EDITORIAL - Neanderthal

Che Tiongson would have wanted to keep her suffering a private affair. But last Wednesday, the father of Tiongson’s five children was all over the airwaves, boasting that he had beaten her up together with her lover after finding them in what he described as an incriminating moment in her apartment.

The man, Luis “Chavit” Singson, told the press it was the second time that he had caught his common-law wife of 17 years together with another man. They were lucky, he added, that he was kind enough not to kill them. Singson repeated the same arguments yesterday after Tiongson came out in the open to tell the nation, complete with pictures from the past, that she had been a battered woman for many years.

This is the deputy national security adviser, and he is admitting to domestic violence — a public crime under Republic Act 9262, or the Anti-Violence Against Women and their Children Act of 2004. RA 9262 imposes prison terms plus fines ranging from P100,000 to P300,000 and requires mandatory psychological counseling or psychiatric treatment for those found guilty of physical, sexual and psychological violence as well as economic abuse of women and their children. The law provides protection to wives, ex-wives, and women with whom the accused has a “sexual or dating relationship” or with whom he has “common children.”

Singson, who still lives in the Neanderthal age when men treated women like chattel to do with as they please, probably thinks his case is similar to that of a cuckolded man who can murder his wife and her lover and get away with a virtual slap on the wrist — destierro, or banishment. He has obviously never heard of RA 9262, or older laws against physical injuries. And even if he has, he obviously does not think the arm of Philippine law is long enough to reach him.

Malacañang’s reaction to the case surely emboldened him. The deputy national security adviser, according to Press Secretary Cerge Remonde, should “behave.” This is from an administration that is headed by a woman. In other societies where the rule of law prevails, a Cabinet member who brags about breaking the law will not last another day in office. In Philippine society, a man who beats up a woman does not lose his government job or go to prison; he brags about his machismo, on national TV.