A resolution calling for a legislative inquiry into a string of violent acts carried out by young people was filed Wednesday, August 19, by Senator Risa Hontiveros, who pointed to the recent campus shooting in Zamboanga as the latest example.
Through Senate Resolution No. 610, Hontiveros pushed for a formal investigation into the attack at the Tumaga Campus of Ateneo de Zamboanga University, where two students were killed. The weapons the shooter used, she said, belonged to his father, an employee of the Bureau of Customs.
The senator framed the inquiry as necessary for crafting future legislation, arguing that campuses cannot be allowed to become sites of bloodshed. “While the investigation is ongoing and the motive for the shooting is still unclear, what remains certain is that schools must be zones of peace and learning with no place for violence or killing,” she stated in the resolution.
Adding a grim note to the case, Hontiveros observed that the university had run its first Human-Induced Simulation Exercise only weeks earlier, on July 18, 2026. That drill rehearsed responses to an active shooter, walking participants through lockdown steps and emergency protocols. “It is regrettable that this proactive initiative by the University would come into use so soon,” she said.
She also raised alarm over how the incident spread online, noting that the shooting was livestreamed and that clips spread rapidly alongside unverified claims. Responsible reporting, she argued, is needed “to avoid panic and sowing confusion among the parents and families of the students inside the campus and the public and to discourage copycat crimes.”
For Hontiveros, the Zamboanga attack fits a broader and troubling trend. She recalled that a series of violent episodes had followed the Tacloban shooting, ranging from bomb and shooting threats to a stabbing between students that turned deadly. “This phenomenon of serious violent activity, possibly characterized by nihilist violent extremism perpetrated, by young students against their fellow students in places of learning, while relatively recent, has already cut short one too many lives,” she wrote.
Part of her response involves reshaping pending legislation. During plenary talks on measures against online sexual abuse of children, Hontiveros said she wants to broaden Senate Bill No. 1819 to cover nihilistic violent extremism (NVE) affecting minors. Her Committee on Women, Children, Family Relations and Gender Equality describes NVE as a process in which bad actors online manipulate young people into carrying out atrocities.
“The new title of the bill will be the Child Online Protection and Safety Act, stemming from the recognition that online harms to children are not merely sexual. These proposals are germane to this (proposed) law,” she explained. She credited collaboration with the Department of Justice, the NCC-OSAEC, and child protection NGOs for producing amendments that would hand investigators the same caliber of tools used in anti-OSAEC cases.
Those revisions, according to the senator, would permit investigative subpoenas for subscriber and traffic data, expand intelligence gathering, and enable undercover online operations. The measure would additionally mandate the preservation and retention of digital evidence to help trace more victims and suspects, establish a shared information architecture across Philippine agencies, and open the door to direct coordination with foreign authorities whenever a case crosses borders.
