Written by Zeny Rosales of Family for Every Child
Zeny, from Manila, Philippines, is co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for the Prevention & Treatment of Child Sexual Abuse (CPTCSA), a local Filipino organisation created in 1995. She is also the Vice-Chair of Family for Every Child, an international alliance of local civil society organisations like hers that work on the front-line with vulnerable children and families. This year, a major milestone was achieved when the Filipino legislation around sexual violence and child abuse was changed. In this article, Zeny shares her story of how individual focus combined with the power of networks contributed to making this possible.
Earlier this year, the Filipino government passed amendments to laws on rape and child abuse that finally improved the legal situation faced by children affected by sexual violence. One major amendment was to increase the legal age of statutory rape from 12 to 16. Another was to change the definition of rape so that men and boys could also be recognised as victims, whereas previously only women and girls were recognised as victims of rape.
As an organisation that has been working with children of all genders affected by sexual abuse for nearly 30 years, we are very happy that these amendments have finally been written into law. In particular, the recognition that men and boys can be victims of sexual violence is a huge step forward, reflecting changing attitudes in a heavily patriarchal society that previously ignored the issue.
After training as a mental health counsellor myself, I started my career with the idea that I would be supporting more girls than boys with issues around sexual violence. However, in the end, my first client was a boy – and this experience marked the rest of my career.
At CPTCSA, as well as providing direct support services to those affected by sexual violence, we also hold policy and advocacy work central to our goals. Legislative change can provide the foundations on which programs and support services can then be delivered. Nonetheless, advocating for changes to legislation can take a long time and requires constant lobbying. We generally work to the assumption that achieving policy change can take around five years, and we work strategically on that basis.
In the case of the recently-passed legislation, the road was long. A key moment was when our government produced a baseline report on violence against children back in 2016, which included the finding that boys reported higher incidences of sexual violence than girls. This was a major shock to many people in the Philippines; although as we already worked extensively with boys, we were less surprised. Initially we held back to see how the government would respond to this finding, but after seeing that no clear strategy was being implemented, we decided to take the lead ourselves.
Networking with intention
It was around this time that CPTCSA joined Family for Every Child, a global alliance of grassroots organisations like ours, all working in our respective countries to improve the lives of children and families.
We joined Family not just because it seemed like a ‘nice thing to do’, but with a clear agenda. We wanted to build an international network of support for our national advocacy, and benefit from the experience of overseas colleagues in order to ensure that boys could be better protected in our country. So shortly after joining, we proposed a practice exchange meeting for other members from around Asia to join us in Manila to discuss sexual violence affecting boys. At this meeting, we coalesced around the need for better data in order to be able to lobby our respective governments for change. As a result, Family for Every Child funded each of us to undertake research from the alliance’s central budget. This research later became known as the ‘Caring for Boys Affected by Sexual Violence’ reports, and they provided each of us members with nationally-rooted, context-specific evidence that backed up the need for boys to be better-protected in this largely under-researched topic area.
Once we had the research, of course, we needed to get it out there. Here, again, being part of an international alliance was hugely beneficial. We came together with a number of Family for Every Child’s other member organisations to create advocacy campaigns. We were able to develop campaign materials that each of us could share – which is more efficient than each of us developing individual campaigns – and running our advocacy as part of an international campaign also added extra authority to our messaging when we were lobbying in the Philippines. During this period we were able to build our national network of supportive stakeholders, spread awareness of our nationally-gathered data findings, and engage the support of people and organisations who held the power to change. Our United for Boys campaign was aimed at stakeholders working with children and families, and Blue Umbrella Day was a complementary campaign which focused primarily on changing social norms with the general public. Each provided a real boost to our advocacy work.
These years of ongoing research, dissemination, lobbying and networking all contributed to the recent amendments to the laws in our country. It has been a collective effort on the part of many organisations – not just ours – as well as supportive people within government and other sectors. Of course, legislation needs to be implemented effectively for it to be anything but an exercise on paper; and now we are focusing on building on the laws to ensure that appropriate programmes and services are there to support it. Right now, for example, we’re working with fathers to train them on how to speak with their sons about sexual health and wellbeing. It’s just one of the programmes that is vital if we are to create a society that is truly aware of and responsive to the issues that boys face in regards to sex and sexual violence.
The importance of give and take
Joining Family for Every Child was therefore something we did intentionally in order to support our work around sexual violence, and we found that being part of an international network enabled us to access opportunities and build support in ways we had never done before.
That said, I would also like to think that we have contributed to the rest of the alliance ourselves. CPTCSA joined Family with extensive experience around sexual violence specifically, and around our approaches to successfully partnering with government to mainstream new approaches. So when we joined, I asked myself not only what Family could bring to us, but what we could bring to Family. For me, that’s the key to making a network successful – building on each others’ strengths. Our Family member colleagues at Paicabi in Chile, for example, were experienced in the area of sexual abuse in the Catholic church; and were instrumental in helping us strategise on how to tackle it in the Philippines. And as part of other networks in our country, such as the Child Rights Network, we’ve been able to lend our support to advocacy campaigns led by other trusted organisations, and help each other to apply pressure on those in power together. In the future, I would love to see Blue Umbrella Day grow to be a more widely-recognised international day against sexual violence affecting boys – if that happens, our network of people making positive change will just continue to grow.
But ultimately, success for me is about being clear on your goals and taking clear steps to achieve them. That applies to all of us as individuals, to our individual organisations, and to our local and international alliances. Stay focused, do your work, and one day you’ll achieve your goal – and if you do it with the help of others, even better.
Learn more about CPTCSA here. Learn more about Blue Umbrella Day here.
If you would like to know more about the power of networks for change for young people contact us on kamini@inhiveglobal.org
