*Dr. Rodolfo John Ortiz Teope, PhD, EdD, DM
I write this not merely as an academician or political analyst, nor only as a public safety and law enforcement professor who has spent years examining institutions, behavior, and power. I write this as a reckoning—and I write it as a single father. This reckoning is shaped by scholarship, lived experience, and a young man’s quiet suffering that revealed how fear, when normalized, teaches people to survive by silence—whether inside a family or within the state.
Years ago, I met a young man who lived as if visibility itself was dangerous. He spoke softly, chose his words carefully, and carried himself as though one wrong sentence could cost him everything. To most people, he was just another student trying to finish school. But beneath that calm surface was a life divided. He was gay, and he was hiding—not because he was confused, but because he was afraid.
When his parents were away and the house finally belonged to silence, he would cross-dress, not to rebel or provoke, but simply to breathe. In those moments, alone with walls that did not judge him, he felt briefly whole. He even took hormones in secret, risking his health in the quiet hope that his body might someday reflect who he felt himself to be. As a law-enforcement professor, I have seen many forms of risky behavior, and I know this truth well: people take dangerous paths not because they are reckless, but because safer paths are closed to them. As a father, what wounded me most was not what he did, but why he believed he had to do it alone.
His parents were separated, each with their own partners, each living a different life. He stayed with his father—the one who remained. His father paid his tuition, supported his studies, and ensured that food and shelter were never lacking. On the surface, it looked like stability. He could go home anytime he wanted. Yet in his heart, that freedom felt fragile. He believed, with painful certainty, that if he ever told his father the truth about who he was, his father would erupt in anger, curse him, and drive him out of the house. He did not imagine dialogue or understanding; he imagined exile. Love, in his mind, was conditional. Shelter was revocable. Acceptance had an expiration date.
What made his fear even heavier was that it followed him even when he left the house. He told me that even when he went out—to a mall, a public place where people laughed, shopped, and moved freely—he carried the same anxiety with him. He was never fully at ease. He was always conscious of how he walked, how he talked, and how he dressed, afraid that one wrong gesture might somehow travel back home and cost him everything. Even outside the house, he was still hiding. Even in public, he felt homeless.
He told me he did not feel loved—not because his father failed materially, but because his father never made room for truth. Provision without acceptance felt transactional. Freedom without reassurance felt hollow. The house he could always return to never felt like a home; it felt like borrowed space, safe only as long as he remained silent. Gratitude became a form of self-censorship. Silence became the price of belonging. He tried to understand his father, excusing the distance as the product of a broken marriage, hardened beliefs, and unhealed wounds, and in doing so, he chose to carry the fear himself.
As a single father, this is where the reckoning deepened. No child should feel unsafe not only at home, but even outside of it. No child should carry fear into places meant for rest, joy, and normal life. When a young person cannot even walk inside a mall without anxiety about being seen, judged, or reported, something fundamental has already failed. That is not discipline. That is not guidance. That is fear being inherited.
And this is where the story stops being only about a gay son—and becomes a political and institutional warning.
What happened inside that young man’s home is the same mechanism that sustains graft and corruption in government. In my years teaching public safety, studying organizational behavior, and analyzing political systems, I have seen this pattern repeatedly: when people believe that speaking the truth will lead to anger, punishment, or expulsion, silence becomes a rational choice. Just as the young man feared being cursed and thrown out of his home, many public servants fear being ostracized, demoted, or destroyed for exposing wrongdoing. So they stay quiet, look away from anomalies they are trained to detect, sanitize reports, and learn to live double lives—not because they lack integrity, but because they are afraid.
Corruption rarely survives on greed alone. It survives in unsafe spaces. Governments, like families, can provide salaries, benefits, authority, and structure—and still fail morally. When leadership offers provision without protection, people learn that integrity is risky and silence is rewarded. On paper, institutions function. In reality, wrongdoing is quietly guarded by fear. Fear becomes the most loyal bodyguard of corruption.
As a political analyst, this is the uncomfortable truth we often avoid. We pass laws, create commissions, and announce reforms, yet corruption persists because we refuse to confront its emotional and psychological roots. Transparency collapses in cultures where honesty is punished. Whistleblowers are not made brave by policy alone; they are made brave by assurance. Integrity does not grow where truth is merely demanded—it grows where truth is protected.
The young man I met did not need more money, more freedom, or more lectures. He needed assurance. He needed to know that no truth he carried would cost him his place in his own home. Our institutions are no different. Public servants do not only need rules and salaries; they need leaders who will not abandon them for choosing honesty, leaders who make it clear that truth will not cost them their dignity, livelihood, or safety.
This is the heart of my reckoning. Ethical leadership, like good parenting, is not about control—it is about presence. It is about creating spaces where people feel safe enough to be real. Where fear governs, wrongdoing flourishes. Where trust exists, integrity begins to breathe. That young man’s story remains with me because it exposes a truth we ignore at great cost: when people believe honesty will exile them—at home, in public, or in institutions—they choose silence and learn to survive by living half-lives.
And until we confront fear—not only inside our houses, but in our halls of power—graft and corruption will always find protection in silence, and truth will continue to wander, anxious and unseen, even in places where it should have been safe.
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*About the author:
