He locked me in a room. He held me hostage. He wouldn’t let me leave.
He screamed at me, “WHO DO YOU BELIEVE IN? SAY JESUS CHRIST! SAY JESUS CHRIST!”
–Janine Hernandez
Content warning: Domestic violence; physical, emotional, verbal, and spiritual abuse; suicidal ideation; self-harm
Every time I talk to Janine Hernandez, I get a reminder of how difficult we’ve made it, as a society, to help victims of domestic violence who want to spare others from the same suffering,
When survivors of all forms of abuse share their experiences with Into Account, I’m struck by how much of their motivation comes from the desire to protect. Perpetrators are often attracted to professions that give them access to and power over vulnerable people, and far too often, we as a society leave it to the people they’ve already abused to do the hard work of protecting others from their violence.
Abusers also gravitate towards professions that are seen as virtuous. Helping professions provide abusers with a cover, whether they’re abusing at work or at home or both, because those professions legitimately attract people with altruistic intentions. And most of us are generally–and understandably–reluctant to suspect someone in a helping profession of doing something so antithetical to the purpose of their job.
In her video above, Janine gives a harrowing account of physical, spiritual, verbal, and emotional abuse by Alberto Sosa, 37, who lives in Maspeth, Queens, in New York City.
Alberto Sosa is an American Sign Language interpreter, though despite extensive searches, we’ve found no evidence that he holds a license with the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, which is the only national certifying body for ASL interpreters. He also serves as an Applied Behavioral Therapist for autistic children. As an ASL interpreter, he interprets at the All Saints Priory, an independent Catholic parish in Ridgewood (Queens), and independently interprets for many organizations in the Deaf community all over New York. Janine and I have both tried repeatedly to alert All Saints to the danger Mr. Sosa poses to its Deaf congregants in particular, but with no response.
ASL interpreters are generally provided to Deaf consumers. This means interpreters will be in doctor’s offices, classrooms, therapy sessions, ER departments, attorney’s offices, and courtrooms. In police stations, even, interpreting for survivors of domestic violence. Interpreters are navigating language and facilitating communication between Deaf and hearing people. Interpreters are required by national licensing entities to adhere to a code of professional conduct. They are required to be emotionally neutral, trustworthy, bound by confidentiality, and beyond reproach when it comes to any form of interpersonal violence.
Based on the evidence I’ve seen, it appears that Mr. Sosa has been reported to the police by multiple women, including Janine, for domestic violence. But to the best of her knowledge and mine, he has never been charged with a crime. Few perpetrators of domestic violence are, even when victims report them. Into Account has shared Janine’s police reports with every contracting entity we’re aware of that employs Alberto Sosa, but like All Saints Priory, most have ignored us completely.
The failures of the criminal legal system should not have to be the failures of institutions that provide vital interpretive services to help Deaf people and hearing people talk to each other, nor of the institutions that serve autistic children. When we make criminal charges and convictions into our barometer for what counts as unethical behavior, we leave the door wide open for abusers, because the criminal legal system will fail us almost every time.
This reality, combined with the particular vulnerability of the populations that Alberto Sosa serves as an interpreter and ABA therapist, puts a survivor like Janine in a terrible bind. She survived him–she got out. Like most domestic violence survivors, it took her multiple attempts to leave. To warn other people about him, she has to risk his retaliation against her yet again.
Does any of this sound familiar? To domestic violence survivors, I’m sure it does. DV victims incur our society’s judgment at every turn. We judge them for the all-consuming nature of the trauma bond they are often forced into with their abusers. All too often, we attribute their staying to lack of strength, failing to recognize how viciously such abusers punish their victims for setting boundaries and asserting autonomy, and the calculations that victims have to make to survive. We punish survivors for naming their abusers to protect others, and we punish them for staying quiet to protect themselves and their loved ones.
Into Account doesn’t have any easy solutions for this. We call the problem out when we see it; we refuse to participate in abuser logic. We advocate for change wherever we can. But what we can do mostly comes down to one basic principle: don’t make people face this alone. Don’t take away survivors’ power to make their own decisions. Help each other. Lift each other up. Work together to fight the isolation that abusers need to do what they do.
Janine has made a career out of providing people with the resources to tell their own stories of living through adversity. It’s an honor to help her do the same for herself. Together with Janine, my hope is that her courageous truth-telling will reach the people it needs to reach, particularly among those in the Deaf community.
–Stephanie Krehbiel, Executive Director