WHAT has become of the Philippines when a parent can no longer send a child to school without silently praying that the classroom remains a classroom, not a crime scene? What has become of a country where a team-building activity, supposedly designed to strengthen discipline, camaraderie and trust, ends with grieving mothers asking why their sons never came home?
The recent shooting at the San Jose National High School in Tacloban City, allegedly carried out by two minors, is not merely an isolated criminal incident. It is a national alarm bell. Three young lives were reportedly lost. Many more were injured. Hundreds were traumatized. And behind the headlines lies the most terrifying question for every mother and father: If children are no longer safe in school, where exactly are they safe?
The easy explanation is to blame the children. They pulled the trigger. They carried the weapons. They allegedly planned the attack. But that answer is too convenient, too shallow and too cowardly. Children do not grow violent in a vacuum. Children do not simply wake up one morning and become armed perpetrators without passing through many layers of adult failure. Before the gun was fired, there were warnings missed, responsibilities neglected and governance sleeping on duty.
Governance
This is why the Tacloban incident must be treated not only as a police matter but as a governance matter. The more serious crime is not only the shooting itself, but the chain of negligence that made it possible: minors allegedly accessing firearms, entering school premises armed, a public school apparently unprepared for such an emergency, bullying being raised as a possible motive and children exposed to violent online environments without sufficient supervision, guidance or intervention.
Governance is not only about ribbon-cutting ceremonies, foreign trips, photo opportunities, press briefings and grand speeches. Governance is the quiet, daily assurance that a child can enter a school gate and leave alive. Governance is a functioning child-protection system. Governance is school security that works before the tragedy, not condolences after the funeral. Governance is firearm accountability that asks, with ferocity and urgency: How did weapons linked to adults and institutions end up in the hands of children?
The Marcos Jr. administration cannot merely say it is saddened. Sadness is not a policy. Condolences are not governance. A “thorough investigation” is necessary, but it is only the opening paragraph of accountability, not the conclusion. The Marcos Jr. government must stop treating public safety as a press-release function. It must now confront a brutal truth: The Filipino child is increasingly exposed to dangers that the state has not seriously prepared for — violence in schools, bullying, digital radicalization, weak mental-health systems, loose firearm control, poor campus security and a culture of institutional evasion.
Duty of care
For parents, this is personal. A mother does not care about bureaucratic acronyms when her child is hiding under a desk listening to gunshots. A father does not want a post-incident task force when his child is already in the morgue. Parents want prevention. Parents want schools to be sanctuaries, not soft targets. Parents want officials who understand that children are not statistics to be processed after tragedy; they are lives entrusted to the state/government.
The same lens may be applied, though in a different context, to the deaths of Ateneo basketball players Rene Clert Baterbonia and Divine Adili during a team-building activity in Aurora. The Tacloban shooting and the Ateneo drowning are not the same incident. One involves alleged violence by minors; the other involves a school-related activity that ended in death. But they are connected by a common question: Where was the duty of care?
Duty of care is a simple but powerful principle. When an institution takes custody of young people, in a classroom, on a campus, during training, on a field trip or in a team-building activity, it assumes responsibility for their safety. That responsibility cannot be delegated to luck, prayer or after-the-fact sympathy. It requires risk assessment, trained supervision, emergency response plans, parental transparency, and clear accountability and responsibility.
In the Ateneo case, the question is not whether anyone wanted the tragedy to happen. Of course, not. The sharper question is whether enough was done to prevent it. Likewise, in the Tacloban incident, one must ask more than who fired the guns; one must ask who failed before the guns appeared and how the weapons fell out of adult control.
Resilience and safety
The Philippines tends to overromanticize the word “resilience.” But resilience has become an overused national anesthetic. We are told to be resilient after floods, after corruption scandals, after transport breakdowns, after institutional failures, after tragedies involving children. But resilience without accountability is not a virtue. It is abuse dressed in inspirational language.
A country cannot keep asking its citizens to be strong while its institutions remain weak. Is the Philippines still safe? The answer depends on whom one asks. For politicians moving with security convoys, perhaps yes. For officials protected by escorts, gates and protocol, perhaps yes. But for ordinary parents sending children to overcrowded public schools, for student-athletes entrusted to institutional activities, for commuters, workers and families living under uneven law enforcement, the answer is increasingly uneasy.
Safety is not the absence of accidents or incidents. Safety is the presence of reliable systems. And right now, many Filipino parents are seeing too many cracks in the system. The Marcos Jr. government must respond not with ceremonial grief, but with concrete governance. It must act decisively, not theatrically.
The Tacloban shooting and the Ateneo tragedy expose a larger crisis of child safety, institutional negligence and weak enforcement. Schools must be audited nationwide for real emergency preparedness, for armed violence, bullying-related retaliation, online-influenced harm and mental-health crises.
Firearm negligence must also be punished without hesitation. When weapons owned or issued to adults end up in the hands of children, accountability must reach the owners, institutions and the officials responsible. Gun ownership is not a decoration of authority. It is a public trust and responsibility.
Anti-bullying measures must move from paper compliance to actual enforcement. Bullying is not harmless childhood drama; when ignored, it can become a breeding ground for rage, trauma and violence. Equally urgent is the need to treat children’s mental health as essential public infrastructure. Finally, off-campus school activities must be governed by strict safety standards, and post-incident transparency and accountability must become mandatory.
Finally, accountability must reach upward. In the Philippines, accountability often stops at the weakest person in the chain: the child, the teacher, the guard, the coach or the local officer. But real accountability asks what national agencies failed to anticipate, fund, inspect, enforce and reform.
Conclusion
The Tacloban shooting of and by minors and the Ateneo deaths should disturb the conscience of the nation. The Philippines must stop normalizing preventable tragedy. It must stop performing grief and start enforcing responsibility and accountability. For every child lost, every parent shattered and every classroom turned into a place of fear, the question is no longer simply “what happened?” The question is: Who was supposed to prevent this, and why did they fail?
Source: The Manila Times
https://www.manilatimes.net/2026/06/27/opinion/columns/when-government-sleeps-its-young-are-left-unprotected-tacloban-and-ateneo-incidents/2373826
