- Writing
- BBC News World
image source, Alejandra Lopez
The writer Belén López Peiró denounced her uncle nine years ago and wrote two novels regarding her experience.
When she was a girl, Belén López Peiró spent her summer vacations with her uncles in the town of Santa Lucía, a former agricultural colony in the north of the province of Buenos Aires, in Argentina, where her mother had grown up.
While her parents, separated, worked in the city, she had fun with her cousins and friends.
But behind those apparently idyllic visits was a terrifying reality: from the age of 13, her uncle -a policeman who was the husband of her mother’s sister- began to abuse her.
She suffered violations for three years, until a family member became aware of the situation.
López Peiró wrote regarding those harrowing experiences in his first novel: “Why did you come back every summer”published in 2018.
And this week, she announced that, following a nine-year court battle, her abuser was finally sentenced to 10 years in prison.
“It’s over”
“It’s over. That’s it. It’s over. It’s finish. set me free“, the 30-year-old writer recounted in an opinion column published on January 3 in the Spanish newspaper El País.
“After nine years and a complaint. Statements, psychological tests, round trips to police stations, prosecutors, national courts. A file: 500 pages. Two lawyers. A prosecutor. A justice commission. Therapy for 15 years Half of my life! My entire family split in two. A town covering up the abuser. Seven years of writing workshops. Two books published (…) Finally. Finally, on December 19 the hearing of trial. And five days later, the sentence,” he wrote.
“Now I say it well, with all the names that I might not say at some time: Claudio Sarlo, former commissioner of the province of Buenos Aires, uncle by marriage, father of a family, sexually abused me when I was a girl,” he stated, detailing the crime that appears in the sentence:
“Seriously insulting sexual abuse aggravated by being the perpetrator in charge of the guardian and for having been committed once morest a minor under 18 years of age.”
image source, Editorial Honeysuckle
López Peiró’s first novel crudely recounts his experience of abuse.
In statements to BBC Mundo, López Peiró said that the sentence brought him “in the first place, no doubt what a relief“, although she said that what had relieved her even more than the failure was writing the column and “putting all those emotions in one place.”
“With the difference that, when I wrote “Why you came back every summer” the word flowed, it was a very deep need. It was like a devastating waterfall, but I let it flow. In this case, the column cost me every word, as if from truth out the last thing i had to say“, revealed.
There he said that he had decided to write regarding the sentence with the intention of “going back to writing to turn the page. Going back to where I found reparation.”
“Transform Abuse”
In an interview with this medium in 2018, when her first novel came out, the author had said that she went through three states during her healing process: first, recognizing herself as a victim, then getting out of that place of victim, and finally, finding the empowerment that it allowed him to move on from that experience.
He found the latter when he entered a writing workshop where they showed him “that he might turn abuse into a work of art“.
López Peiró not only wrote -crudely- regarding being raped. She also told how she had suffered during her long journey in search of reparation and justice, due to the number of people who I questioned her.
Why hadn’t he said anything before, why did he come back every summer, why did he do this to his family.
His response was to tell everything and make visible what many did not want to see.
image source, Bass Cannarsa
The writer denounced the abuse when she was 22 years old and wrote the criminal complaint herself.
In 2021 he published his second novel, “where I do not stand“which reflects all the difficulties faced by a victim of child sexual abuse when they decide to report and start a legal process.
The author says that her two novels are “books that I would have liked to read had I not only experienced a situation of sexual violence and not knowing whether to report or not, and not knowing what to do and find some repair, but also for any other person, so that a father, a mother, a brother, a friend, can better accompany the people who experience a situation like this”.
“write something else”
In his opinion column in El País, López Peiró says that “I didn’t know if it was necessary or not to write this.”
But what did it do?for all those who might not speak or denounce. For me”.
His last sentence is an announcement: “From now on I dedicate myself to writing something else.”
Asked regarding this future project, she reveals that she is working on her third novel.
“It’s too soon to tell anything, but I think that now that I can be a little lighter I am going to be able to have a possibility that I did not have before, which is to create other worlds, that my head, that my emotionality has enough space to immerse itself in other possible universes”.
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