Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte is not known for his high regard of women. In fact, he is notorious for his lack—no, absence—of respect for women.
In various pronouncements, Duterte boasted of his conquests: wives, girlfriends and others he “maintains.” During sorties, he picked out attractive women and kissed them on the mouth, to their surprise and terror—if not revulsion. In one of the presidential debates, when asked how he could show he respected women, he mumbled something about banning bathing suits on the beach, betraying a superficial, if not outright wrong, notion of gender equality.
Perhaps the most galling was his recollection of the killing of an Australian missionary in his city many years ago, when he said he had wanted to be the first among the prisoners who had raped the woman because she was “so beautiful like a movie star,” as if that justified anything.
The statement gained harsh reaction over social media and made it to international news, even as it failed to dampen the larger population’s adulation of Duterte, something that was shown not only by the surveys that followed but by actual election results. The Davao mayor took on an early lead—and never looked back.
And now he will be the next president and the transition from an Aquino to a Duterte administration has begun. One of the members of the transition team would be Senator Pia Cayetano, sister of Duterte’s defeated running mate and who has positioned herself as a champion of women’s rights in the Upper Chamber.
Cayetano was scored when she did not denounce the mayor’s joke about the Australian woman—perhaps careful to not place her brother’s candidacy at risk—even as she insisted in her Twitter account that her stand on gender issues had not changed and that she had reached out to Duterte’s team after that remark.
Now the senator says she would push for the inclusion of more women in high-level government positions. That the country has had two women presidents does not erase the fact that some quarters of government not only remain dominated by men but are actually hostile and discriminatory to women.
The new administration must look at the plight of marginalized women in conflict-ridden and extremely poor areas. They must be allowed to perform their diverse roles in rearing children, maintaining homes and earning a living. Women community leaders must be heard and empowered. Finally, they must be seen not as weak members of society need protection. They are, instead, citizens who must be accorded respect as any human being deserves.
We cannot wait to be proven wrong. It would take more than appointing a champion like Cayetano for Mr. Duterte to show a decent regard for women and an intention to reverse his reprehensible words.