A Nun Barred Me from Interviewing Abuse Victims

ONE of the few frustrations I had as a writer was when I tried to get access to a shelter for victims of abuse and unwed pregnant girls. This shelter, although sanctioned by the government, was run by a religious organization. This was in the Philippines.

At that time, I was working freelance for various publications in my home country.

This was a year or two before I started writing romance novels, and well before the advent of social media.

Certainly, it was before Google (and other search engines on the Internet) when research and interviews had to be done the conventional way.

Writing stories with happy endings 99% of the time

To say that I had an easy time establishing myself as a writer (during that time) would not be an exaggeration. I wrote stories that readers fancied and expected, stories with happy endings 99% of the time.

That was the mainstream, which I could not and would not fault. People read for pleasure, to get away even fleetingly from life’s concerns. I wrote what my readers demanded. Easy-peasy, as they say.

My Very Special Love – a selling formula

So when I was assigned my first series, titled My Very Special Love, I clung to the selling formula of happy-endings-only pieces. The series catered to readers who mailed their love story.

The letter-sender’s name and address were included in the published story, another sure-fire formula for increased circulation.

Writing the senders’ stories was the easy part. From serious stories to unbelievably juvenile – like one reader whose very special love was Jon Bon Jovi – it was a delight to tell their stories for the readers’ leisure.

The hard part was reading the boxes and boxes of letters from readers who wanted their love story to be scripted. I didn’t mind, even if I could only choose two senders’ stories for the twice-weekly publication.

There was a harder part. That was choosing stories that had neutral or more preferably, happy endings. Harder, because three quarters of the senders’ stories had unhappy endings.

The hardest part was that I could only feature a small number of stories with tragic or woeful endings.

And that, I suppose, was a sort of epiphany for me as a writer.

I learned that people, real people, wanted their stories to be published. It didn’t matter if it were embarrassing, humiliating, or outright shameful. They wanted it out there, to be communicated with the larger public to provide real-life lessons.

True stories of sheltered victims

Shortly after the appointment of a new editor-in-chief, I proposed a project. That of doing a series of true stories based on interviews with people being housed in refuge shelters for abandoned children or drug dependents on government rehab.

My primary objective, however, was to interview girls who were victims of abuse.

From my research, I found that there was a refuge center where both abuse victims and unwed pregnant girls were housed. This excited me. I saw a surfeit of stories from which lessons and related information could be learned.

This new editor-in-chief, bless his heart, approved my proposal. He even provided me with a contact person in the government agency that dealt with the refuge centers. This contact was the agency’s assistant director, a kindly woman who understood my intention.

She emphasized, however, that the agency could not demand that I be given access to the shelter. That I have to contact the religious organization myself, explain why I wanted to see and interview the victims who were willing to speak, and what exactly I would write about them.

The law on separation of church and state at work, I said to myself but without rancor.

The assistant director gave me the name of the Mother Superior and the contact numbers. No, I wasn’t given an address because the refuge center housing the abuse victims was confidential, which was understandable given the circumstances.

So, for the next two weeks I tried to speak to the head nun. She wasn’t always there in the shelter. She was always somewhere else, busy attending to her duties in her various charity work.

Eventually, I managed to speak to her. Twice. But twice she advised me that no, I could not be given permission to the refuge centers. And, no, I could not interview the abuse victims and the unmarried pregnant girls – even if their identities would not be revealed in the publication.

She was brusque, and never would I forget those two phone conversations with this nun. (I had other cheerless conversations with other nuns many years later but that’s another story.)

***

I was on a mission even if I didn’t know it

While I tried to understand the nun’s rationale for declining my request, I couldn’t help but feel dispirited after that. I thought I would be doing some sort of service to readers by exposing, in print via stories, the circumstances that led the victims to the shelter.

And it wasn’t as if I would earn a ton from the series. On the contrary, I expected to spend way more on taxis and for my time on related research. I was on a mission, although I didn’t look at it that way.

***

TO THIS DAY, I still haven’t got over my experience with the head nun who refused my request.

If she had allowed me to get a glimpse into the tragic fate of girls who were abused and raped, with some becoming pregnant as a result of the abuse, who knew who might have read what I would have written and learned from it.

These days, at least, with social media and online news and with whistleblowers appearing every now and then, abuses are being uncovered. Victims are given a voice, provided with support, and perpetrators are being held accountable.

Not in my days, though, when a woman of the cloth disallowed me access to those who could have shared truths about the abuse done to them. It could even have led to prosecution of their abusers.

***

First published here.

Thank you very much for reading!

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