The blast was the echo of a long-ago gunshot that put a bright and charismatic young woman in a wheelchair for life. The “it” was an email she recently sent me recalling the horrific event while touting its positive legacy.
That legacy: the efforts of her son, motivated by his mother’s tragedy, to help domestic violence victims everywhere, including the Philippines.
I first met Julie Alban back in 1988 when she was a 22-year-old new college graduate and I was a new reporter at the Los Angeles Times. Just three months earlier, her then-boyfriend had shot her in the back as she slept at her parents’ Long Beach, California, home after spurning his proposal of marriage. The story made headlines because both came from prominent families who lived across the street from each other and had been tight-knit friends.
While Julie was the daughter of a well-known orthopedic surgeon who had run for public office, her assailant’s stepfather—Daniel H. Ridder—published the local newspaper, the Long Beach Press-Telegram. I was the first journalist Julie ever talked to. And the result was a lifelong friendship that produced a string of newspaper features over the next 20 years, most recently in 2008 shortly before I left the paper.
By then, she had a five-month-old son, birthed by a gestational carrier fertilized by intrauterine insemination. And it was that son—Joseph Abraham Alban—about whom she wrote me last month. “You covered my story with so much integrity and sensitivity,” suggested the woman who left a thriving law practice to become a full-time mom, “that I thought you might pass his story along…”
And what a story it was!
Joseph, now 17 and deeply affected by what his mother describes as “growing up in the aftermath of the rippling effects of domestic violence,” has spent the past two years volunteering at a domestic violence shelter in Long Beach called Interval House. “I began immersing myself in learning everything I could about domestic violence,” he told me in an email of his own. “I wanted to understand what motivates someone to brutalize the person they love the most.”
To find out, he interviewed several counselors at the shelter who had survived violent abuse by people to whom they were close. Then he published it all on a website called Breaking the Chains: Domestic Violence Prevention Begins with All of Us.
Some of the stories are dramatic.
“When I was five, my dad tried to kill my mom,” wrote one woman who emigrated to the US from Vietnam in 1975. “That was the last time I saw him…Domestic violence is very common in the Asian community. But women are told that speaking out disgraces the family.”
That sad truth also resonates in the Philippines, where divorce is illegal, trapping many women in loveless marriages. “Every time he beat me, he beat the kids,” Rizal resident Michelle Bulang, who still bears scars and burn marks from the abuse, told ABC News Australia in a segment aired last year.
Philippine lawmakers took a major step forward with the 2004 passage of the Anti-Violence Against Women and Their Children Act, providing serious penalties for domestic abuse. And yet, a 2022 National Demographic and Health Survey conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority found that 17.5% of Filipino women aged 15-49 had experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence at the hands of intimate partners.
Joseph Alban hopes that sharing their stories will help contributors worldwide find “a safe space free of the stigmas and blame often unfairly placed on this community…preventing families from getting the help they desperately need.”
For Bulang, that help came when she finally found the courage to leave. “Before, I can’t smile, I can’t laugh…” she said. “But now I am free, just like a bird, I am free.”
For some, that freedom could begin with a visit to young Alban’s website.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American author and journalist with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times. For help or to tell you story, visit BREAKING THE CHAINS: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE PREVENTION BEGINS WITH ALL OF US.
