Teenagers inside Iloilo motels

By Alex P. Vidal

“No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.”—Plato

WE laud the move of the Iloilo City Government’s Task Force on Moral Values and Formation (TFMVF) in trying to prevent teenagers or minors from entering the motels and other prohibited places for youngsters, especially during the recent Valentine’s Day.

TFMVF chief Nestor Canong and his team may have all the best intentions, but even after collaborating with taxi companies, they still couldn’t prevent some teenagers from staying away from motels that are now mostly drive-ins, where it is easy for customers to enter without being scrutinized by authorities.

It is now becoming increasingly difficult for any authority to distinguish an adult from a teenager based only on their physical appearances without proper identification.

Age, like romantic love, nowadays can be faked.

TFMVF had earlier reminded taxi drivers of the existing ordinance prohibiting minors from entering accommodation establishments.

But taxi drivers don’t have the capacity to determine their passengers’ real age unless they will be required or mandated by law to ask for their birth certificates or identification cards (IDs) before agreeing to bring them inside the motels.

Nowadays there are teenagers who look like 20 to 24 years old. Cab drivers just don’t have enough time to check or argue with young passengers who might present bogus IDs and other documents to pretend they are of legal age.

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Not all couples intending to spend Valentine’s Day inside the motels—or even during normal days—are teenagers or minors.

There are adults who accompany teenage partners or sex workers; or adults with teenage or even minor “sweethearts”—males or females.

All over the country, it’s hard to stop eager and enterprising teenagers or minors from landing inside the motels.

There are many ways to skin a cat, so to speak. They can use a disguise or ask cab drivers to bring them only outside the motels and once they have alighted, they can walk casually in going inside the drive-in gates.

Canong wanted to remind the metropolis’ cab companies of the existing Regulation Ordinance ‎No. 2025-447, which aims to protect youngsters from sexual exploitation and other abuses.

Even if under the ordinance, lodging houses, pension houses, inns, hotels, motels, apartelles and other similar establishments are barred from accepting those below 18 years old, many customers below 18 were still able to enter the above-stated establishments.

Preventing teenagers from entering the motels is like preventing a corrupt government official from asking kickbacks from DPWH contractors.

It’s something that can be done but hard to implement. It’s impossible to happen, in other words.

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DO WE HAVE DOUBLE STANDARDS? We certainly do, say editors of Men’s Health. The questions: “Do you feel men are naturally monogamous?” and “Do you feel women are naturally monogamous?” The variance in the responses is staggering. YES (26 percent men, 55.5 percent women) NO (65.3 percent men, 33.8 percent women) NO ANSWER (8.7 percent men, 10.7 percent women)

AVOID CHEMICALS IN OUR CANS. Canned food alert: Consumer Reports found bisphenol A-a chemical linked to reproductive problems, diabetes, and heart disease–in all 19 brandname canned foods it tested, including those labeled BPA free. Because levels vary so widely, even among cans of the same product, there’s no way to predict how much we’re getting.

REENERGIZE WITH EXERCISE EARLY EVENING. Even though we’re tired, forcing ourselves to do aerobic exercise will energize us for a couple of hours and make it easier to fall asleep at night. Our body temperature naturally falls at night, shortly before bedtime, so the natural dip in temperature that happens about 2 hours after a workout can help us get to bed at a decent hour and wake up refreshed the next morning.

SEX REVS UP IMMUNE SYSTEM. Researchers from Wilkes University showed that college students who engaged in sex once or twice a week had 30 percent higher levels of infection-fighting antibodies than did their abstinent classmates.

RECORD VIEWERSHIP. One hundred twenty-three million and four hundred people watched Super Bowl LVIII, setting a new viewership record as the most-watched TV broadcast in a generation. It was the biggest audience since the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two daily newspapers in Iloilo.—Ed)