right now we're not preparing the next generation well enough because we're not thinking of the future. As I said, you have to make painful choices and think of the future."
With public health as a yardstick of sorts, chaff can be separated from grain. Among 37 senatorial aspirants, 11 chose to include public-health measures in their to-do tasks in the Senate. Five of them are from the Genuine Opposition, four are from Team Unity, and two from Kapatiran. Three are senators seeking reelection; two are from the House of Representatives out for an upgrade; one is an extant provincial governor; five are political neophytes that include a popular actor, a school administrator, an incarcerated rebel soldier, a physician, and a lawyer-broadcaster.
The most daring among the 11: Senate-seat-seeker Sonia M. Roco and reelectionist Panfilo Lacson are likely to draw fire and lesser votes from conservative catholics. Roco and Lacson are batting for population management (read: family planning)-and die-hard Catholics and the Church have shot down every attempt of policy-makers and lawmakers to craft any decent program on women's reproductive rights. They will likely level their guns on Roco and Lacson.
Sen. Lacson ties in population management with poverty alleviation in terse terms: "A family of two or three can better feed that family compared to a family of 10 given the same resources."
The healthy candidates with their uptake on public health:
Sen. Edgardo Angara authored the Mag-na Carta for Public Health Workers, the Generic Drugs Act, the Breastfeeding Act of 1992, the Nursing Act, and the Philippine Health Insurance law.
He is batting for a PhP5-billion allocation for barangay health centers to sustain delivery of health care at the grassroots, and expanded PhilHealth coverage for senior citizens. He wants additional compensation and incentives for the country's employed doctors, nurses, midwives, dentists, technicians, nutritionists, therapists, aides, and other health workers in hospitals, barangay health centers, and health-care units in rural and urban areas. He also wants in place a national program on mental-health education and awareness.
Says Bautista: "I am all for advocating natural family planning which is not only safe, it is also effective. Unfortunately, it is also the most expensive. Why? Because you need to educate all these couples intensively. It's not only [the] woman that you have to educate about natural family planning; it's both. It's the couple you have to educate."
Rep. Allan Peter Cayetano lists health and education as top priorities in his legislative agenda.
Rep. Francis Joseph Escudero seeks to take up health programs for the poor and elderly: "Pagkilala sa karapatang makapagpagamot at gumaling sa anumang karamdaman lalung-lalo na ang mga mahihirap at mga may edad."
Lacson envisions affordable, quality health care as a right not a privilege. He has tasked himself to "support policies and legislation to provide citizens easier access to affordable and appropriate health care, including cheaper and quality medicines.
"Seek the government's commitment to help improve the quality of health education, the system of licensure of health professionals and monitoring of ethical practices in the health industry/sector.
"Support initiatives allocating more funds for pro-poor health programs including anti-TB and the expanded immunization program."
Zambales Gov. Vicente Magsaysay aims to "modernize health system and empower the local governments to enhance basic health-care services as much needed in the purok level."
Award-winning movie actor Cesar Montano includes public health in his list of legislative tasks.
Sen. Ralph Recto is batting for a bigger allocation for health services of the Education department as there is chronic lack of nurses, doctors, and dentists to attend to 17.6 million public-school students: "We only have 86 public-high-school dentists nationwide. We've got more presidential assistants and advisers in the Palace than dentists in high schools."
The DepEd budget for dental care in 2005 was P9 million, which "translates to a per- student budget of 50 centavos. The cost of filling caries or extracting a tooth is Php50. That Php0.50 is not even enough to buy a cotton ball," he cites.
School administrator and seasoned teacher Roco, widow of the late Sen. Raul Roco, has included in her platform women's rights, health, and population control. Reports have it she is not concerned with how she is faring in the survey rankings and would still put to work her advocacy even if she is not elected.
Lawyer-broadcaster Adrian Sison wants to draw up a debt-for-migrant-health-worker policy: "Bawat doctor or nurse
na umaalis ng Pilipinas, may formula tayo na pambayad ng utang doon sa bansa na 'yon na kumuha, para bumaba ang external debt,
dahil ang kapalit noon e tao, buhay ng tao."
Detained rebel suspect Navy Lt. Senior Grade Antonio Trillanes IV includes health and social services in his campaign platform.
And those are your 11 Senate seat-seekers who have fitted out their campaign platforms with public health as a priority worth working for.
