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 about those harrowing experiences in his first novel: “Why did you come back every summer”published in 2018.
And this week, she announced that, after a nine-year court battle, her abuser was finally sentenced to 10 years in prison.
“It’s over”
“It’s over. She is already. She finished. It’s over. I broke free“, recounted the 30-year-old writer 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 solicitor. A commission of justice. Therapy for 15 years. Half of my life! My whole family split in two. A town covering up the abuser. Seven years of writing workshops. Two books published (…) Finally. Finally, on December 19, the trial hearing arrived. And five days later, the sentence, ”he wrote.
“Now I say it well, with all the names that I could 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 guardianship and for having been committed against a minor under 18 years of age.”
Speaking 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 did you come back every summer” the word flowed, it was a very deep need. It was like a sweeping waterfall, but he let it flow. In this case, the column cost me every word, as if it were really the last thing i had to say”, revealed.
There he said that he had decided to write about the sentence with the intention of “going back to writing to turn the page. Go back there 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 could turn abuse into a work of art“.
López Peiró not only wrote -crudely- about being raped. She also told how she had suffered from her during her long journey in search of reparation and justice, due to how she was questioned by those who should care for her and listen to her – from family members, to doctors or judicial officials.
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.
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 a bit of 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 ”.
During the long process that led to this conviction, López Peiró not only highlights the support of his closest family nucleus.
It also mentions a major turning point in the case.
“When I found a feminist lawyer who is Luciana Sánchez, she made us work in the judicial process in a more collective way. Somehow she made us involve other lawyers, other communicators, that we go to associations, that this does not remain solely on my shoulders or on her shoulders, but rather made the work collective”, explains the writer.
“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 he do?for all those who could not speak or denounce. For me”.
His last sentence is an advertisement: “From now on I dedicate myself to writing something else.”
Asked about this future project, she reveals that she is working on her third novel.
“It’s too soon to say 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”.
Now you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate them so you don’t miss out on our best content.
- Do you already know our YouTube channel? Subscribe!