SUPPORTING a so-called better half or lifetime partner is not for either the husband or the wife alone; it is a mutual arrangement of the couple under their marital contract, according to the Supreme Court (SC).
THE SC issued this observation as it exonerated a former overseas Filipino worker who was convicted by a lower court for alleged failure to support his wife.
The trial judge sentenced the man up to six years in prison for violation of Republic Act (RA) 9262 or the Violence Against Women and Their Children law.
In its ruling released online on Thursday, the SC emphasized that a husband’s failure or inability to provide financial support to his wife does not automatically mean he broke the law on violence against women.
“The obligation to provide support is imposed by the law mutually upon both spouses. The obligation is not a one-way street for the husband to support his wife,” the High Tribunal explained.
“The wife has the identical obligation to provide support to her husband. The law certainly did not intend to impose a heavier burden on the husban to provide support for his wife, or institutionalize criminal prosecution as a measure to enforce support from him,” the ruling stated.
Although RA 9262 was enacted to protect women, the SC asserted it did not intend to limit or discount their capacity to provide for and support themselves.
“The law cannot presume that women are weak and disadvantaged victims. The wife was a person fully capable of providing for herself. She was gainfully employed as a massage therapist and owner of a sari-sari (retail) store. She was not a destitute victim who had no choice but to depend on her husband’s money to live,” the SC noted.
The SC added that it “would be gravely erroneous to interpret and apply the law in a manner that will perpetuate gender disparities that should not exist.”
The SC decision overturned a Court of Appeals’ ruling which had affirmed the trial court’s order.
The couple with the marriage on the rocks wed in 2002 and two years later, the husband left the country to work abroad. The union bore no children.
The husband stopped remitting money to his wife after a few months of his employment as a seaman and suggested that she considers living with her parents in the province.
The wife eventually sued the husband in 2016 for alleged violation of RA 9262, asserting that the husband “willfully, unlawfully and feloniously commit psychological violence and economic abuse upon his wife, by then and there abandoning her and denying her financial support, thereby causing substantial, mental or emotional anguish, public ridicule or humiliation to his wife, to the damage and prejudice of the said offended party.”
The husband claimed he was only forced to marry his wife and had to stop sending money after his parents were struck with cancer. Upon his return in 2007, he found work but admitted he did not contact his wife nor send financial support.
In 2017, the trial court convicted the husband and ordered him to pay a fine of P100,000 in addition to psychological counseling.
The CA denied the husband’s appeal in 2019, saying stopping financial support and communication caused the wife pain and psychological suffering.
The SC maintained however, that if the wife “truly needed financial support, it is only expected based on human experience that she would have at least exerted efforts to obtain it. The fact that she did not do anything whatsoever to get support prior to filing this criminal case cast serious doubt on her claim that she needed it.”