prostitution in the philippines research paper

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Prostitution in the Philippines -a time for change

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Jerome Bernabe

Ronald Weitzer

Donna M Hughes

Petro Kurmaiev

The article analyzes the main approaches to the interpretation of prostitution from the legal, economic, sociological, psychological, sexological and religious points of view. The author formulates its own definition, in which prostitution is considered as a form of entrepreneurial activity for the provision of sexual services on a paid basis, aimed at meeting sexual needs. The basic preconditions that are necessary for the prostitution to become the signs of entrepreneurial activity are presented: availability of commodity-money relations; religious and social tolerance; sexual freedom; sexual need. It is offered to allocate three main groups of mutually conditioned motives to engaging in prostitution: psychological-emotional, image and socio-economic. It is noted that for today's Ukraine socio-economic motives are dominant.

International Journal for Research in Applied Science & Engineering Technology (IJRASET)

IJRASET Publication

Atmaja a poor Indian girl was born in broken family. Her father was alcoholic and use to abuse and beat her mother every day. Her mother instead of consoling her took out all anger and frustration on her telling her that she was an unwanted child and should have died the day she was born.

Sudhansu Dash

Prostitution is the system that commodifies and dehumanizes the bodies of the woman for the use and profit of the man. The term serves as an adjective for any sexually transgressing woman, seen as sexual beings representing uncontrolled sexuality. Prostitution is understood as a sexual act involving women. Today it is an object of intense mainstreaming campaign that is working for social and political acceptance of the highly profitable industry of sex. Prostitution right groups in India however argue that prostitution is the exchange of sexual favors between partners within a relationship for earning money, which is one of the various ways of expressing and carrying out human sexuality.

Sophie Heine

Amnesty International recently adopted a position in favour of the total decriminalization of prostitution. This decision and the debates that preceded it triggered a great deal of critical reaction across the world, from feminist circles to Hollywood stars – Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet were among those voicing their opposition. Many organisations for women’s rights have also expressed their concern about Amnesty’s new position. According to Equality Now, for instance, Amnesty’s position shows that ‘it has ignored the clear links between prostitution and sex trafficking that it says it opposes, as well as the incompatibility of the commercial sex trade with gender equality, human rights and international law. It has ignored survivors of the commercial sex trade who repeatedly called on the organisation to rethink its position based on their experiences and to adopt a policy that seeks to curb, rather than facilitate, the commercial sex trade.’

Olayinka Olaniyan

Prostitution is the business or practice of engageng in sexual relations in exchange for payment[1][2] or some other benefit. Prostitution is sometimes described as commercial sex.

The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Aimee Wodda

This entry provides a thorough overview of the various types of act that fall under the umbrella term “prostitution”; it describes various forms of solicitation and the individuals engaged in these exchanges; and it offers descriptive statistics. The criminal justice response to prostitution is examined, with a focus on the strengths and weaknesses of arguments surrounding criminalization, decriminalization, and legalization. The summary concludes with a review of the global context of sex trafficking.

Muyiwa Babalola

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“The police are our real pimps”: Violence against sex workers in the Philippines

On the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (17 December), Sharmila Parmanand discusses the intersections of violence in the Philippines against sex workers and against people who use drugs.

Sex workers in the Philippines experience many harmful effects of the war on drugs. It has increased the power of the police over sex workers’ lives, and it has made sex workers who use drugs far less likely to engage with the healthcare system for fear of their status being disclosed. Sex workers have always had a difficult relationship with the police, and street workers especially may be hesitant to access public healthcare because of stigma, but the war on drugs has significantly exacerbated these conditions.

What surfaced from my interviews with over 50 street and establishment-based sex workers in Metro Manila in 2017 and 2018 is that the police are perceived and experienced by sex workers as a greater threat than clients or third parties. “The police are our real pimps,” many of my interviewees would say.

The power asymmetry between cops and sex workers can be partially attributed to the confusing mix of laws that govern sex work in the Philippines. The Revised Penal Code treats women who sell sex as criminals who should be fined or imprisoned. This is partially contradicted by the Philippines’ 2003 anti-trafficking law, which defines taking advantage of the vulnerability of a person for the purpose of exploitation, including for prostitution, as trafficking. It also runs up against the 2010 Magna Carta of Women, which names prostitution as an act of violence against women from which they should be protected. Various local governments have their own policies on sex work, ranging from tolerance and risk management to stigma and punishment, or a mix of these.

Corrupt police officers have regularly taken advantage of the legal limbo on sex work. Sometimes they conduct entirely anti-prostitution raids with the aim of arresting women and pimps, or extorting money or sex from them. Other times, they conduct ‘rescue operations’. The women never know what to expect. The police might aggressively break them up and drive them off the streets, or arrest them for ‘bagansya’ (vagrancy). However, the Philippines decriminalised vagrancy in 2012, which means that either my interviewees misunderstood the purpose of the raids, or these raids were indeed arbitrary and illegal.

My interviewees also reported having been subjected to raids where police officers used anti-trafficking as a cover to extort money from them, their clients, and owners of commercial sex establishments. One said that in 2015, there was a sting operation on her street. “We were all caught and taken to a precinct. They said their reason was that there were minors among us. But we were all adults! Each of us and our pimp still had to pay 50 USD.” She added, “We don’t pimp minors.” These allegations of fake and indiscriminate raids are also documented in the Philippine section of the US Department of State’s Trafficking in Persons Report in 2010, 2017 , and 2018 and in a UN report on sex work and the law in Asia and the Pacific .

Raids and rescue operations are not the only sites of abuse. Many of my interviewees pointed to instances of everyday extortion: Police officers would approach them and demand money, sex, or both in exchange for not arresting them. In one particularly egregious case, cops engaged in ritual humiliation by urinating on two sex workers who were waiting for clients on a street corner. Many experienced having a gun casually pointed at them by patrolling cops. Some of their worst clients were also policemen. In a context where sex work is criminalised, it is dangerous to demand payment from a client who is also a cop. Many street workers are unwilling to report abusive clients or managers to the police after having been shamed for doing so in the past, or for fear of being extorted or jailed themselves.

Under the war on drugs, which has seen the police exert greater power and control over civilians, sex workers have become even more vulnerable. Duterte has made several pronouncements to the effect of encouraging the police to aggressively pursue and even murder suspected drug users and sellers. There are credible allegations of drugs being planted on individuals and their property to justify criminal charges or police violence under Duterte’s current drug war. Based on my interviews, it seems that corrupt police officers have taken advantage of the war on drugs to weaponise the common association of sex work with drug use. Many of the 50 sex workers I interviewed had police officers threaten to plant drugs on them if they did not pay bribes or give in to sexual demands.

“In the past, I could still shame the cops who were trying to extort from me. I would ask if they were proud of themselves for taking the money for my child’s milk,” explained one of my interviewees when describing the shift in her relationship with the police. “I would taunt them for being too cowardly to go after the real criminals instead of us helpless women. Some of them would leave us alone after. But things have changed now. We do not fight back. We are too scared.” Another interviewee, who was raped by a policeman in a precinct toilet after he arrested her and threatened to plant drugs on her, said, “I couldn’t defend myself. Nobody cares about poor drug addicts dying. They care even less about poor supposedly drug-addicted prostitutes!” Several of my interviewees said that they are more frequently ‘invited’ to precincts for invasive strip and cavity searches as part of ‘anti-drug operations’.

