Homicides prompt soul-searching in RP

By Mike L. Tan

MANILA: Bryan Macagba Zuckor's obituary in a local newspaper had his picture and a brief anguished caption: "was killed for no reason ... by a schoolmate wielding a gun in Santee, California on March 5, 2001." Bryan was 14. His mother is one of the Macagbas of La Union, a well-known family of physicians.

Only a few weeks earlier, another Filipino-American made headlines, this time as the predator. Police raided the home of Al Joseph de Guzman, a 19-year-old college freshman in San Jose, California, and found 30 pipe bombs, 20 Molotov cocktails, four rifles, a sawed-off shotgun and a cache of ammunition. They also found an audiotape where De Guzman apologized to his parents, friends and the mass media, in anticipation of his plan for a shoot-out and bombing of his college.

The case of the two Filipino-Americans and the surge of violent incidents (e.g., the latest hazing death in the military academy) here in the Philippines remind us that we need to look more closely into our own culture of violence.

In 1997,the United States had a homicide rate of 6.8 per 100,000, the highest among developed countries, exceeding even war-ravaged Northern Ireland's rate of 6 per 100,000. But if violence in the U.S. seems horrendous, note that our homicide rate in 1996 was 16.2 per 100,000, more than double that of the U.S.

Violence has reached epidemic proportions in our country, ranking, through the years, among the leading five causes of death in the country. In 1996 alone, homicides accounted for more than 11,000 deaths.

What factors contribute to our culture of violence? An instinctive reaction, which I also had, was to blame it on guns. But it turns out that guns were implicated, at least in 1996, in "only" about 20 percent of our homicides. It seems then that our violence involves more than guns.

We stab, strangle, poison, bludgeon people to death, and sometimes for the most trite of reasons, even that "dirty look."

A whole book could be written about our culture of violence but our tribalism and feudalism amplifies this culture. Our primitive tribalism pits Filipinos against Filipinos based on loyalties to a fraternity, religion or ethnicity. We are trapped in an endless cycle of attacks and counterattacks to reclaim lost "honor."

Feudalism also contributes to violence with its emphasis on power derived from brute force. In a feudal system, a person can be violent simply because he is in power -- the kind that "authorized" Rep. Jose Mari Gonzales to slap the House security chief last year. This feudal violence helps us to understand why hazing becomes so violent -- the "masters" are intoxicated by their total control over the neophytes. These feudal relationships also perpetuate the violence year after year -- today's neophytes become next year's masters, with a new batch of neophytes to victimize.

Our feudal relationships also contribute to violence because of the tremendous pent-up anger it creates on the part of the underdog. This is where the school shoot-outs in the United States offer us insights. After the guns have died down, classmates and teachers will remember the assailants were "quiet" but isolated, or sometimes even bullied.

De Guzman was described as a "choir boy." De Guzman was probably "typically" Filipino, a patient people known for two bloodless political revolutions. Yet these very same gentle souls can and do break out in homicidal rage, when honor is tarnished, when they are socially isolated, or when they can no longer take the bullying.

In the Philippine context, rage often accumulates because our feudal norms dictate that we defer, silently, to elders, employers and other "superiors," even if we believe they were wrong. Western psychiatrists of an earlier era used to describe what they thought was an innate tendency, among the "Malay race," Filipinos included, to run amok (the word is itself Malay). Today's social scientists see these rampages more as a consequence of a society's lack of mechanisms for conflict resolution.

It's not surprising that as "civil society" develops, the homicide rates drop. These societies develop ways for face-to- face conflict resolution, unlike tribal societies where the aim is to mobilize friends and relatives to get back at someone. A "civil society" also reduces violence by regulating power, so that no one is beyond the reach of the law and ethical norms. When people know justice will be meted out, they are less likely to take the law into their own hands, as we often see in the Philippines.

While guns figure only in 20 percent of our homicides I worry about how these weapons may in fact delay the development of a civil society and a decrease in homicide rates. Pro-gun advocates say that the guns are there mainly for defense or for sport, but they should prove that this is the way the majority of Filipinos perceive guns.

Ask a young boy and he already sees guns as badges of masculinity, as tools to wield power and to get one's way. Whether it's the underdog security guard tired of being bossed around or the power-hungry politician, having a gun on hand, makes it so much easier to lose control, to run amok.

What we need are rigorous studies, breaking down the homicide statistics and interviewing people to look for patterns in the violence, and the triggering factors.

We may need to go beyond the homicides and look at other violent incidents, down to the domestic level of wife-battering for example, to understand the way our social structures and values converge to control, or abet, violence.

-- Philippines Daily Inquirer/Asia News Network