With as much resources as about a million pesos a month to pay for support personnel- certain lawmakers don't bother hiring such staff but bother to collect the funds for staff salaries-plus Php200 million per year in greasy pork barrel, the least a taxpayer expects of an elected lawmaker is to carry out the usual medical/dental missions that can chomp as much as Php50,000 a pop as token gesture for the people's health.
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He injures, she endures
Violence against women is "widespread and deeply ingrained and has serious impacts on women's health and well-being," says a World Health Organization study
Dong delos Reyes, Contributing Editor
The child was just another dreamer who wanted to wring the nightmares that reeled off right in their home into something less repugnant. He would hear his mother sob, howl out in pain, break into some more sobbing as the husband had his way with her. Feeling afraid and helpless, the child would go back to sleep and pretend it was all a bad dream.
That dreamer grew up haunted by bad dreams about his mother's sexual torture. He turned into a brutal rapist perpetrating multiple assaults, recounts maverick criminologist Dr. Lonnie Athens who journeyed into the depths of criminal minds and found out what it takes for any person to turn into a monster.
The same nightmares descend upon women throughout the world in their waking hours. The warmth of hell engulfs womankind in the comfort and safety of their homes. Or in more placid terms, women have to bear and rear children plus untold amounts of homespun brutality.
Indeed, a man's home is his castle-torture chambers are aplenty.
"I suffered for a long time and swallowed all my pain. That's why I am constantly visiting doctors and using medicines. No one should do this," groans a woman interviewed in Serbia and Montenegro.
"The beating was getting more and more severe…. In the beginning it was confined to the house. Gradually, he stopped caring. He slapped me in front of others and continued to threaten me…. Every time he beat me it was as if he was trying to test my endurance, to see how much I could take," confesses a 27-year-old university graduate from Thailand.
"My husband slaps me, has sex with me against my will and I have to conform. Before being interviewed I didn't really think about this. I thought this is only natural. This is the way a husband behaves," confides a woman from Bangladesh.
The voices cry in collective anguish in the World Health Organization's Multicountry Study on Women's Health and Domestic Violence. Specially trained teams gathered data from over 24,000 women from 15 sites in 10 countries representing diverse cultural settings. As notions about violence differ between individuals and communities, the WHO study stuck to conservative definitions of violence.
Old-fashioned violence hews along these lines in which an ex or current partner had:
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Slapped her; or thrown something at her that could hurt her;
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Pushed or shoved her;
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Hit her with a fist or something else that could hurt;
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Kicked, dragged, or beaten her up;
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Choked or burnt her on purpose; or
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Threatened her with or actually used a gun, knife, or any weapon.
Conservative sexual violence manifest in these actions:
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Being physically forced to have sexual intercourse against her will.
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Having sexual intercourse because she fears what her partner might do.
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Forced to do a sexual act she found degrading or humiliating.
The WHO study also pointed to acts of emotional abuse that can be more devastating than physical violence:
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Being insulted or made to feel bad about oneself.
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Being humiliated or belittled in front of others.
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Being intimidated or scared on purpose, say, the partner yells and smashes
things.
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Being threatened with harm directly or indirectly in the form of a threat to
hurt someone she cared about.
"Emotional abuse is worse. You can become insane when you are constantly humiliated and told that you are worthless, that you are nothing," rues a respondent from Serbia and Montenegro.
The study implicitly warns damsels-to-be-distressed about the telling behavioral warts of certain princes charming that are likely to turn into toads. The type seethes with heinous jealousy, is overly possessive, acts like a puppeteer toying with a marionette on strings, and he:
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keeps her from seeing friends;
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restricts contact with her family of birth;
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insists on knowing where she is at all times;
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ignores or treats her indifferently;
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gets angry if she speaks with other men;
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often accuses her of infidelity;
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controls her access to health care.
Women themselves point to reasons that cause men to go heavy-handed on their partners. The most common justifications or excuses for inflicting violence? "Not completing housework adequately, refusing to have sex, disobeying her husband, and infidelity," according to the WHO study. Interestingly, the same worn-out reasons turn up daily in Philippine tabloids that often parade reportage on domestic violence and wife-beating incidents as "human interest" stories.
She shouldn't thwart the partner's advances although she doesn't feel like it. Or the husband is drunk and stinks like a dumpsite, or she is sick. From 10 to 20 percent of women in provincial sites of Bangladesh, Peru, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Samoa believe that they have no right at all to refuse to have sex under any of those circumstances-she should always be willing, able, and available.
Because the study used a conservative definition to measure domestic violence, the results are, as WHO cautions, "more likely to underestimate than overestimate the prevalence of violence." But it would be less than sufficient to infer that domestic violence is dangerous to women's health.
