In this photo taken on December 2, 2020, Rose Alvarez, 16, -- whose name AFP has changed to protect her identity -- speaks during an interview inside a health centre in Manila. - The Catholic-majority country has one of the lowest ages of consent in the world, allowing adults to legally have sex with children as young as 12 if they agree. Congress now looks set to approve a bill to raise the age to 16. (Photo by Ted ALJIBE / AFP) / To go with AFP story Philippines-crime-teenagers-sex, FOCUS by Allison JACKSON
Manila teenager Rose Alvarez was 13 when she started having sex with a man who was more than twice her age. That would be statutory rape in most countries, but not in the Philippines.
The Catholic-majority country has one of the lowest ages of consent in the world, allowing adults to legally have sex with children as young as 12.
Child rights activists have lobbied for decades to increase the age — enshrined in the penal code since 1930 — but faced resistance from what they describe as a “culture of patriarchy” in a country where abortion and divorce are illegal.
Congress now looks set to approve a bill to raise the age to 16.
Campaigners say the legislation would help protect youngsters in a nation that has become a global hotspot for online child sex abuse and where more than 500 teenagers get pregnant and give birth every day.
“This is a victory for Filipino children,” Patrizia Benvenuti, UNICEF’s chief of child protection in the Philippines, said recently as the proposed legislation moved closer to a final vote.
“Pegging 12 as the age of consent is really not consistent with scientific studies on brain development.”
Alvarez, who got pregnant when she was 14, says she now realises she had been too young for a sexual relationship and the demands of motherhood.
“I was still a child then, I didn’t know anything about sex,” Alvarez, now 16, told AFP at a clinic run by the Likhaan Center for Women’s Health in Navotas, one of the poorest areas of Manila.
“I was telling him to use a condom… but he removed it. He didn’t want to use it,” said Alvarez, whose name has been changed to protect her identity.
Alvarez — who until the age of 12 thought it was possible to get pregnant from kissing — said she was drunk the first time she slept with the man, who was about 29 when they met on Facebook.
“When I woke up I was shocked to see blood in my underwear and it hurt a lot,” she recalled. “I was too intoxicated to know what was happening.”
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