According to ‘Tex’, one of the leaders of the Philippine Sex Workers Collective, “Sex workers are prime suspects not just as drug users but as people who work with drug dealers. This is not hard to believe for the police and the public. If they already think that you sell your body, why not drugs? A student sex worker was killed in Baguio. They were reported to be dealing drugs. Their fellow sex workers, who are too scared to challenge the police, have said this is patently false. Their family did not pursue the case because they didn’t want it publicised that their child was a sex worker.” Tex added, “Given the stigma against sex workers and given that anyone can just be reported as a drug user or dealer, anyone with an axe to grind against sex workers could just report them to the police.”

Many of my interviewees also lamented the loss of clients and income. Regular clients are staying away from the bars and brothels, where anti-drug raids frequently happen, because of the very real risk of getting shot or extorted if found there. Unsurprisingly, their clients who are also police officers are still around.

Not only has the war on drugs hurt existing sex workers or made it harder for them to exit, it has also pushed women into sex work. Most of the people who were killed without trial – at least 5000 based on the police’s own estimates, and above 20,000 based on estimates from credible civil society and media organisations – have come from low-income communities. Five of the sex workers I interviewed lost their partners to extrajudicial killings, and two of them have partners in jail for what they said were false drug charges. Two of them began engaging in sex work to support their children, while five engaged in sex work more frequently than they would have preferred, to make up for lost income.

In the midst of the drug war, many of my interviewees coped by paying higher bribes to cops. One of them summarised this as, “We pay the same amount weekly that we used to do monthly!” They also attempted to be less visible when soliciting clients, even if it reduced their earnings and forced them to operate in less secure areas. Several who used to operate independently were increasingly relying on third parties who offered protection based on links with the police. Three of them were strongly considering shifting to online spaces to solicit clients. Most of them could not afford this and did not understand technology well enough.

Some of my interviewees said that they were less likely to disclose their status as drug users to state healthcare providers, for fear of their private information being transmitted to the police, and that they were less likely to engage with the healthcare system in general, which means not getting tested for STIs or seeking medical assistance when they are ill. This makes them disproportionately vulnerable to HIV and viral hepatitis. Some sex workers who use drugs were less willing to serve as peer counsellors to other sex workers for fear of being identified by the police and executed. Peer-led initiatives are extremely important in providing support to sex workers who use drugs. Essentially, the drug war has made it difficult for some sex workers to exercise their basic human right to healthcare. A few who were HIV-positive have been forced to disclose their status to police officers for fear of being killed if they failed mandatory drug tests because of the substances in their anti-retroviral drugs. This is a violation of their right to privacy.

The Collective issued a call for solidarity with drug users four months into Duterte’s term. With the strong public sentiment against drugs and popular support for Duterte, however, the leaders of the Collective worried about raising the issue aggressively because of the risk of being misrepresented as arguing in favour of drugs and inviting more violence against sex workers in the very simplistic and emotionally charged public conversations about illegal drugs.

Under the war on drugs, Duterte has signalled to police officers that they can be assured of his protection when they murder drug suspects. Now more than ever, it is very difficult for sex workers to publicly expose police abuse. They generally fear retaliation and harassment. One sex worker who filed a complaint against a policeman was threatened by his colleague: “Do your children know what you do? They might not like their mother anymore if they find out.”

Sex workers in the Philippines need more platforms to be able to tell their own stories directly; they need access to legal support for those among them who have been victims of police harassment and abuse; they need to find entry points and allies within civil society, media, academia, and government that can allow them to challenge dominant assumptions about sex workers that do not reflect their lived realities. I am also conscious that while rattling off this wish list, I am still talking about a marginalised and criminalised community, some of whom suffer additional forms of discrimination (trans sex workers, sex workers who are HIV+, etc.), and many of whom support their families financially and perform caring roles. It is definitely not easy.

Sharmila Parmanand is doing a PhD in Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge on a Gates Scholarship. Her research critiques the dominant representation of sex workers in anti-trafficking discourse in the Philippines and the effects of anti-trafficking interventions on sex workers. She has worked as a volunteer with the Philippine Sex Workers Collective since 2015.

• Analysis Purus faucibus ornare suspendisse sed. Et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Arcu vitae elementum.
• Experiences
• Special Coverage
• Autonomy Autonomy is key for women to have the right to their own body and a life free of violence. Autonomy is not something that builds up on its own. We understand autonomy as a path under construction, which is laid out by strengthening women’s movement and organization. Facing violence and the control over women’s bodies means facing the racist and patriarchal capitalist system.
• Demilitarization Demilitarization is a matter of political urgency for many peoples around the world. Challenging the military control over peoples and territories means fighting for peace, for people’s sovereignty, and for a world without violence, imperialism, colonialism, arms race, and warfare. People’s lives are not disposable, and women’s bodies are not battlefields!
• Environmental justice The struggle for environmental justice is the struggle for a world where nature, territories, and the ways of life of the peoples are respected, not destroyed. Fighting for environmental justice is about defending nature and all the people who live in it (and who are nature themselves). It’s about fighting for a sustainable model of production, free from the false solutions of the market.
• Feminist economy Feminist economy is about political thought, practice, and pledge. It points the way to transforming the social organization and the lives of women, whose care work sustains life. Feminist economy challenges the divisions and hierarchies between culture and nature, the public and private realms, and productive and reproductive labor. We depend on each other and we depend on nature. This is why we need to build and practice an economy centered around life.
• Food sovereignty Food sovereignty is a right of the peoples! The struggle for food sovereignty is about fighting for land and healthy food, for decent work, and for the end of exploitation, agribusiness, and large-scale plantations. Women take the primary responsibility for food production and preparation, and they have accumulated this knowledge over a long period of time. Fighting for food sovereignty also means fighting to have women farmers’ work acknowledged as well as to reorganize domestic, care, and food preparation work.
• Movement The movement is both what organizes us and what we organize. In movement, we build anti-capitalist, anti-racist feminism. And we create collective syntheses, change the present, and point the way to the future.
• Asia and Oceania
• International

The Life and Struggles of Victim-Survivors of Prostitution in the Philippines

Capire spoke with myles sanchez and jean enriquez of catw-ap about sexual violence, war on drugs, and other struggles faced by philippines.

Women of the WMW during protests on March 8th, 2020 in the Philippines / Mulheres da MMM durante os protestos do 8 de Março de 2020 nas Filipinas / Mujeres de la MMM durante las protestas del 8 de marzo de 2020 en Filipinas / Femmes de la MMM lors des manifestations du 8 mars 2020 aux Philippines

In Bulacan, a province in the Central Luzón area in the Philippines, Myles Sanchez and other survivors have started a community-based programme, with the help of The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women . In this place, women who survived prostitution found a sanctuary from the violence that haunts their lives and their children, can study and learn a real profession, and have the support they need to build not only economic but also political autonomy. The survivors use the things they learn in their own process to help and organize other women. They assist whom they call sisters in cases of violence and they provide legal aid to get women out of jail when needed.

CATW-AP (its Asia-Pacific chapter) is an international network of feminist groups and organizations fighting domestic and sexual violence, especially prostitution, suffered by women around the globe. In the Philippines, they are part of the National Coordination Body of the World March of Women. Launched in 1988, in New York, USA, during the First Global Conference Against Trafficking in Women, their objectives are to bring attention to and take care of women and girls who are victims of trafficking, prostitution, pornography, sex tourism, and bride selling, by promoting campaigns and policy advocacy. Survivors and victim-survivors are how they call, respectively, the women and girls who were able to escape this reality and the ones who still depend on prostitution. They are assisted by CATW and participate in programs of education, training, and organizational development; empowerment; policy advocacy; and research and documentation.

