women and children champions

I interviewed lawyer Andrey Sawchenko of the International Justice Mission yesterday and I’ve never seen somebody so full of hope for women and children who were once the victims of abuse.

He envisions that someday, women and children—who used to be incapacitated to function as responsible wards of the community because of trauma from abuse—will one day turn their backs from shelters and brave the real world that once stood like a cruel clown to them.

He said IJM is rolling out a program for their clients (IJM’s rescued cases) that will help them gain employment after going through rounds of training on professionalism, hygiene, timeliness as well as skills training.

He also said that he, together with the rest of the IJM team in Cebu, have high hopes for the women and children that they can become, one day, high quality employees.

The program is yet to be tested since at present about ten to fifteen of IJM clients are enrolled in the program’s pilot batch. He said IJM wants to present to the victims “real opportunities.”

In the course of my interview with Mr. Sawchenko, I remembered a subject I took in college called Women Studies. I never came to love that subject because aside from a narrow-minded teaching nun, I am one who will never make a big deal out of equality between men and women.
I go for how men and women are designed by the higher forces. Simply put, men are masculine and women are feminine. And simply by design, there are boundaries to what each is capable of doing and I don’t think that it is because of the dictates of old sages. It is merely because back in the old days, people saw what was fitting and proper.

I used to hear a lot of women advocates of feminism say that the women are the stronger sex because we are capable to bear a child. But it is not necessarily so. We are capable to bear a child because that is how, by nature, we are designed.

In Women Studies, my professor said women were exploited because men do not see women as their equal.

I say women were subjected to exploitation because they are ignorant of the value of their being feminine and most has chosen to go the easy way out. Some just did not see the choices they had.
If the world believes men and women to be equal, it would have been unfair to have special laws in place to protect women and children because there are women who abused men too.

But thanks to IJM, we have champions who never give up rescuing women and children from sex dens, prostitutions and human trafficking. They do not advocate for equality between men and women but they acknowledged the long-known fact that women are, as we are, unique as females—that is why we need the care and protection of those who are most capable to do so, the men.