Silence
Most victims of gang rape remain silent for months before reporting the crime. Obet Montes, coordinator for services of the women's group GABRIELA, says this is due to the victim’s fear of society’s judgment, of not wanting to be branded as “maruming babae” ("dirty woman"). The group says further that a rape victim becomes so afraid that she is going to be blamed for the crime, that she denies that she was violated.
Claire Padilla, a lawyer and advocate of women's rights who prosecuted the case of a 19-year old who had the mental capacity of a six-year old, says that a rape victim who keeps silent becomes easy prey for continued abuse.
Read more about this topic: Rape In The Philippines
Famous quotes containing the word silence:
“As the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into Silence. Silence is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places. She is when we hear inwardly, sound when we hear outwardly. Creation has not displaced her, but is her visible framework and foil. All sounds are her servants, and purveyors, proclaiming not only that their mistress is, but is a rare mistress, and earnestly to be sought after.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Life became a pregnant silence, but it was understood that the silence was to lead nowhere.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)