For this article, Capire talked to Myles Sanchez, a prostitution survivor in the Philipines, and Jean Enriquez, the executive director of CATW-AP. “Our campaigns are not only about sexual violence of all kinds, but also about economy, globalization, militarism, and other political policies. We make a very clear connection with the idea of commodification of life and the commodification of women’s bodies,” says Jean about the CATW-AP work.

“When I heal, I can help other survivors. We train ourselves to become leaders. For us, being a leader is not like being a politician. For us, it is to act as models to encourage others. We are the leaders who guide and we are role models to show that positive change can happen in our lives,” Myles explains. She argues that one of the most important things when it comes to working with victim-survivors is to listen to them and to their stories. By listening to these women and understanding their reality, the leaders can discuss with them how they can become autonomous and overcome prostitution and other types of violence to which they were submitted.

The methodology of working with victim-survivors is also what guides their action around their political demands. It is from these stories and experiences that they can accumulate and build knowledge and vision about the traps that lead women to prostitution. From Myles’s perspective, which resonates into the stories of many other victim-survivors around the world, being sexually abused as a child by her own father, seeing her mother who was forced into marriage after also having been raped by him, and many other situations have induced her life to this path.

Myles explains that she “never wanted to be in prostitution.” “No one of us would want to be used by many men we don’t know. I was brought to the brothel by a soldier when I was taking care of my own siblings. My sisters in my organization were also abused by their employers when they worked as domestic workers. None dreamt to be in prostitution but many things happened to us before we got to this place.” In their perspectives, prostitution is not just something to be dealt with, it is one of the types of violence against women in the framework of their struggles.

Listening to victim-survivors is also about building the organization’s political agenda. When it comes to the terms used to name prostitution nowadays, the organization is emphatic: there is no such thing as “sex work” or “sex workers.” These names are becoming hegemonic in some places, but they did not originate from their experience or their vocabulary, Jean explains, considering their experiences in the Philippines. “We usually hear these terms from funders or from academics. Historically, feminist movements have been talking about violence against women as a form of women’s rights violations, but it is important to understand that in cases of violence against women, there are the perpetrators and there are the victims, and that is why the term ‘victim’ is very valid.”

The word “survivor” was included because these women don’t remain as victims. When they fight or find strategies to survive, they become survivors. That’s when they start recovering some autonomy when it comes to their lives. “We take care of the empowerment process of healing and recovering. Recovering their lives, recovering their dreams and aspirations. Most of them proceed to formal education, some of them become teachers. Some of them aspire to become social workers. But almost all of them become activists who are now part of something that is not only changing their own lives, but also changing society,” says Jean.

The survivors who work in the community programme and with CATW-AP are completely against the legalization of prostitution. Myles says that “to us, pro-legalization groups want women to be abused, raped”. Many of those who are speaking about legalization are coming from the academe, wishing for post-structural, postmodern ideas, and talking about prostitution as if it was a matter of sexual identity.” Jean explains that this narrative “often comes from a very patriarchal idea. In the same manner as we have been very critical of men who are trivializing women’s experience of sexual violence. They are attempting to define prostitution for the women who live it.” This perspective is reinforced by the glamorization of prostitution, led by neoliberalism.

Besides academics, funders outside the Philippines are also dictating the discourse and many NGOs are only remaining alive because of funding from agencies whose perspectives are coming from liberal ideas. This is a process marked by North-South inequalities and colonialism that pushes the ideology that women are free to choose to be prostitutes, without acknowledging that the life of these women could not be more difficult. Having to be with men when they don’t want to, having no means to take care of their families.

Understanding these women’s lives, stories, experiences and needs is one of the ways to articulate a path out of prostitution. It is important to address the roots of the problem of all forms of violence suffered by women, which are patriarchal and also, in the case of prostitution, capitalist, as in the neoliberal idea and practice that all things can become commodities, including human beings. Women want real jobs, not prostitution, and the labor movement in the Philippines understood that.

“We are happy with how we earn our money now with our feminist, fair-trade, and ecological livelihood program. We were the ones judged before. Previously, when we saw lawyers and the police, we were embarrassed. Now, we talk before them. We talk about our rights. We should be the ones being asked what is the real situation in prostitution. I come out on television [and say] that I never dreamt to be in prostitution, I dreamt to have a good life,” Myles told us. Fighting for their autonomy, victim-survivors agree that prostitution is not a real job, and they got together to push an anti-prostitution law that doesn’t see them as the criminals, like it is today, but as the victim-suvivors for whom support programs should be formulated. The real criminals are the hustlers and the buyers. “We want to have communities that are free, such as this that we organize with the help of CATW-AP.”

The movement demands an anti-prostitution law that strengthens the penalties against the buyers. As Jean says, “our analysis is that the main perpetrators of violence against women are those who are using women’s bodies.” The law today punishes the traffickers and hustlers, but accountability against the buyers are not implemented, which is a perspective that avoids the issue of patriarchy, according to Jean. Capitalism relates only to profiting on the system of prostitution, but the idea that the consent of women can be bought and that men have the right to purchase women’s bodies is a patriarchal relationship. That is why the survivors in Philippines want to get the anti-prostitution law passed, which clarifies this as a public policy.

Another huge problem faced by victim-survivors is the drug issue. “I was forced to use drugs because it numbs us. It makes us numb to what customers want to do to us,” says Myles. Women are led to use drugs by drug dealers, which make them constantly in debt with the traffickers and the hustlers, and make them even bigger victims of this system that profits from their lives.

The use of illegal drugs in the Philippines is lower than the global average . Even so, the right-wing authoritarian, conservative, and populist president Rodrigo Duterte, who assumed office in 2016, has been carrying out a war on drugs with the help of the National Police that has led to the deaths of five to 20 thousand Filipinos , mostly urban poor (the numbers vary based on different sources of information coming from the government or civil society groups). These killings increased more than 50% in the early months of the pandemic.

Increasingly, women in prostitution are used as couriers by the police to take drugs to buyers. They are forced to use drugs, and therefore a lot of them are arrested and jailed, some even charged not only with drug use, but also with selling. Besides that, Myles told Capire that since Duterte came into power, many of the victim-survivors have been raped by the police in exchange for the life and freedom of their partners who have been charged, even with no proof, by this war on drugs. “Women in prostitution are particularly targeted. Bulacan, where Myles lives now, is in fact a relocation area for poor urban women and it has one of the highest rates of killings since 2016. At least 210 women who are members of CATW-AP had relatives killed by the police,” Jean says.

About women and Duterte, Myles told us that “some of our members were pro-Duterte, but after he became president, their relatives were killed and they realized how bad he is. He attacks those who are critical of him, he trivializes rape. It is very painful for us survivors of rape, all of Duterte’s talk normalizing rape, flaunting his molestation of their domestic worker, all his sexual remarks against women.” To her and to all of the women organized with CATW-AP, if there were no feminist groups, they wouldn’t know where they would be. “We are thankful because of them. Because of these women and their experiences, we know how to resist and fight.”

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Filipino Children and Adolescents’ Stories of Sexual Abuse: Narrative Types and Consequences

Nora maria elena t. osmeña.

