Every March, women are celebrated. For the rest of the year, we are put on trial. This contradiction is not new. Rather, it is one that the country has grown comfortable living with.
This implication mirrors Filipino women everywhere. At home, 17.5% of women aged 15 to 49 have experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence from an intimate partner, and two in five of these survivors never seek help. In the workplace, one in five women experiences violence or harassment, while still earning less than men for the same work.
Meanwhile, online spaces reflect the same pattern. Between January and June 2025, dozens of cases of gender-based violence were recorded, most involving women, girls, and minors. Yet the first question asked is still almost always what she sent, rather than what he did.
The root of that contradiction is patriarchy, not as an abstract idea but as a system reinforced in homes, schools, media, and even in legal spaces where authority should protect rather than question. Because of this, it has become so embedded in Filipino culture that many no longer recognize it as something that can be challenged or changed.
It explains why a woman who is beaten is asked what she did to provoke it. It is also said to explain why misogyny, homophobia, and other forms of gender-based harm are treated not as systemic failures, but as isolated incidents that repeatedly happen to the same kind of person.
When a woman reports harassment or assault, the questions that follow are rarely directed at the perpetrator. Instead, they are directed at her: why was she dressed that way? Why was she there at that hour? What did she do to provoke it? These are not neutral questions. Anyone who asks them, whether a prosecutor, a neighbor, or a well-meaning bystander, participates in the same logic that protects abusers. This is because the question itself already implies that the woman had a role in what was done to her.
Despite legal protections such as the Anti-VAWC Act and the Safe Spaces Act, only one in every ten cases is reported to authorities. This silence is not accidental. Instead, it is a rational response from women who have seen how the system works. They have watched blame shift toward them at the barangay desk, in the courtroom, and in everyday conversations where what she was wearing is asked before what was done to her. While laws may be written, culture ultimately decides whether they are enforced.
Others may argue that these questions come from good intentions — that asking what she wore or why she did not leave sooner is simply looking out for her, or warning other women. But intention does not determine impact. When concern is directed consistently at the victim and never at the perpetrator, it does not protect women. It protects the culture that harms them. Good intentions, left unexamined, become the quiet foundation on which perpetrators are excused and survivors are left without recourse.
What needs to change, therefore, is not only the reinforcement of the law on paper but also the question in the room. The shift begins the moment we stop interrogating women’s choices and start confronting the perpetrator’s sense of entitlement. This shift must happen in barangay halls, workplaces, classrooms, and everyday conversations. It begins with refusing to ask questions that shift blame and, more importantly, with challenging those who continue to do so.
Until this country stops directing its questions at women and starts demanding accountability from the culture that protects perpetrators, honoring women for one month means nothing—because she was never the problem, the system that keeps asking if she was, is.
Sources:
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/2146826/nearly-7000-vawc-cases-logged-from-aug-to-nov
https://press.un.org/en/2025/wom2246.doc.htm
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10387730/
https://grokipedia.com/page/Rape_in_the_Philippines