It seems the president is nowhere near sorry when it comes to rape jokes.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte defended his controversial rape joke in a speech before the Filipino community in Jerusalem, Israel on Sunday (Israel time). The president said he is simply exercising his freedom of speech, according to ABS-CBN.
Not backtracking on his fallacious belief that only beautiful women can get raped, he said in Filipino: “I said there probably was a lot of beautiful [women] in Davao [which is why Davao has high rape cases]. I didn’t say they were all raped.”
Duterte insisted that he has the freedom to say whatever he wants. “And this is [a] democracy. Freedom of expression,” he added.
He made the controversial joke during a speech in Mandaue, Cebu last week. There, he said in Visayan: “They said there are many rape cases in Davao. As long as there are many beautiful women, there will be more rape cases.”
Understandably, this did not sit well with Filipino feminists, including the group GABRIELA Women’s Party. GABRIELA posted a statement on its Facebook account where it called the joke a “flamboyant display of misogyny, which places more Filipino women at risk of rape.”
GABRIELA also stated: “A person who finds pleasure in the mass killings of innocent people and who finds humor in demeaning women and enabling rapists is not fit to be President.”
Data released by the Philippine National Police (PNP) last week show that in the second quarter of this year, Davao City had the highest number of rape cases at 42, GMA News reported.
Quezon City followed with 41 and the City of Manila was third with 32.
The president seems to be strangely fixated on rape.
Back in 2016, when he was still campaigning for the presidency, he joked that as mayor, he should have been the first person to rape an Australian missionary who was sexually assaulted during a deadly prison riot in Davao in 1989.
He defended himself by crediting it to the “gutter language” he learned from his childhood.