1 Psychology Department, Negros Oriental State University, Dumaguete City, Philippines

Dan Jerome S. Barrera

2 College of Criminal Justice Education, Negros Oriental State University, Dumaguete City, Philippines

There is a paucity of qualitative research on children’s and adolescents’ perceptions of their sexual abuse experiences. This paper aims to describe the narrative types and consequences of sexual abuse stories among ten female Filipino children and adolescents. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using dialogical narrative analysis. Results show that three narrative types appear in the stories of the survivors. These are the tragic resistance narrative, rescued slave narrative, and heroic saga narrative, and each of these narratives has idiosyncratic effects on the identities, affiliations, disclosure, and adjustment processes of the participants. The results show how symbolic cultural structures can have far-reaching consequences on sexually abused children and adolescents.

Introduction

Sexual abuse in childhood and adolescence remains a prevalent social problem. A worldwide estimate shows that 13% of girls and 6% of boys experience sexual abuse in childhood and adolescence (Barth et al. 2013 ). As a result, they experience debilitating adverse mental, psychological, physical, and health effects (Amado et al. 2015 ; Hillberg et al. 2011 ; Maniglio 2009 ; Norman et al. 2012 ; Teicher and Samson 2016 ). In the Philippines, a national survey shows that the lifetime prevalence of child and youth sexual abuse is 21.5% - 24.7% for boys and 18.2% for girls (CWC and UNICEF 2016 ). These reported abuses are a bit higher than some worldwide estimates, and they even lead to early smoking, sex, and pregnancy, having multiple partners, substance use, and suicide among the victims (Ramiro et al. 2010 ). Despite this information, research on children’s and adolescents’ narratives on sexual abuse in the Philippines gathered through qualitative approaches t is limited (Roche 2017 ). This gap is not surprising because systematic reviews show that only a handful of extant studies have analyzed children’s and adolescents’ perceptions of their sexual abuse experiences (Morrison et al. 2018 ; Watkins-Kagebein et al. 2019 ). The bulk of the literature on children and adolescents’ sexual abuse experiences comes from retrospective accounts of adult survivors (Alaggia et al. 2019 ; Tener and Murphy 2015 ), which may differ from children’s and adolescents’ themselves due to recall bias, participants’ advanced developmental phase, and other factors (Foster and Hagedorn 2014 ; Morrison et al. 2018 ; Watkins-Kagebein et al. 2019 ).

Nevertheless, there has been a recent surge of interest in studying young victims’/survivors’ sexual abuse accounts. These studies documented the emotional experiences of children and adolescents, including their fear, anger, pain, worry, and coping strategies (Foster and Hagedorn 2014 ; McElvaney et al. 2014 ; San Diego 2011 ; Schönbucher et al. 2012 ); the disclosure processes and their barriers and facilitators (Foster and Hagedorn 2014 ; Jackson et al. 2015 ; Jensen et al. 2005 ; McElvaney et al. 2014 ; Schaeffer et al. 2011 ; Schönbucher et al. 2012 ); and the subjects’ healing journey through therapeutic processes (Capella et al. 2016 ; Foster and Hagedorn 2014 ; San Diego 2011 ). Besides the emotional aspects, secondary victimization in the justice system (Foster and Hagedorn 2014 ; Capella et al. 2016 ) also manifested in the reports.

However, what remains underexplored in these studies and adult retrospections are the meso-level factors that affect post-sexual abuse emotions, reactions (e.g., disclosures), coping and adjustment, and identity work. One example at the meso-level is culture (Sanjeevi et al. 2018 ). In their review, Sanjeevi et al. ( 2018 , p. 631) note that studying culture is essential to “provide culturally competent and culturally valid services” to children and adolescents who have experienced sexual abuse. However, this inquiry line is underdeveloped as most culturally-oriented studies have either studied culture as practices (e.g., ways of raising a child, sleeping arrangements, child marriage) or beliefs (e.g., beliefs on what constitutes sexual abuse). A treatment of culture as a system of symbols is absent in child sexual abuse literature, especially in studies of children and adolescents’ accounts of their sexual abuse experiences. In this study, we treat culture as “a structure of symbolic sets” that “provide[s] a nonmaterial structure” of actions by “creating patterned order, lines of consistency in human actions” (Alexander and Smith 1993 , p. 156). Furthermore, a narrative is an example of a symbol. Narratives are culturally available resources and structures (e.g., tragedy, romance, comedy) with which people construct their personal stories (Frank 2010 ). Furthermore, narrative analysis makes these narrative types visible (Wong and Breheny 2018 ).

The narrative approach has not been extensively used in sexual abuse studies. Although few studies employ this methodology (e.g., Capella et al. 2016 ; Foster and Hagedorn 2014 ; Harvey et al. 2000 ; Hunter 2010 ), these studies were more thematic. They focused more on the ‘what”s’ of storytelling and neglected the ‘how’s’ (Gubrium and Holstein 2009 ). Thus, there is a need for other narrative approaches like dialogical and structural (Riessman 2008 ). We argue that Arthur Frank’s ( 2010 , 2012 ) socio-narratology and dialogical narrative analysis can fill this void.

Socio-narratology views stories not just as retrospective devices of representing the past but also prospective ones that interpellate people to assume identities, affiliate/disaffiliate from others and do things (Frank 2010 , 2012 ). As Alameddine ( 2009 : 450) notes: “Events matter little, only stories of those events affect us.” This view tends to find support in some narrative psychologists’ (e.g., Bruner 1987 ; Polkinghorne 1988 ) and philosophers’ (Carr 1986 ; MacIntyre 1981 ; Ricoeur 1984 ) stand on the power of stories in people’s lives. As Polkinghorne ( 1988 , p. 145) posited, life/action is the “living narrative expression of a personal and social life. The competence to understand a series of episodes as part of our story informs our own decisions to engage in actions that move us toward a desired ending.” Polkinghorne added that stories and narratives provide us with models for the self, action, and life, and we use these models to plan our actions and assume identities.

This paper aims to describe the narrative types and consequences of sexual abuse stories among ten female Filipino children and adolescents. We argue that cultural symbols in the form of narratives describe phenomena through personal stories, and they also tend to influence emotions and actions. This perspective, we believe, is also applicable to children’s and adolescents’ stories and experiences of sexual abuse. Narrative types can be visible from these stories of sexual abuse, which have material effects on disclosure processes, emotions, coping, identity work, and behavioral and social adjustment of children and adolescents who have had the experience.

Methodology

The researchers sought to capture data by profiling the Filipino children’s and adolescents’ lives before, during, and after experiencing sexual abuse through semi-structured interviews. The participants were contacted and recruited through a temporary government-controlled crisis center in the province of Negros Oriental, Philippines, where they were housed. Of the twelve participant interviews, only ten were analyzed because two participants did not answer some questions critical to the analysis.

Table ​ Table1 1 shows the socio-demographic characteristics of the participants. As shown, most of the participants were sexually abused in their adolescence (10–19) by family members with whom they lived at the time of the abuse. At the time of the interview, all of them had studied for at least 3 years when the abuse started.

Socio-demographic charateristics of the participants

Data Gathering Procedures

After having been granted the ethics board approval, consent from the government agency that controlled the center, the caregivers, and the participants was obtained. Contacts with the target participants were developed through the said government agency, which had personal information in the center. The target participants were then informed about the nature of the study and its purpose and were also asked about their willingness to participate. They were briefed on the confidentiality of the information gathered from them and the anonymity of their identity. Those who opted to participate were requested to sign informed consent forms and to indicate their preferred schedule and place of interview, which could be any place conducive.

