MANILA: The rows of fixed lines and a mobile phone hotline never stop ringing as trained counsellors alternately take calls from distressed women and children.

But this is no ordinary women’s crisis centre run by some private and non-government groups for battered wives or rape victims and physically abused children in the Philippines.

The freshly painted lavender-and-pink office is actually a police station in Manila, manned by an all-woman team trained to handle crimes committed on women and children.

“Our job is really more difficult than solving murders and robberies,” said Chief Superintendent Yolanda Tanigue, head of the national police’s women and children protection centre.

“We’re dealing with crime victims who went through traumatic experiences and those who would rather keep silent about their ordeal than share their personal shame, guilt and self-pity.”

Tanigue, the first ever Filipino woman police officer to be promoted to general, heads about 3,000 women who work in similar centres in police stations across the country.

The Philippines’ 110,000-strong national police force has about 10,000 women.

From about 200 cases of assault on women investigated in 2004, the number had risen to more than 2,300 complaints last year. But there could be a far bigger number of unreported cases, Tanigue said.

Since the mid-1990s, the Philippines started putting up women and children’s desks in police stations across the country, but it was only this year that the concept of an all-woman police station to handle such crimes was put into motion.

“Our biggest challenge is not to educate our women to stand up for their rights, it’s actually how to raise awareness and to make men respect our rights,” Tanigue said.—Reuters