Misdirected wrath

Netizens have found another artista to attack, apparently. Following the terrible gun shooting that shook a quiet town’s (and the whole country’s) sense of equilibrium recently, someone dug up a statement that actress Anne Curtis made against lowering the minimum age for the criminally liable to nine years old.

Anne, a UNICEF ambassador, naturally pushed for the protection of children’s rights. She spoke up against Republic Act 9344, saying there already was a Juvenile Justice Act that was properly funded and fully implemented anyway. She added that if a child was exposed to an adult criminal environment as the penalty for a crime, it would do the child more harm than good.

Instead, she stressed, we should focus on proper rehabilitation and care. After all, children who are in conflict with the law are often victims of their circumstances. Family life, the school environment and society do influence a child’s life more than we care to acknowledge.

And for those two minors to end up wielding real guns and aiming them at their classmates in the sunny islands of the Philippines? It is more telling of the state of our lives than it is of a celebrity’s opinion.

It should make us reflect on why Filipinos would direct their grief and wrath over the deaths of innocents in that school shooting to someone who was, years ago, merely using her social media influence to air her thoughts about children in crime situations. Why deride her views?

Why not be angry at parents who neglect their children’s mental health? Why not blame a curriculum or a school environment that does not nurture values education?

Tacloban’s underage perpetrators got hold of guns and bullets. How did they manage that? The two had the gall to post their photos with the guns on social media, and no one noticed enough to feel alarmed. They were able to sneak those weapons onto school premises. What has happened to the security in the places we send our children to learn?

These are questions that need answers, and not why Anne Curtis disagreed with the proposed bill to make children as young as nine answer for crimes in the same way adults do. What happened in Tacloban was a result of many factors, chief among them the diminished values of the youth in a world deluged with violence and corruption, with little accountability.

Bullying is suspected as the main reason for those boys pulling the trigger. While it is a fact that “nearly 76 percent of Filipino students experience some form of bullying,” with “about 36 to 40 percent being bullied multiple times a week,” according to data from the Programme for International Student Assessment and the Philippine Institute of Development Studies, a big factor is what the child experiences beyond the classroom.

A toxic environment at home can spill over to other spaces in one’s life, but more importantly, how does the toxicity develop?

Parents who struggle with finances, from survival mode to status anxiety, can exhibit behaviors that their kids absorb or which affect them negatively. Societal conditions can either be a support or a trigger. A country’s political and economic conditions can cause or contribute to the disintegration of values.

It is a cycle we must recognize and accept so we can fix the problems at their root.