The study utilized face-to-face semi-structured interviews, which were conducted by the lead author and employing narrative interviewing techniques (Jovchelovitch and Bauer 2000 ). A debriefing to prevent the recurrence of trauma was given to the participant right after every interview, which could last for 30 min to one-and-a-half hours. All audio-recorded interviews were password-secured and were only transcribed and translated by language-proficient staff and verified by the researchers for accuracy and consistency. For ethical reasons, participants’ names and other information were kept anonymous and replaced with pseudonyms.

Dialogical Narrative Analysis

Frank ( 2010 , 2012 ) coupled socio-narratology with his methodological technique – dialogical narrative analysis (DNA). DNA is a heuristic guide in analyzing stories. It is a combination of thematic, structural, and dialogical analyses (Smith 2016 ). DNA “studies the mirroring between what is told in the story – the story’s content – and what happens as a result of telling that story – its effects” (Frank 2010 , pp. 71–72). In other words, DNA is concerned with the content of stories and their effects on selves, affiliations, and actions. Although Frank ( 2010 , 2012 ) intended DNA to be heuristic in nature, there are phases of the analysis that can be implemented (see also Caddick 2016 ; Smith 2016 ). However, these phases are not necessarily linearly followed: even in a later phase, one can always return to the initial ones.

The present analysis started with getting the story phase done by the first researcher. Here, the stories in each interview were identified using Labov and Waletzky’s ( 1967 ) structural model of narratives. Then, the getting to grips with the stories phase was implemented by the two researchers. Indwelling with the data by listening to the audios and reading the transcripts several times was done at this phase. Also, narrative themes, relationships among themes, and the structure of the stories were identified. The opening up analytical dialogue phase followed by asking dialogical questions by the two authors directed towards the narratives identified (Frank 2012 ). This makes DNA unique from other analyses. Dialogical questions include resource questions, affiliation questions, and identity questions. Finally, pulling the analysis together phase was done by choosing among the five forms of DNA, the best way to structure the results. We chose to build a narrative typology as our approach. Narrative types are ‘the most general storyline[s] that can be recognized underlying the plot and tensions of particular stories’ (Frank 1995 : 75). After weeks of analysis, the data revealed three narrative types and their consequences, which are discussed in the next section.

The Narrative Types

This section shows that there are three significant narratives to which the participants of this study subscribe. These narratives are tragic resistance narrative, rescued slave narrative, and heroic saga narrative . The most common among these are the tragic resistance and the rescued slave narratives. The heroic saga narrative serves as a contesting narrative against the dominant ones. We will also show that these narratives interpellate the participants to assume particular identities (selves), connect or disconnect from alliances, and do things for and on them.

Tragic Resistance Narrative

Its structure.

A common narrative emplotted by some of the participants is the tragic resistance narrative. This narrative starts with some favorable situations, followed by a disruption in the form of sexual abuse. Due to fear of negative consequences, the participants subscribing to this narrative tended not to disclose their victimization. Moreover, if they disclosed, they did it covertly with those outside the family. This does not mean, however, that they did not do anything against the offender. They tended to make subtle but covert resistance against the abusers. This narrative has this structure: “Girls live a normal life. It is made horrible when they are raped. However, they could not disclose it because they fear that their resistance might fail as the abuser might retaliate.” This narrative appears to be a derivative of the culturally available rape myths such as “No woman can do much about rape” (Gordon and Riger 1989 ; Plummer 2003 ). Also, fear of retaliation among the sexual abuse victims in the Philippines circulates culturally (Hunt and Gatbonton 2000 ). Previous research also documents fears experienced by children and adolescents due to their abusive experiences (Foster and Hagedorn 2014 ; McElvaney et al. 2014 ; Schönbucher et al. 2012 ).

One example of this kind of narrative is a story told by Mary, who was raped by her father. She said,

That night, he came home very drunk. My brother and I only slept side by side in the sala of our house. Then my father laid down in between my brother and me and started to undress me. I said, “No, Pa,” but he held a knife and said that he would kill me if I refused. So, he succeeded in undressing me and finally raped me. When he inserted his penis into my vagina, it was very painful. It happened when I have not even had my first menstruation yet. When I tried to move, he would threaten me with the knife.

Mary did not continue to resist because of the threat made by her father to kill her if she would fight. She emplotted her experience in a tragic resistance narrative yet did not offer more resistance. Other participants’ stories unfolded through this type of narrative. Ana, for instance, shared this story:

One time when my Mama left, my father and my siblings were left at home. Then he [stepfather] attempted to rape me, but I shouted, and it was on time that my Mama came back. So Mama had the incident blottered. My stepfather was so mad. Eventually, he was put behind bars because my godmother, who was a policewoman, helped us. We went home to Zamboanguita because we were in Bayawan during that time. We did not know that he was temporarily freed but he was able to post bail. He came back and planned to kill us all. He murdered Mama, who was pregnant. I was almost killed too. He almost killed Lolo. If Lolo was not able to kill him, all of us could have been killed. Lolo killed him at that time.

Ana related that she screamed when her stepfather attempted to rape her and her mother reported it to the police. Then, the offender was arrested and detained. However, such resistance was tragic. When the offender was able to post bail, he retaliated and killed her pregnant mother and almost killed her, but her grandfather eventually killed him. This tragic resistance created extreme fear in her as she relayed, “.. . that is what I fear. Because of me, my family would kill each other.”

Jess took the same narrative to describe her initial resistance against her stepfather. It was not her stepfather, however, who foiled her resistance. It was her mother. Her mother prevented Jess’s attempt to resist. She said: “He abused me every night, and if I said no, he would go wild. I was angry with my Mama because she did not believe me.”

Tragic Resistance Narrative’s Effects on the Self, Relationships, and Actions

With the tragic resistance narrative, the participants experienced what Freeman ( 2010 ) calls narrative foreclosure , wherein one believes that he or she has no or little prospect for the future. This is detrimental to the self. Some participants experienced hopelessness and even considered committing suicide. This kind of narrative led them to offer little (covert) or no resistance against subsequent abuses. They even became emotionally attached to their abusers.

Dirty and Foreclosed Self

When asked what she felt immediately after the abuse, Jess described herself as

“Filthy. I considered myself filthy because my being had been devastated by a person who was good for nothing .”

She also felt that her future was foreclosed as she lamented,

“I felt hopeless. I felt like I was already totally hopeless. I can’t think of any solution to the problem during that time. I thought there was nobody who could help me because I was hesitant to tell anybody.”

Ana and Mary had the same thought about themselves immediately after the repeated sexual abuse. And after a considerable number of years, they still felt marred by such molestations, although not as intense as immediately after the incidents. For instance, Mary still felt her womanhood tarnished:

“Sometimes, I feel I am the filthiest person. My father sexually abused me.”

Ana had a similar struggle with herself even long after the event. She continued to experience confusion about herself.

Interviewer: Let me ask you this, “How is Ana?” Ana: Tired. Interviewer: What makes Ana tired? Ana: It’s like I do not understand myself.

“Yes, we see each other because her peers are also our classmates, but we feel nothing more than friends. She would just tell me to take care, then we go our separate ways. She asked me why I get attracted to girls. I said I am not attracted to girls; I get attracted to boyish girls. I used to get attracted to boys, but now I hate them. I never had feelings towards lesbians before. When a cousin of mine got into a relationship with a lesbian, I even admonished her from getting involved with the same sex. I wonder why I have changed. Ate Lyn even asked me why I got into a relationship with a girl.”

