Rose Alvarez was 13 years old when she began dating a man twice her age, a relationship that would be considered the sexual abuse of a minor in most countries, but not in the Philippines. Although this will soon change.
Legally, any adult can have sexual relations with boys or girls from the age of 12, one of the lowest in the world.
Child protection organizations have been fighting for decades to increase the sexual age of consent enshrined in criminal law since 1930.
But the deep-rooted macho and patriarchal culture has fiercely opposed changes in the archipelago where abortion and divorce remain illegal.
Things should change, however, as the Senate plans to vote in the coming months on a law to increase the age of sexual consent to 16 years and impose sentences up to life imprisonment.
This text will help protect young people in the archipelago that has become a paradise for online pedophiles, where 500 teenage pregnancies take place every day.
– “Was a girl” –
“It’s the victory of Filipino children,” Patrizia Benvenuti, head of UNICEF’s child protection division in the Philippines, recently welcomed.
“Establishing the sexual majority at age 12 contradicts scientific studies of brain development,” he says.
Rose Alvarez became pregnant at the age of 14. Now she knows she was too young to have sex and to live up to the demands of motherhood.
“She was a girl, she knew nothing about sex,” the 16-year-old teenager at a clinic at the Likhaan Center for Mothers’ Health in Navotas, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Manila, told AFP.
“I told him to put a condom on, but he took it off. He didn’t want to use it,” says this young woman who doesn’t want to reveal her real name.
Rose, who thought she could conceive with a simple kiss until she was 12, says she had been drinking a lot the first time she slept with this 29-year-old man she found on Facebook.
“I was too drunk to know what I was doing,” she says. I woke up shocked to find blood on my underwear. It hurt a lot. ‘
– Victims are blamed –
In the Philippines, there is a rape every hour, Senator Risa Hontiveros said in a document in the Senate. Seven out of ten victims are minors, and the vast majority are girls.
A national survey in 2015 found that, according to UNICEF, 20% of young people between the ages of 13 and 17 had been victims of sexual abuse and 4% were victims of rape.
Legal proceedings in cases involving people over the age of 12 are complicated because an excuse for consent is often invoked, said Rowena Legaspi, general director of the NGO Children’s Legal Rights and Development Center.
“Imagine a 12-year-old girl. She is a minor,” he told AFP. “How could I have agreed?”
Increasing the age of sexual consent should also make life more difficult for sexual predators, according to some associations, which advocate more information for young people.
The sexist mindset of many magistrates who tend to blame victims must also be changed, said Legaspi, who reminded that there is no rush to hold rape hearings.
– Perverse Effects –
Others are concerned about the perverse effects of increasing sexual consent, fearing that it hides a problem that will persist and make caring for troubled young women more difficult.
Donna Valdez, 15, says couples should be able to decide if they’re ready to have sex. She was 13 when she found her boyfriend on Facebook ten years older.
After two months of online exchanges, they were asleep and soon became pregnant.
Now they live together and under the new law her boyfriend could be charged with sexually assaulting a minor.
Donna Valdez says she does not regret becoming such a young mother.
“We are happy to be blessed with the arrival of a son,” she explains, as her 10-month-old baby flaps to her knees.
However, he admits that he misses his old life a bit: “Sometimes I would like to go out with my friends and have fun.”