Cindy Nguyen '06

The mission statement of the San Diego Volunteer Lawyers Program (SDVLP) is “To provide equal access to the justice system by serving as a bridge between indigent and other disadvantaged people in San Diego County and the volunteer lawyers and others who are willing to donate their time and resources.” Their vision statement is “That all people in San Diego County enjoy equal justice and access to legal services without regard to economic status.”

SDVLP provides services to domestic violence survivors through the Domestic Violence Prevention Project and Family Justice Center Collaborative. The Domestic Violence Prevention Project is a court-based clinic program at which domestic violence survivors are assisted in completing the application for a temporary restraining order which they file in pro per. At the Family Justice Center, SDVLP provides direct representation assistance in Domestic Violence Restraining Order Hearings and related legal services.

This past summer, I worked with victims of domestic violence who were seeking a restraining order and who were not able to hire a lawyer to help them. I worked individually with clients, from writing their declaration to filling out their legal request for a restraining order to filing their actual court order for a mandated restraining order. The process would start out with the personal declaration, a written document explaining the most recent abuse, possibly including a history of abuse, the circumstances surrounding the abuse, and the client’s reasons for requesting a restraining order. Upon the completion of the personal declaration, I filed legal documents for the request of the restraining order and the actual court order.

My summer was mostly spent helping economically disadvantaged women who believe in the possibility of empowerment, but who had heretofore been perhaps too afraid or ignorant to seek it. In addition to employing my skills as a writer, I was also able to offer translational services to Vietnamese clients who did not speak English. A moment drenched in memorable significance was when a woman described how her boyfriend abused her by squeezing her breast until it bled. As a woman, as a person, the horrific image of this action left me momentarily speechless and devoid of any clear response. Here was the exploitation of a woman’s sexuality at its most poignantly cruel. I cannot fully describe what sort of emotional, intellectual, political reaction this elicited from me. I know the feeling intimately, but words cannot capture the heat of my mind, nor the pang of my heart. My emotional reaction was one of outrage. How can a person so cruelly inflict such trauma on another? How can a woman endure this kind of pain? Perhaps the physical injury meant nothing to her – not because it did not hurt her – but perhaps because she had gotten used to this kind of physical and sexual abuse. Anger paralyzed my ability to recognize it as simply one of countless sexual violations that continue to go unreported. My intellectual reaction was one of rebellion. How can she not do anything about this? How can the world continue to watch in silence? My political reaction was a searing sense of injustice. Where was the promise of female empowerment? Where was the promise of sexual equality? As far as I knew, the promise was out there, but the actualization had to come from within.

I do not want to be stripped of the power, stripped of the right, to do something. I want to be armed with the knowledge of the right, armed with the knowledge, that not only do I know something, but that I have the right, indeed, I have the obligation to help someone when no one else was willing. At that moment, I not only wanted justice, I wanted retribution. A moment’s reflection reminded me that as a part of my summer internship, I was not there to deliver retribution. A second moment’s reflection told me that I was not even there to deliver justice. I was but a meager volunteer working in a legal clinic for a summer. What could I do? Yet what could I not do? At that moment while I was writing the woman’s declaration, I had never felt so powerless in all my life. What was a college education worth when others were helplessly standing there being victimized by the very persons who presumably love them? As powerless as I may have felt at that moment, my client assured me that I could never truly grasp the emotional impact that this incident had on her. Although I was powerless, she was voiceless. I felt powerless because I felt that I had no capability through which to help her. But she felt
voiceless because she did not possess any medium through which protest could even be heard, let alone acted upon. A person’s life is fragile, and a person’s dignity is no less important. To truly believe in human rights, I had to believe in the human being beneath. It was not that my own personal aspirations in the legal field were categorically ascertained at this moment. On the contrary, my aspirations took a rather hard beating. I understood that the meaning behind assisting these victims of domestic violence to seek shelter and protection through legal means. However, it was as if working on the restraining order aspect of the problem was like treating, the symptoms of the problem, not the actual source of the problem. For a while after the internship ended, I was paradoxically disillusioned and empowered. I questioned whether I could really make a difference, and the equivocal answer that I got from myself and from my internship compelled me to seek an answer.

If I am starting to sound like an LSAT stimulus in the Logical Reasoning section, it’s probably because I am. My immediate goal right now is to do well on the LSAT, which implies that law school is in my immediate future. I realize that law school is but a step in the direction of practicing law, and though I am not certain that I am going to law school in the next year, I am certain that I intend to practice law. If there is a possible direction in which my practice of the law might take me, I know it is in the area of human rights, possibly international human rights.