Emotional Attachment with the Abuser

The tragic resistance narrative invites the participants to build an emotional attachment with the abusers. This is in line with some qualitative research that documented children’s conflicted feelings toward their abusers (Morrison et al. 2018 ). Probably, this is to prevent any harmful retaliatory acts from the abuser towards the abused or to their significant others or to make the abusers believe that they were not resisting.

For instance, after she was abused for the first time, Ana lived with her uncle; she was again raped by her cousin. This time, she did not resist her cousin overtly after the death of her mother and her unborn child, which resulted from her previous overt resistance against her stepfather. Instead, she built a close relationship with her cousin and his family with which she was living. When asked about the frequentness of being abused by her cousin, Ana said:

“He did it to me, maybe two or three times in a month. Sometimes I got insulted because he would bring his girlfriend, and still continued to abuse me. (But) I had high respect for him as an older brother.”

Ana may have been “insulted” or probably jealous that her cousin had a girlfriend whom he brought latter to their house. This indicates her attachment with the abuser, which is also manifested in the last sentence, where she expressed her respect towards him as her elder brother. Ana treated him as part of her family and considered his family her own; in fact, she even participated in their family drinking sessions and became drunk at times. And just like Ana, Mary also became attached to her father, who raped her repeatedly. This was because she was concerned with what could happen to him if she would leave him. She said:

“He even told me that he wanted me for his wife because women avoid him. After all, he bathes only once a week. He smells foul and dirty. I was the one who did his laundry. Our neighbors kept on telling me to finish my studies so that I could get away from him. But it is difficult to leave him. I am concerned about him because every time he got drunk, he would wake up everybody and put a fight.”

Subtle Resistance and Disclosure

A tragic narrative calls one for inaction because of fear (Smith 2005 ). It curtails any hope for the future and halts one from advancing towards it. Similar things occurred among some of the participants. Despite the abuses, they stayed with their abusers. That is why they experienced repeated sexual abuse. Their actions were enactions dictated by the emplotted narrative of their experiences of abuse (Frank 2010 ). Their actions became dialogical copies of their narrative. Nevertheless, instead of not doing anything, they made subtle resistance and disclosure. They expressed their agency strategically in a covert way, possibly, to avoid retaliation from the offender.

Ana, for instance, feigned a pregnancy after experiencing repeated abuses. This was a very strategic ploy. It was effective and, at the same time, did not require her to create a disorder in the family; although, there were still risks associated with it. She shared:

“At the end of December, I pretentiously told him I was pregnant to stop him from raping me. He was terrified, and he did stop raping me. He even gave me some pills, but I did not take them.”

On the other hand, Kay employed playful covert resistance. She used jokes against her abuser, although it had no similar effect as that of Ana’s. For example, she said,

“Mama’s brother used to carry a gun and has abused me several times - five times already. At times, I would jokingly tell him: “You know, I will report what happened; I will report you, Uncle, to the police station.” But, he wasn’t thinking that I was joking. I asked him, “Uncle, how many times have you done it to me already? Do you remember you stripped me naked, you removed my panty and my skirt and then kissed me in the mouth, my breasts, and licked my bottom?” After that, he warned me: “Do not to tell your father, mother, and my older brother -- because if you do, I will shoot them.” I said, “Yes, Uncle, I understand.” I was crying at that time.”

In this case, the participants made subtle disclosures – although not within their immediate family. They disclosed to their friends, neighbors, and the police. Mary opened to her neighbors (boarders), who were also caught in a tragic resistance narrative. This time, it is the neighbor’s daughter who was almost raped by her drunk father. But they did not report it to the authorities. She shared this:

“They asked me what my father did to me, but I did not answer them; I only cried. They said it would be New Year so I should have a new life and should not be staying at home always. That prompted me to tell them what happened to me. They asked me how I should deal with the situation. That was it; they were also afraid to report to the police because my father warned that whoever will help me, will be killed. He also warned of killing my brother and me if I would tell anybody about the incident.”

Ana made a similar kind of disclosure to the mother of her best friend. She did not disclose it to her uncle, who supported her, because she feared that a similar tragic event in her family would occur again. Ana said:

Interviewer: Did you tell anybody? Ana: I didn’t tell anyone except the mother of my best friend whom I trusted most. Interviewer: What prompted you to tell? Ana: Because I could no longer bear the thought that even his father can do the same to me when we were supposed to be kins. So I told the mother of my classmate, and she even cried.

Rescued Slave Narrative

Another common narrative invoked by the participants is the rescued slave narrative. This is a progressive type of narrative (Gergen and Gergen 1988 ). Emancipation was the key theme in this narrative: emancipation from the bondage of sex slavery and other forms of oppression. However, this emancipation was not the participants’ initiative but of other people and a Higher Being. The agency on the part of the participants was minimal, especially in terms of disclosure and resistance. This narrative’s typical structure is: “Women are subjected to slavery and other forms of oppression. They become martyr slaves and break down inside. Somebody rescues them, and they are freed from the bondage of their abusers.”

Joy had employed this kind of narrative. She was repeatedly raped by her grandfather as if she were a sex slave. She broke down and cried. She was asked why and then she disclosed. Then, some people helped her get her grandfather arrested and incarcerated.

“The first time I got raped was when I was eight years old. Since then, I was raped by my Lolo several times. I never told anyone about it because he warned me not to. Every time he gets drunk, he would rape me. One time, my Lola's sibling was in the house, and my nephews and nieces, Lolo started to rape me. However, I cried, so they asked me why I was crying. It was then that I told them about it. They helped me get my abuser jailed.”

This rescued slave narrative tends to be a mimetic copy of her slave narrative before the sexual abuses occurred. The same is also true with the other participants who employed this kind of narrative. Their narrative of the abuses was dialogical (Frank 2010 ) because it cohered with the narratives of their lives before the abuses. We can see that Joy’s slave narrative during the abuses formed a dialogue with her narrative of her experiences before the abuses. Both narratives cohered. Joy shared that before the abuses happened,

“I used to babysit my nephew and niece. When I get home, I would fetch water. And sometimes, I get home late after traveling on foot because we had no money to pay for a ride from school which was quite a distance, and I get whipped, and the child of my Lola (grand) would hit me on the head when I commit an offense."

The participants used the same type of slave narrative to emplot the abuses but in a progressive mode due to the rescue being made by others.

Jean, likewise, used the same rescued slave narrative. She experienced trauma after her employer abused her, and she seldom talked with her co-workers; she was in shock and absent-minded. It was her boyfriend and her mother who rescued her. She recounted her rescue moment:

“I was already at home one evening. My boyfriend noticed that I wasn’t my usual self and appeared bothered. Then I confided to him about the abuse. The following day my mother went to the police to report.”

Meanwhile, Bem had a similar narrative:

Interviewer: What prompted you, Bem, to speak up? Who was the first person you have spoken to? Bem: My aunt. Interviewer: Why did you speak up? Bem: They confronted me, saying, “Bem, we heard stories that your brother has molested you.” I said, “Yes, Auntie, and I don’t know why.” And she said to me, “Just don’t tell him; we will just report it.”

It was only when her aunt confronted Bem that she disclosed. This was typical in the rescued slave narrative. These participants were powerless, martyr victims. They broke down, and people noticed their depressive symptoms and then asked them why, and that was when they eventually disclosed.

