Two groups of people ran to meet Elmer Balbero as he came out of the airport that day. One was a group of reporters. Another was his wife and two daughters he had not seen in seven years.
The reporters jammed cameras, lights, and microphones into his face. His family engulfed him in an embrace and tear-filled kisses. “Nasaan si Kathleen? Si Kathleen?” [Where is Kathleen?] Balbero asked, looking for the younger of his two children.
“Ayan, naka yakap na sa’yo,” his wife, Claire, told him. (There, hugging you.)
Kathleen had one arm wrapped around his waist while the other held her phone recording their reunion. When Balbero had left to board that fateful fishing boat, Kathleen was a toddler who stood above his knees. Now, she was a teenager.
Balbero was among the 29-man crew onboard the Naham 3 fishing vessel that was hijacked by Somali pirates while sailing the Indian Ocean on March 26, 2012. One crew member died during the hijacking and two reportedly succumbed to illness while in captivity.
Balbero was among the five Filipinos who were released and returned to the Philippines in November 2016. Their period of captivity of nearly five years is among the longest in modern-day piracy.
I was one of the journalists who met the newly released hostages at the airport. Former Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay called the media to a press conference. Family members were there, too. SEACOMS, a non-government organization that had been supporting the families of the fishermen since the kidnapping, funded the transportation needs of family members so they could be present at the airport to welcome their men home.
“It would have been traumatizing if he (Balbero) were to come home and there would be no one here,” Rancho Villavicencio, then Executive Director of SEACOMS Maritime Development International, told me.
Hearing this bothered me. Doing my job meant intruding on such an intimate moment. It felt predatory. Perhaps to assuage my guilt, I told Villavicencio, “At least it’s a happy ending now that they have been rescued.”
“This is just the beginning. They have to settle into normal life again. They have to get to know their family again. This is the hardest part,” Villavicencio said.
In 2020, I got in touch with the Balbero family. I had last written about Balbero’s pain and trauma. I wanted to write about his healing, too. Where my reportage had ended, Balbero’s character was framed and frozen as a victim who needed to be rescued. I wanted to tell a story that reflected other aspects of his character, as a father and as a survivor. So together with a local reporting partner, I interviewed Balbero and his two daughters, Eloisa and Kathleen in their home in Isabela. His wife, Claire, still worked abroad.
Eloisa told me that as a little girl, her father taught her how to play chess. The quiet concentration of the game mirrored her father’s gentle and soft-spoken manner. Eloisa’s childhood memory was in stark contrast to the father who had returned to them as a jumpy, short-tempered man who often suffered from nightmares.
Eloisa wondered if her father blamed them for his kidnapping and if he still loved them. She wondered if he knew how hard they had hoped for him to be alive and return home.
In the years that he was held captive, everyone told the Balbero women to give up on Elmer ever returning. He is already dead, they said. It will do you good to move on. “No one except me, my sister, and my mother believed that he was still alive and that he would ever come back to us. No one,” Eloisa told me.
As Eloisa’s 18th birthday neared, she prayed that her father would come home to dance the father-daughter dance with her. She could not imagine having someone else stepping in to take his place. About 10 months before she turned 18, Balbero was released.
Counseling and therapy helped the Balbero family recognize that Elmer was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Nearly five years after he had been released, I wrote the story of the Balbero family’s journey of collective healing in, “After Freedom, Filipino Seafarers Captured by Pirates Battle Trauma”.
I shared Elmer’s story and my own struggle writing it with Charles Autheman, an international consultant specializing in migration-related narratives. For many years, Charles and I have been developing workshops and resources to train journalists on reporting stories of forced labor and human trafficking.
While much of this work was intended to equip journalists to deal with stories of worker abuse and exploitation, there were growing discussions about how the existing paradigms of journalism limited the representation of migrant workers and survivors of violence to victims. The interview questions and the exercise of extracting information, presume the victim subject position and hardly consider how else the person might want to be portrayed in the story.
Autheman and I jointly realized that there was a pressing need for journalism to dull the edges of its extractive nature. Traditional approaches to reporting labor exploitation and human trafficking can lead, in some extreme cases, to situations of re-victimization, saviorism, or extractivism. While guidelines for trauma-informed reporting exist, without training and practice–and under the crunch of a deadline, there is always the possibility of failing to capture the complex, and often long process, of dealing with the physical and psychological toll of exploitation and its layered experiences of physical violence.
One way to address this is to pay closer attention to survivor-led organizations. For several years, organizations such as the Survivor Alliance have been trying to provide ethical education for those who come across situations of severe exploitation. They have crafted the foundations of survivor-centered approaches and developed some of the key ideas that can guide journalists in reporting these stories, which include recognizing that:
The survivor has agency and shall not be reduced to his or her experience of abuse.
The survivor has a life beyond the specific abuse that needs to be told and provides the necessary context to the audience.
The survivor will certainly carry post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) well after he or she has been “rescued” and that story, as well, needs to be told.
Following Elmer Balbero’s story after his rescue has deeply influenced my way of looking at survivors of labor abuse. I’ve had to re-think the impact that my stories can have and how I can involve subjects as co-creators of their narrative. Mostly, I’ve been consciously working on developing my writing to become more trauma-informed and survivor-centered to reflect the nuanced life character of my subjects beyond that of the victim.
If we limit subjects to case studies of victimhood, stories come to an end with rescue. But policies, support systems, and social norms need to address what comes after rescue: the harder part of surviving and healing. – Rappler.com
Ana P. Santos is an investigative journalist who reports on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and migrant labor rights. Charles Autheman is an international consultant specializing in human and labor rights, mainly in the context of migration. Santos and Autheman have developed and implemented media trainings for journalists on issues such as forced labor, fair recruitment, and intersectionality, in partnership with the International Labour Organization and other United Nations agencies and related organizations.
The story of Elmer Balbero is part of the multi-media investigative report series, Survival in the High Seas, which was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