Study findings show that physically abused women are more likely to report poor or very poor health than women who had never gone through such partner-inflicted injury.
The study also pinpoints other telltale signs of trauma: "Ever-abused women were also more likely to have had problems with walking and carrying out daily activities, pain, memory loss, dizziness, and vaginal discharge." Women victims also betray emotional distress through symptoms such as crying easily, inability to enjoy life, fatigue, and thoughts of suicide.
"Women who had experienced severe physical violence were more likely to seek support from an agency or authority. The most frequently given reasons for seeking help were related to the severity of the violence (e.g., she could not endure any more or she was badly injured), its impact on her children, or encouragement from friends and family to seek help," the study cited.
And some fight back, particularly the Thai: "Only in Thailand did more than 15 percent of ever-physically abused women report of initiating violence against their partner more than twice in their lifetime."
Some choose to leave their tormentors-and often return to the scene of the crime continually perpetrated on them as they could not leave the children or "for the sake of the family." Other reasons for going back: she loved him, he asked her to come back, she forgave him, she thought he would change, the family said she should return. The horrors unfold anew.
Based on its findings, the WHO drew up a 15-point list of recommendations for governments, policymakers, development planners, institutions, and similar entities to carry out:
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Promote gender equality and women's human rights.
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Establish, implement and monitor multisectoral action plans to address violence against women.
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Enlist social, political, religious, and other leaders in speaking out
against violence against women.
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Enhance capacity and establish systems for data collection to monitor
violence against women, and the attitudes and beliefs that perpetuate it.
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Develop, implement, and evaluate programs aimed at primary prevention of
intimate-partner violence and sexual violence.
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Prioritize the prevention of child sexual abuse.
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Integrate responses to violence against women in existing programs for the
prevention of HIV/AIDS and for the promotion of adolescent health.
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Make physical environments safer for women.
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Make schools safe for girls.
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Develop a comprehensive health sector response to the various impacts of
violence against women.
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Use reproductive-health services as entry points for identifying and
supporting women in abusive relationships, and for delivering referral or
support services.
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Strengthen formal and informal support systems for women living with
violence.
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Sensitize legal and justice systems to the particular needs of women victims
of violence.
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Support research on the causes, consequences, and costs of violence against
women and on effective prevention measures.
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Increase support to programs to reduce and respond to violence against
women.
The study demonstrates violence against women is "widespread and deeply ingrained and has serious impacts on women's health and well-being. Its continued existence is morally indefensible; its cost to individuals, to health systems, and to society in general is enormous. Yet no other major problem of public health has-until relatively recently been so widely ignored and so little understood."
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Sleeping with THE ENEMY, grappling with "HE-MANITY"
Tales of violence women experience from their spouses
Dong delos Reyes, Contributing Editor
Santa Clarang pinung-pino
Kami po sana'y bigyan n'yo
Ng asawang labingtatlo
Sa gulpe walang reklamo.
(Saint Clare most mild
Please do give us
Thirteen spouses
Who won't gripe if they're mauled.)
Lovelorn males on a pilgrimage to Obando town in Bulacan some 30 kilometers north of Manila pray and sway skip and hop to a lilting folk tune in homage to St. Clara. The patron saint is believed to listen to requests for a fiancé. A reworked version of the same folk tune is often sung in booze binges of Filipino men folk-the drinking devotee brashly asks for a retinue of wives, a harem to serve him without qualm or complaint even if he thrashes anyone in such a string of mistresses in his fold.
That reworked folk tune betrays a mindset that afflicts many Filipino men. It is an affliction that may likely have been ingrained by some 300 years of convent trysts with fat padres and over 50 years of necking in cinema shadows with film demigods-it's an acculturation process that reduced women to the level of chattels and playthings. We may have grappled with it in a try to struggle and prevail. Or we must have lost badly, embraced and acquiesced to our conquerors. So we took to their ways. Adopt their norms we unwittingly did.
Well-stacked Roma Batarra (not her real name) doesn't look her age-flirty-something, maybe in her "thrifties" as she tightly holds the purse strings to a thriving publication business. She defied norms, typified the strong woman of substance who runs a tight household and a weekly tabloid. But she sounded like a lost waif as she sobbed a torrent about how her much younger live-in partner beat her black and blue.
Batarra caught him in flagrante with a much younger lover. But he wasn't sorry getting caught. He was sore at Batarra for getting in his way and whims.