Rescued Slave narrative’s Effects on the Self, Relationships, and Actions

The participants who employed the rescued slave narrative saw themselves as powerless against the oppressive forces which perpetrated sexual abuses and other forms of torment. But, they were rescued after others noticed the pain they just kept inside them. This type of narrative has profound effects on the self, relationships, and actions of these participants.

Rescued Slave Identity

On the other hand, some participants in this study also assumed the rescued slave identity. With this identification, they felt relieved to have been freed from their oppressors. Some frequently heard words in these narratives include “makagawas ” (to be free), “move on,” and “ nahuwasan ” (relieved). Another participant named Kat reported that,

“After arriving here (crisis center), I felt relaxed because nobody bothers me anymore, especially at night. I am thrilled to learn that I have many companions here who are also victims like me. I thought I was the only one who had experienced such an ordeal. I am happy because no matter what, there are people who could help.”

This kind of narrative was also captured in the stories of Joy. She recounted that she was happy after leaving the house of her abusive grandfather. She said:

“I am happy I have left the house of my Lolo and met some people here in the city. In here (crisis center), I feel like they are my family.”

However, this narrative only indicates that the abused just keep a physical distance away from their abusers. Like in the account of Joy, this physical or spatial dimension only allowed them to escape in space but not in memories. The stigma associated with their slave identity remained, and getting rescued would not wipe away the stains. This slave identity still dwells in them. After being rescued, Joy again employed the same type of narrative, this time in another form of oppression:

“Where I used to stay was quite okay, but I still felt a little sad because the sibling of my auntie was a bit nosy on me and my personal belongings and went around telling unpleasant and unreal things about me. Now I am okay that I am out of that place.”

Kim had a similar experience of oppression after being freed from sexual abuse. He could not escape the stigma of having a slave identity, and neither could he escape its enslaving memories . Like Kim, Jean recounted these memories:

“I am attempting to disregard what happened. I want to move on now. But I could not avoid remembering it, mostly since our courses now talk about court cases. So, I would have no reactions; I keep quiet, and I do not study the lessons. However, I try to overcome it as much as I could.”

Disaffiliation from the Abusers

Within the tragic resistance narrative , the participants developed an emotional attachment with the abusers; on the contrary, the participants were disaffiliated or disconnected from their abusers and connected with those who rescued them in the rescued slave narrative . The participants were happy to have escaped from the control of their abusers and tried as much as possible to keep their distance from them. All they wanted was for the abusers to be punished.

While Joy was delighted to leave her grandfather’s house, Bem also learned that her father had known the abuses done by his brother towards her when she was still 5 years old; however, instead of standing by her side, he blamed her and calling her slutty. This changed Bem’s perception of her father, so she decided not to stay with them anymore.

As for Jean’s abuser’s daughter-in-law, who befriended her on Facebook :

“I want this case to be resolved, especially that he has not been arrested and is currently free. On Facebook, his daughter-in-law sent a friend request to me. I wonder how she knew my Facebook profile and why she sent a friend request. I just disregard her.”

Therefore, the participants were disaffiliated from their abusers, and those they believed were their cohorts. They executed what the rescued slave narrative demands, and this is to separate and leave their abusers in space as traditional slave rescue dictates. As a result, they became more connected with their heroes who rescued them.

Emotional Resistance and Disclosure

The classic slave narrative demands that the slaves be submissive to their masters and be martyrs regardless of the oppression and abuses (Jacobs 2009 ). This narrative had a profound impact on some of the participants. They executed what this narrative demands and played martyrs to the repeated sexual abuses.

This action prevented them from initiating the disclosure process; however, this does not mean that they did not participate in the disclosure process. Although their rescuers initiated the disclosure by asking and confronting them upon seeing them in distress, the participants were truly part of the ritual. The participants’ emotional manifestations of anxiety, depression, and shock were part of the slave narrative. Apparently, they used these to let others know that there was something wrong with them. This cue invited the “heroes” to make sense of their tormenting situation and initiate the disclosure process. Such is what happened to Joy in her previous recount “…so they asked me why I was crying. It was then that I told them about it. They helped me get my abuser jailed.” Her aching emotions were a form of resistance and disclosure, albeit not in words.

Heroic Saga Narrative

The last of the narrative types is the heroic saga narrative. Here, the protagonist is characterized as undergoing a “continuous array of battles against the powers of darkness” (Gergen and Gergen 1988 : 26). This character experiences a series of ups and downs; the theme is progressive but ends in success. This narrative is generally “an adventure tale with several stops where the protagonist encounters trials, oppositions, and challenges but overcomes such testing and emerges as victorious.” This narrative serves as a counter-story to the most dominant and common narratives - tragic resistance and rescued slave narratives. Specifically, only one participant in this study emplotted her experiences through this narrative. May had a similar and could be a much worse experience than some of the participants. She was molested repeatedly by multiple offenders. Unfortunately, along with her, her twin was also abused by her abusers. However, she employed the heroic saga narrative portraying herself as the hero who was in control of herself and the situations she was in. Much can be learned from her. As she recounted:

“I do not know. When my stepfather molested me, I was not in the right mind because my nephew was in the hospital with a 50-50 chance of surviving. My twin and my elder sister were the ones who were in the hospital while I was left at home. On that day, Mama was in the market; it was noontime. He called me to get inside the house because I was at the store. He was holding a knife and told me to sit in the cot and remove my clothes. I refused to remove my clothes despite his insistence until my mother arrived. He dropped the knife beside me and ran to the restroom.

Notice that despite the repeated demands of the abuser, she did not obey his order to undress herself until her mother arrived. This kind of narrative is resonant with the narrative type of the story of the second abuse she shared. This time her brother-in-law attempted to abuse her, but she did not bend to his demand. She was hit, so she screamed aloud, and her sister discovered about this attempted abuse. May recalled:

“He grabbed my leg and pulled me downstairs, but I managed to climb upstairs and hold tight to my twin. He called me to go to him, but I did not. I whispered to my twin. I said, “Jam, our brother. . .” Jam clutched me tighter. The two of us were bracing each other so that I could not be pulled down. Because I did not give in, he hit me, causing me to scream. The commotion roused my elder sister, Che. She asked me what happened. He went downstairs, and I said, “Our brother hit me.” As he resumed his drinking, my sister called him, resulting in another fracas.”

Still, there was another instance when her brother-in-law fondled her. She ran away afterward. With this, she acted with full agency and full control of herself and her situation. She was not a helpless, powerless girl submitting herself to a master, and she was not afraid of retaliation. She fought. She said:

“There was also a time when my older sister told me to stay home because she was going someplace. Our brother started touching me (during that time, I was already working). The following day, I did not return home. My twin and I left. We searched for a new job until we reached Pampanga and found a very kind employer. We stayed there for a long time and have not seen our sister and our Mama since then. “

Heroic Saga Narrative’s Effects on the Self, Relationships, and Actions

The heroic saga narrative had far-reaching effects on the identity, relationships, and actions of May. She viewed herself as a hero who did not wait for help from her family members. She fought her way to free herself from the bondage of her sexual abusers.

Heroic Identity and Heroic Actions

In the adventure tale that she had emplotted, May stood as the main protagonist. Although the heroic saga narrative is characterized by the hero as the abused, it also has a progressive theme similar to that of the rescued slave identity where the hero is the rescuer. In the case of May, she had the full agency and control of herself and her situation. She did not let her situation or other people dictate what to feel, think, and do.

