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AUSTRIAN Josef Fritzl horrified the world with the recent exposure
of his evil crimes of incest. Fritzl had detained his daughter
Elisabeth in the basement in their residential abode, raped her for
24 years, fathered seven children with his daughter, detained these
children along with his daughter, and continuously intimidated and
threatened his whole family about killing them by gassing their windowless
bunker if anything happened to him. Such horrifying incestuous
abuse happened undetected for 24 years because nobody cared enough.
Not even Elisabeth Fritzl’s mother, who lived with her husband and
tolerated his abuse.
But this horrific story of incest and pedophilia
is not shocking to Filipinos. In fact, the Philippine Supreme Court
once acquitted Austrian pedophile Heinrich Ritter in 1991 for the
sexual abuse of an 11-year-old child, Rosario Baluyot. The child was
a vagrant streetchild in Olongapo City. She was befriended by Ritter
and brought along to his apartment with another streetchild. Ritter,
using friendly persuasion and influence, adult ascendancy and money,
made them perform perverse sexual acts. At one point, during that
fateful night, he inserted a dildo vibrator into the young child’s
genital organ. It broke and the vibrator’s rotor got stuck inside
the child’s genitals. She died some months later from genital
infection.
The Supreme Court acquitted Heinrich Ritter for
the crime of Statutory Rape. Statutory Rape is the presumption that
a male person who has sex with a female minor below 12 years old is
guilty of rape. Consent of the minor is not an issue nor is it
considered an exempting circumstance. The legal principle is that
the minor, being of tender age, cannot consent to any act of sex
because such minor is legally presumed innocent, inexperienced,
immature, and incapable of discerning or appreciating the
consequences of such conduct or behavior.
But why did the Supreme Court acquit Heinrich
Ritter of Statutory Rape? Accordingly, the court argued that the
child’s age was not proven because of the submission of
conflicting birth and baptismal documents, which did not
conclusively establish the child’s age to be eleven years old. So,
since there were no pertinent documents on which the court could
base a conclusion finding the Austrian pedophile guilty of Statutory
Rape, the court assumed that the child was older than 11 years old,
or that she was at least 12 years old. It further argued that since
the child was not necessarily 11 years old, then the issue of
consent becomes an element that should be considered. Since it was
Baluyot who had gone and visited Ritter, then she had consented to
his company and ultimately, to the sexual acts which he performed on
the minors. Austrian Heinrich Ritter’s story, like Austrian Josef
Fritzl’s story, is nothing more than a betrayal of children and
the participation of society in such betrayal.
With the development in the criminal case
against Congressman Romeo Jalosjos in its laudable decisions of
finding him guilty beyond reasonable doubt of several counts of
Statutory Rape and Child Sexual Abuse, we sincerely thought that the
Supreme Court had finally resolved its moral mettle of courage and
strength in protecting Filipino children and that the era of
enlightenment in child nurturance and proper parenting had finally
arrived in the Philippines. Until this recently dismissed
administrative complaint that was filed in the Supreme Court against
their own Budget Aide Leonardo Tisado Ibarra for Grave Misconduct,
particularly for his Incestuous Sexual Assault on his own biological
daughter (whose family name differs from Ibarra’s family name and
shall not be mentioned for confidentiality purposes). The Supreme
Court dismissed the administrative case because the incestuous
conduct was not work-related, without prejudice to the conviction of
Ibarra in a criminal complaint. This virtually means that Supreme
Court employees can commit murder and rape, and they shall not be
dismissed from their employment in the Supreme Court because these
are not work-related acts until they are convicted of such crimes.
Shocked by this Supreme Court decision, which made no distinction
between administrative and criminal cases, several infuriated child
rights advocates have now volunteered their services to test this
case before the Civil Service Commission in view of the apparent
bias and partiality in such an aberrant judicial resolution, which
manifests no intellectual perspicacity.
The betrayal of children is happening around the
world. But in Austria, government authorities are taking appropriate
measures in holding incest perpetrators and pedophiles accountable
and in protecting child victims by summarily allowing administrative
change of identities, psychological rehabilitation, foster parenting
and immediate adoptions, and their residential transfers. In the
Philippines, however, we still have to confront the continuing
betrayal of children, which happens daily. Children will have to go
to courts just to testify; adoptions and change of names are allowed
only through adversarial judicial proceedings; and family court
judges will order their reintegration with incest perpetrators
because they happen to be the children’s biological parents.
ericfmallonga@yahoo.com
Eric F. Mallonga is an international lawyer
and lecturer, who holds a Master of Laws degree in International
Family and Child Law with Merit Honours from the University of
London. His incisive columns, sometimes fearless academic critiques,
comprehensively straddle multitudinous issues on free expression,
human rights and humanitarian law, political analysis and education,
environment and global warming, global economics and international
trade, developments in family and intercountry adoption laws, and
children’s human rights.
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