WARNING: This article contains details of child sexual abuse.
Hardly a week goes by that I don’t hear from a victim of sexual abuse.
Hundreds of emails have landed in my inbox from across Canada and beyond — as far as New Zealand.
They’ve read my reports or heard my podcasts investigating serial abuse, and they want to share their own unrelated story of what happened to them when they were children.
“You’re the first person I’ve ever told,” is a sentiment more than a few have written.
Sometimes in a few sentences, others over many pages, they reveal intimate, heartbreaking details of what happened to them at church, school, in cars, on camping trips, after band practices.
Most aren’t asking me to report their story. They just want someone to know.
I always write back, because I believe them.
It’s sad they feel they have no one else to tell, that no one close to them would listen, support them, or could be trusted. Or maybe it’s just easier to tell a stranger.
Reading Andrea Robin Skinner’s account of sexual abuse in the Toronto Star — and what happened to her after she told her mother — none of it came as a shock to me.
Skinner’s mother was Canadian author and Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro.
As a young adult, Skinner told Munro about the abuse she had suffered at the hands of her stepfather, starting when she was just a nine-year-old kid.
Munro chose to support her husband, and the literary icon blamed her daughter.
The reaction of mothers
This common, well-documented response happens a lot, and more often when the victim is a girl or woman.
“It’s easier to blame the girl,” Beverley Chalmers told me in an interview.
Chalmers has long studied and written about the abuse of children around the world. Her latest book is Child Sex Abuse: Power, Profit and Perversion.
“Often the girl child is regarded as being compliant because that’s what we expect,” she explained. “‘You didn’t fight back. You went along with it. You came back for more. It’s your fault.'”
Chalmers pointed out that Munro’s daughter was abused twice — first by her stepfather, then by her mother, both as a child and throughout her life.
“For multiple possible reasons, the mother who learns of this abuse often remains faithful to her partner at the expense of the child.”
But even when the perpetrator is not a relative or friend, girls are still too often blamed by their mothers.
Evidence and admissions backed the stories of more than a dozen women who said they were abused by a teacher in the Greater Toronto Area in the 1970s and 80s in my podcast, The Banned Teacher.�
And yet some of the women said their mothers didn’t support them.
“I told my mom and she basically said to me two months ago, ‘So why did this happen to you and none of your friends? Why were you drinking? And if he flirted with you, why weren’t you strong enough?'” said one of the women who reported being raped by her teacher when she was 17.
Stand by your man
My investigations reveal cases of abusers who are charismatic, trusted and revered: priests, mentors, coaches, teachers, scout leaders, family friends.
And abusers can be strategic. They gain the love and trust of colleagues and parents, then use that to their advantage.
“They start with the adults first, to prime the environment to be able to do it and to and to be able to get the access they need,” said Noni Classen, director of education and support services at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.
“These individuals who end up victimizing children are grooming not only the children, but grooming the adults,” she added.
Those groomed adults defer to the abuser, not the child, for the truth. Sometimes, even with the facts in front of them, such as a list of multiple victims on a criminal charge sheet, that conviction remains resolute.
I’ve seen wives holding hands with abusers as they left court; couples smiling, arm in arm, on social media posts after lawsuits were filed and criminal charges were laid.
I’ve been bullied and harassed by supporters of the accused. I received a warning from the lawyer of a wife asking me to cease my reporting about her husband.
Munro simply wasn’t the only woman who chose to stand by her man.
It happened so long ago. Why come forward now?
For many of the men and women I’ve interviewed, it took years to stop blaming themselves and focus their shame and guilt on the abuser.
That meant keeping the pain of what happened to them a secret for a very long time.
“I think it is absolutely amazingly heroic for people to come forward years later, and I don’t care if it takes 20 years, 40 years, 50 years to report what happened. It is so difficult to be believed and to be regarded with respect and treated with sensitivity, because we as a society, we still don’t allow it,” Chalmers told me.
But for the survivors, it’s like no time has passed. They still feel the pain, embarrassment and humiliation.
Two summers ago, I sat in a room with five women who’d just recently met. What bound them together was the teacher who’d hurt them. Some said they were raped. Others were molested, fondled, kissed.
What surprised me was the tendency for each woman to downplay what had happened to them in contrast to the experiences of the other women in the room, as if their pain was any less.
They’d been conditioned to tamp down their emotions and hide the facts because none of the important adults in their lives had validated their claims when they were kids.
Decades after the abuse, that coping mechanism continues to rear its head, causing victims to still consider the possibility that their assault wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been.
But the impact is real, and the damage is lasting.
“I’m still having trouble looking people in the eye while talking about it,” one survivor told the group of women, 35 years after she said she was raped.
“You feel the shame. I understand it. I just wish you didn’t,” responded another survivor.
‘It couldn’t happen today’
Crimes in residential schools, scandals at Scouts Canada, abuse by clergy in the Catholic Church and serial sexual exploitation by school teachers are now all well documented.
What happens in homes behind closed doors is often more insidious, closeted, leaving victims voiceless, reluctant to speak out for fear of being ostracized by an entire family or community.
Allegations are still hidden because the accused is a “nice guy” who “didn’t mean anything by it.”
“We don’t want to ruin anyone’s life,” children are told.
What may surprise many is that these aren’t just stories of yesteryear. Every year in courtrooms across the country, parents, guardians and relatives of children are facing charges of sexual assault.
Every police department knows these crimes are underreported. Several forces have started stressing this point when they send out media releases about such arrests.
When a case does proceed to court, the law prevents anyone from identifying the children, for good reason. But when the victim is the son, daughter, niece, sibling or cousin of an abuser, even mentioning the family connection could break the publication ban.
Oftentimes, the public only finds out when the children themselves decide to speak out. This means going back to court, and sometimes to extraordinary lengths, to lift the ban on their own names.
In Andrea Robin Skinner’s case, details of her stepfather’s plea bargain and indecent assault conviction only came to light because she revealed her own story.
Why these stories need to be told
“The topic of child sex abuse is still remarkably taboo and few chose … to write about it,” Chalmers said. “Like Alice Munro, we continue to hide this shameful aspect of life, and in so doing, we, like Alice Munro, continue to betray our children.”
Investigative reporters or police can’t investigate every case of sexual abuse. There are too many.
And experts agree the onus shouldn’t be on the children to call out the adults. But when they do, it’s important to listen.
Despite the #MeToo movement and a growing awareness around these issues, survivors say police still routinely ignore complaints.
The reasons range from “unfounded” to “insufficient evidence to proceed,” as well as “not enough likelihood of conviction” and “no applicable law.”
But as I’ve learned through two sprawling podcast investigations and many more instances of reporting through the years, the act of real listening begins with empathy rather than doubt.
I often ask survivors why they’re giving me the privilege of telling their story. Peter Hamer, who was sexually assaulted by his Ottawa music teacher in the 1980s, answered that best.
He said it was his abuser’s secret, not his.
“The most important thing for me is, it’s not my secret. It’s now public, and it’s not my responsibility to keep his secret anymore.”
As they recover, survivors learn to put the blame where it belongs.
It’s not their fault. It’s not their shame.
And it’s not their secret to keep.
Support is available for anyone who has been sexually abused. Resources for family and children are available through the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. You can also access crisis lines and local support services through this Government of Canada website or the Ending Violence Association of Canada database. If you’re in immediate danger or fear for your safety or that of others around you, please call 911.