In line with the heroic narrative, she felt much stronger about how she coped with the abuses than others who would typically break down. May said:

“Difficult. I do not know. The good thing was, for example, if this happened to other people, I think they would already break down. It was a good thing that although there were so many challenges that came to my life, I stood my ground and was able to surmount them all. Even in this recent ordeal, I fought and remained strong.”

She narrated that she had fought and survived and even acted in full control of her abuser at one point. She even objected that her brother-in-law’s term of imprisonment be lowered:

May: I wanted him incarcerated for six to eight years, but he pleaded for three years or below. I was against it, but I told the fiscal that if he did not agree, I would testify [in court]. Interviewer: Oh, did they move for amicable settlement? May: Yes, but when [social worker] and I went to the Hall of Justice on September 11, it was Monday, they agreed to my offer of six to eight years.

In this part, the word “my offer” implies that May was in full control. She was the one offering – suggesting that the fate of her abuser was in her hands. She also had good future aspirations: “Everything is now clear because the case is already over. I have a plan to go back to my school before in Piapi. My elder brother asked me whether I would continue. I said, “Yes.”

In terms of her affiliations, she found connections and easy identifications with those people who had similar narratives with her. She could open up her problems and shared her experiences with people who, in a way, lifted her spirit. Moreover, the heroic narrative also seemed to wipe away all the stigma of the abuses. During the interview, she reported having no negative feelings because “I do not mind it anymore… it’s harmful to me. It is nothing to me anymore.”

May’s reaction could entirely be different from that of the dominant tragic resistance and rescued slave narratives. Unlike the rest where the stigma remains, her narrative tells that she has won over the torment.

The purpose of this paper was to describe the narrative types and effects of the stories of sexual abuse experiences of Filipino children and adolescents in their childhood and adolescence. The study is essential in filling up gaps in the literature on child and adolescent sexual abuse. Also, it introduces an alternative narrative analysis – dialogical narrative analysis – in analyzing stories on sexual abuse. With this perspective, stories are seen as retrospective and prospective polyphonic and heteroglossic devices in representing actions and experiences. Narratives as cultural symbols tend to have influences on children and adolescents’ adjustment after sexual abuse experiences. The study provides an answer to Morrison et al.’s ( 2018 ) conflicting results of their review. In their review, some studies show that fear may or may not prompt children to disclose, and they attribute this to the type of abuse experienced. However, we argue that it is not primarily the type of event that occurred, but the type of narrative a particular child or adolescent takes to narrate her story that influences her reactions to the abuse, as shown by the idiosyncratic effects of the three narrative types in this study. As Rabih Alameddine ( 2009 , p.450) notes: “Events matter little, only stories of those events affect us.”

We found three different ‘narrative types’ (Frank 1995 ) in the stories of 10 female Filipinos who experienced sexual abuse. These narrative types are tragic resistance narrative, rescued slave narrative, and heroic saga narrative. We coined these narrative types by loosely basing it on the narrative typology suggested by Smith ( 2016 ). These narratives have idiosyncratic consequences on the identities, social affiliations, and actions of the participants. This supports the contentions of socio-narratology that narratives do not just represent actions but also act prospectively in influencing what identities the participants would take, whom they would affiliate, and what actions to take (Frank 2010 , 2012 ).

We can also see the influence of the Filipino culture on the narratives of the participants. This influence demonstrates the heteroglossic and polyphonic nature of narratives (Frank 2012 ). Filipinos are communitarian (Guevara 2005 ). With this, relationships are highly valued. Thus, the interests of the family and the community are considered superior to individual interests. This is probably the primary reason why most of the participants’ stories were told in the tragic resistance and rescued slave narrative. They were afraid that if they disclosed the abuses, it would ruin family relationships. Moreover, those who used rescued slave narratives tended to be highly dependent on family and friends’ help. The self and its interests were sidetracked as only one participant storied her life in a heroic and individualistic manner.

Although the study is informative, it is not without limitations. Contextual limitations are present in the study. Other contexts might provide different narrative types and consequences of such narratives because the culture is at play in narrative research. Thus, we join other scholars’ call in conducting more qualitative studies on children’s and adolescents’ narrative voices on their sexual abuse experiences. Also, the study is limited in the type of participants. The present study analyzed stories of those who had been admitted to a crisis center. Stories of victims who have no such admission might differ. Thus, future research should explore the narrative voices of victims not admitted to crisis centers.

The study is also limited in terms of focusing only on the structure and consequences of the narrative. It has not delved into what influences one to take such a narrative. Thus, future research could address this limitation by looking into the personal and contextual variabilities in the production of stories. It has also been widely acknowledged that interviewing is a co-production between the research participant and the interviewer (Gubrium and Holstein 2009 ; Holstein and Gubrium 1995 ). The interviewer exerts an influence on the stories produced. Thus, the interviewer (first author) might have a unique influence on the participants. Nevertheless, she built enough rapport to address this. Future research can still employ less intrusive ways of conducting narrative analysis, like visual analysis (Riessman 2008 ).

This study is just a step going forward in employing the narrative approach to sexual abuse studies. It is only a primary seed for exploring both the ‘whats’ and especially the ‘hows,’ which have been neglected in narrative research (Gubrium and Holstein 2009 ). Future research could explore the different dimensions of narrative analysis – thematic, structural, dialogical, and even visual (Riessman 2008 ). Moreover, we argue that future scholars should take guidance from Frank’s ( 2010 , 2012 ) socio-narratology and dialogical narrative analysis to do this. Socio-narratology addresses the theoretical and methodological needs implied by Gibson and Morgan ( 2013 ). They argued that there is a need for sexual abuse research to analyze the linkages among contexts, abuse, and consequences of these abuses as illuminated by stories, which do not neglect contexts and idiosyncrasies of different experiences studies suffer.

Future studies could also build upon the current findings, especially on the three narrative types. There may be other narrative types available in other localities as culture and contexts provide variability in narratives. Moreover, these narratives are the resources people use to tell their stories (Frank 2010 , 2012 ; Harrington  2008 ; Riessman 2008 ). Thus, sexual abuse stories may differ in other places. Other researchers could pursue this line of inquiry.

Moreover, it is suggested that more studies on child sexual abuse be done in the Philippines. A recent review found a lack of research on child maltreatment, especially on sexual abuse. Sexual abuse has been known to have far-reaching adverse consequences for the victims, and more research can be conducted about this (Roche 2017 ). Moreover, the narrative approach could give an avenue to hear these victims’ ‘voices,’ especially with the recent interest in cultural studies of children and adolescents’ sexual abuse experiences.

Authors contribution

Conceptualization: [Nora Maria Elena T. Osmeña, Dan Jerome S. Barrera], Methodology: [Nora Maria Elena T. Osmeña]; Formal analysis and investigation: [Nora Maria Elena T. Osmeña with the assistance of Dan Jerome S. Barrera]; Writing - original draft preparation: [Nora Maria Elena T. Osmeña]; Writing - review and editing: [Nora Maria Elena T. Osmeña, Dan Jerome S. Barrera]; Funding acquisition: [Nora Maria Elena T. Osmeña]; Resources: [Nora Maria Elena T. Osmeña].

Funding for this study was derived from the Commission on Higher Education [Philippines].

Compliance with Ethical Standards

All rules and regulations related to research with human participants were strictly followed. Ethical clearance was given by the Silliman University ethics committee.

Informed consent was obtained from the participants and authorized personnel.

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

This paper was a derivative of the doctoral dissertation of the first author at Silliman University, Dumaguete City, Philippines

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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