I was in 5th grade the first time I heard my classmates talk about a body count like it was the weather.
It was the early years of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency, and the news in the Philippines was the same every night: police shootouts, grainy CCTV footage, men face-down on wet pavement with cardboard signs around their necks. The anchors called it the war on drugs. The police called it nanlaban — he fought back — every single time. My classmates called it scary. One of them said it quietly one morning, the way you say something you’ve heard your parents say at home: “Even kids got killed.” Nobody argued. Nobody was surprised.
We were 10 years old.
That is the specific texture of what it meant to grow up in Duterte’s Philippines — not just the politics of it, not the international headlines about extrajudicial killings and human rights violations, but the smaller, quieter thing that happened in classrooms and at dinner tables across the country. A generation of children learning, without anyone intending to teach them, that killing was a reasonable instrument of governance. That the state could point at a person and say criminal, and that would be enough. That bodies on sidewalks were just part of the news cycle, somewhere between the weather and the sports scores.
Between 2016 and 2022, somewhere between 6,000 and 30,000 people were killed in Duterte’s drug war, depending on whose numbers you trust. The Philippine government counted one figure. Human rights organizations counted another. What nobody counted, at least not loudly enough, was what it cost the children who watched it happen.
My generation watched a president brag about killing on live television and get applauded for it. We watched the police use the word nanlaban so many times, it stopped meaning anything. We watched international bodies raise alarms and get told to mind their business. We watched adults — teachers, parents, officials — absorb all of it and keep moving, because what else do you do when the violence is coming from the top?
And now those same institutions want us to trust them.
This is the part that doesn’t make the international news, the part that gets lost when journalists write about Duterte’s legacy as a political story rather than a generational one. The damage wasn’t only done to the people who were killed, though God knows that damage was enormous and real. The damage was also done to everyone who grew up watching it happen and had to figure out, on their own, what to make of a government that murders and calls it policy.
What my generation made of it, mostly, is anger. Not the loud performative kind — the quiet kind that settles in when you’ve watched enough things get called normal that shouldn’t be. The kind that makes you skeptical of every official statement, every press release, every politician who stands at a podium and talks about protecting the people. We grew up in a country where that language was used to justify killing. It is very hard, after that, to hear it used and feel anything other than tired.
I became a journalist because I got tired of watching people move on from things that should have stayed uncomfortable. Writing felt like the only way to stop looking away.
That’s not a heroic origin story. It’s just what happens when you grow up in a country that normalizes the wrong things and then wonders why its young people are disillusioned. You either look away or you don’t. Most people look away because looking away is easier and because the alternative — staying with the discomfort, writing it down, insisting that it matters — costs something.
The Philippines is now grappling with a school shooting in Tacloban City that killed three students. The political response has been to blame video games and push to lower the age of criminal liability to 10. Nobody in the Senate is asking what it means that an entire generation of Filipino children grew up watching their government model violence as a solution.
A 7.8 MAGNITUDE QUAKE KILLS 12, DESTROYS BUILDINGS AND SPARKS TSUNAMI IN SOUTHERN PHILIPPINES
I already know the answer. I was one of those children.
The least we can do — the very least — is stop pretending we don’t.
Luther Saturion is a Filipino high school senior, student journalist, and opinion columnist, and a member of The Frontman, the official publication of the Philippine League of Column Writers. His work has appeared in Philippine national publications.