ed counselors alternately take calls from distressed women and children. But this is no ordinary women‘s crisis center run by some private and non-government groups for battered wives or rape victims and physically abused children in the Philippines.
The freshly painted lavender-and-pink office is actually a police station in Manila, manned by an all-woman team trained to handle crimes committed on women and children.
“Our job is really more difficult than solving murders and robberies,” Chief Superintendent Yolanda Tanigue, head of the national police‘s women and children protection center‘s, told Reuters in an interview. “We‘re dealing with crime victims who went through traumatic experiences and those who would rather keep silent about their ordeal than share their personal shame, guilt and self-pity.”
Tanigue, the first ever Filipino woman police officer to be promoted to general, heads about 3,000 women who work in similar centers in police stations across the country.
The Philippines‘ 110,000-strong national police force has about 10,000 women.
A trained social worker before she joined the police 28 years ago, Tanigue said she was concerned over the rise of domestic violence cases in the Philippines since 2004, when wife abuse was criminalized by law. From about 200 cases of assault on women investigated in 2004, the number had risen to more than 2,300 complaints last year. But there could be a far bigger number of unreported cases, she said.
“I really don‘t believe Filipino men are wife-beaters,” the soft-speaking Tanigue said. “But, some men are afraid they will be called ’under the woman‘s skirt‘ and beat their wives just to show they are macho and the boss in the house.”
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
Since the mid-1990s, the Philippines started putting up women and children‘s desks in police stations across the country, but it was only this year that the concept of an all-woman police station to handle such crimes was put into motion.
Apart from its pastel-colored building, Tanigue‘s office is not your usual drab police station. It has a spacious garden and a playground and the rooms are decorated like a kindergarten school.
The only indication in Tanigue‘s pink-colored room that it was part of a police station is the display of her personal general‘s flag, rows of medals and her uniform. Beside her huge desk is an altar with several icons of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.
“We‘re still adding up new facilities to cope with our work,” she said, hoping to open half-way houses for distressed women and children as well as training areas.
She said hundreds of women police officers were trained in different parts of the country to handle investigation of women and children cases as well as offer gender-sensitivity courses to male police officers.
“Our biggest challenge is not to educate our women to stand up for their rights, it‘s actually how to raise awareness and to make men respect our rights,” Tanigue said.
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