So she caught most of the blows the live-in partner rained at her. Nearly bashed to a pulp, Batarra bawled him out of the house, which she owns. The young man stormed out, still heaping verbal abuse and threats at her.
Batarra wielded her influence as a crusty tabloid journalist and got back at the errant partner whose threats of bodily harm were carried out on him. That interesting story how she got even didn't break as news. She confided to an erstwhile editor how she got even, got herself together, and moved on, sense of self-esteem intact. Body bruises can heal.
Not all bruises heal as seen in this bit lifted off a newspaper report: "Insp. Mario Monilar, homicide section chief, told this newspaper that they are still waiting for the documents such as marriage contract and death certificate before they could file a parricide case against the husband. The wife's remains are now at the St. Ignatius Chapel…. She left behind a one-year-old girl. The girl's aunt told investigators the dead woman was a battered wife and had long been taking the abuses."
Cases of violence against women (VAW) that found their way into police blotters bloated from 1,100 cases in 1996 to 7,383 by 2004. The highest recorded number of VAW cases in the police department peaked in 2001 at 10,343. Both the 2004 police and Department of Social Welfare records show that battering and rape are the most common types of reported cases.
Battery cases could be construed as attempts to induce abortion: six of 10 battered women were brutalized during pregnancy. While a child sired on the woman can be living proof of male potency, an additional mouth to feed can wreak havoc on the man's earning capacity.
Every now and then Eileen Corporal (not her real name) meets up with advertising honchos, looking like she had gone through 12 rounds with a wannabe Manny Pacquiao to whom she had been married for 20 years. She'd rather not talk about those bouts. She can leave her man any time she wishes to-she is an heiress to extensive farmlands in Bulacan, she has a stable job that pays well-but she'd rather tough it out. She was brought up, her mindset shaped in time-honored values, maybe quite feudal but she hasn't outgrown that. She isn't looking forward to recurring return bouts to count her mounting losses. She can take the beatings.
Unlike Eileen, Siglynd (an alias) snapped after three children and 18 years of toughing it out as a human punching bag totally dependent on her tormentor for financial support: "I thought, if I got past the experience of being a battered wife for so many years, then I could cope with any other trials that come my way."
She sought help from a nongovernment organization espousing women's rights. The NGO taught her about her rights and helped her obtain a court-issued restraining order for the husband to cease and desist from mauling her. She now runs a thriving cargo-hauling business and sends all her children to school on her own.
In unflinching reminiscence, she muses: "My inspiration are my children. They were also my source of strength during the times that my husband was beating me up. I cannot afford to be weak since my children and I have no one to depend on but myself. I also give credit to the NGOs that not only helped me to stand on my own, but more importantly, helped me banish the trauma from my experience through counseling. Being finally free from my husband, I've now learned to appreciate my self-worth."
In recent years lawmakers have arrayed a legal arsenal to stem the rising tide of violence perpetrated on women and children. The weaponry includes:
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RA 7877: Anti-Sexual Harassment Law;
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RA 8353: Anti-Rape law-elevation of rape as crime against person; expanding
the definition of rape to include marital rape-9 of 10 battered women
experienced marital rape;
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RA 8505: Rape Victim Assistance Act;
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RA 6955: Anti-Mail Order Bride Law;
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RA 9262: Anti-Violence Against Women and Children Law; and
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RA 9208: Antitrafficking in Persons Act.
Buried in Congress is a bill throttled to death by so-called prolife lobbyists and their lawmaker minions, the proposed Responsible Parenthood and Population Management Act. It is grounded on obligations of national and local governments to deliver basic services including basic health, reproductive health, and family planning, with penalties for public officials who shall prohibit or intentionally restrict the delivery of legal, medically safe reproductive-health-care services including family planning. The bill doesn't prescribe two-child family as ideal family size.
Legal weaponry aside, women's rights advocates such as the Cebu-based Lihok Pilipina Foundation have also helped battered women to stand their ground, regain their bearings, and assert their humanity. Tessie Banaynal Fernandez brought the organization to life in 1985 as a group of 20 women to discuss among themselves primary health care, herbal medicines, and family problems.
While a clutch of statutes can be wielded in defense of women's rights, chucking off Jurassic thinking and repressive cultural norms ought to be the more telling tack: "The propensity to do violence begets more violence. When children witness violence, they grow up thinking that it is okay to found a family where violence exists. I think one significant indicator of development and all of the things we are fighting for is being able to uphold the personal integrity of each person. Until we have that, violence in the homes, in the fight for properties or land, and everything else cannot be entirely solved," she points out.
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