Dava Maguinda » The Rape of Mariannet Amper

By Dava Maguinda

DAVAO CITY, Philippines — Mariannet Amper is raped!

She was raped when she was alive, she is raped when she is dead.

Based on the findings of the medico-legal officer of the Regional Crime Laboratory, who did a less-than-two-hours autopsy on the exhumed body of the 12-year-old suicide, there were lacerations on the girl’s private parts that suggested rape.

The tough-talking mayor, Rodrigo Duterte, called a criminal investigation on the girl’s death. The police invited the girl’s father and elder brothers for questioning and will subject them to a drug test.

But everybody knows who raped Mariannet Amper.

She was the girl whose suicide rocked the nation because it had put a face to the poverty experienced by the whole country amidst the series of bribery scandals faced by the Arroyo administration. Because her death has become a metaphor, it had not only captured the imagination of people but had turned her into a debate and her body into a battlefield.

The media raped Mariannet Amper. Armed with their camera, they reduced her once quiet life into a commodity for people to consume. Like vultures, they feasted on Mariannet Amper’s death. They came to her house to see how much it has decayed, how its sawali walls crumble at the slightest touch, turning the family’s life inside out.

By portraying the scandalous image of her poverty on television and forgetting to relate it to the extravagance of the government that should have protected a child like Mariannet, the family of Mariannet Amper was robbed of dignity and humiliated in public.

In life, Mariannet Amper’s illegitimate government raped her.

Mariannet lived in a period when government’s penchant to protect foreign interest and the interest of the few had robbed her of her right to a decent life and a secure childhood. Her parents had to eke out a living for the family to survive, leaving Mariannet to confront her own demons alone.

Her government, preoccupied with political survival because of questions of legitimacy, had no time to take into account the conditions of its people, much more of children like Mariannet Amper.

Yes, Mariannet Amper was raped — and the mayor does not have to look very far for the suspects!

He does not have to invite Mariannet’s family, who is still in a state of shock and mourning at the shape that the turn of events has taken. He does not have to exhume the girl’s body from the grave, five days after she was buried, nor invite Mariannet’s father to explain why it took him five days to tell the police what happened. The medico legal does not have to perform the autopsy in a hurry and become defensive in the eyes of the media, just to get to the bottom of the rape.

For everybody knows who raped Mariannet Amper.

Everyone is guilty of that rape.