Gang-banged

It was the kind of news that sudden gets you by surprise, the kind that seems so incongruous with the setting that is Lianga that it certainly got my full attention when I first heard of it.

One community leader from Anibongan, one of the town’s outlying barangays or villages, during an impromptu consultative meeting with municipal officials held in one of Lianga’s seaside restaurants just a few weeks ago had voiced his concern about the emergence of youth gangs in the small community high school in his area. He described the gangs as vicious and extremely violence oriented and with a membership base recruited not only from out of school youngsters from the poverty stricken rural areas but from high school students as well.

It turned out that that particular piece of news was not exactly new to many of the participants in the meeting. Almost all of them were aware of the problem but were unsure of how to deal with and approach the situation.

According to information I had pieced later from various sources, youth gangs are a relatively new phenomenon in the campuses of Lianga’s schools. In the past, student fraternities and sororities have always been the norm as far as student groups and organizations were concerned. Violence as a result of fraternity wars or conflicts have been very rare and for the most part these student organizations have been positive influences in the lives of local students.


But Lianga despite its rural character and relative isolation from the world is not completely immune to the changes brought about by the outside world and the influences, both healthy and unhealthy that come together with such changes. The sick allure and glamour of the youth gangs from the cities have simply been among those not so desirable leavenings of urban life that have managed to get through to the local youth culture.

When the gangs, like the BLOODS and CREEPS, which are offshoots of urban youth gangs started putting up their local counterparts in Lianga recently, they found a local youth culture exceptionally vulnerable to their kind of combative and violent mindset. Clothing themselves in such benign concepts such as brotherhood, camaraderie and solidarity, the gangs quickly gained adherents among the young and impressionable who were ill-equipped to resist their aggressive recruitment style.

Persistent reports of habitual drug use and mounting cases of youth vagrancy and delinquency among gang members as well as the gang raping and physical abuse committed especially against female gang recruits started making their way to local community leaders and law enforcement agencies. But the latter have been largely impotent in dealing with the problem not only because of the laws protecting minors in the Philippines but more so because of the lack of adequate training and sensitivity needed for that job.

When the role models for the modern youth gangs like the CRIPS and BLOODS which first made their appearance in the urban ghettos of Los Angeles in the United States in the 1970’s, they were first initially considered more of a public nuisance than an emerging peace and order problem. Nowadays they are a major police problem with international links and ramifications.

Thus the time to deal with the youth gangs in Lianga is now when they are still weak and in their embryonic stages. Aggressive police surveillance and the intensive monitoring of gang activities must be implemented. School and college programs designed to inform students of the dangers posed by these organizations and counteract their recruitment efforts must be put in place. Community and religious leaders must start recognizing the dangers these gangs pose to the community and coordinate efforts to help solve the problem before it get out of hand.

When a female recruit to the BLOODS gang is first initiated into the group she is supposedly asked only one question. “Hirap or sarap?” Roughly translated, she is merely being asked if she wants to do it the hard way or the easy and pleasurable way. The former means a traditional bruising bout with the wooden paddles and physical abuse while the latter simply involves sexual abuse and a gang rape. Either way she loses her dignity and self-respect. Whatever happens, she is essentially scarred and damaged for life.