The following column was published a week ago - it's by a regular Ottawa Sun writer and our local Sun-owned paper, The London Free Press printed it...My response is below it. What do you think?
The London Free Press, Feb 17, 06
Molestation memories tainted with guilt
By GEOFF MATTHEWS
I have a deep, dark secret. I was sexually molested as a child. On several occasions and by three different people. All of them men.
I was just four years old when it happened the first time. It was in the basement of a church -- a building that by its very nature should be a place of safety and refuge from the wrongs of the world.
The molester was someone who was familiar to me. A part-time employee in the church where my father was the minister. He'd always been friendly to me, and other adults seemed to trust him, so when he wanted to play a "game" that saw my pants and then his coming off, it didn't set off any warning bells in a four-year-old brain.
His games, thankfully, involved nothing more than rubbing and touching, and they always came with the strict warning that I shouldn't tell anyone else, so I didn't. At least not for about 50 years when I finally worked up the nerve to tell my father.
My dad was in ill health and I just thought he should know. Not because I wanted him to go back there and punch the guy's lights out but I just felt compelled to tell him.
I was a rambunctious 13-year-old the second time I became a victim. The whole of north end Halifax was my playground in those days and I was cutting through a construction site heading home when the night watchman flagged me down.
He offered me a cigarette, which immediately made him pretty cool in my books, and then asked if I wanted to go into his trailer and watch TV ... learn how to roll a smoke, maybe even have a glass of beer.
Wow. Could life get any better?
So what if he wanted to put his hand down my pants. No one would know, he assured me, as long as I didn't tell. So I kept it to myself, but I didn't take a shortcut through that building site anymore.
Episode three happened in P.E.I. when I was 16. I wanted to buy some beer but was five years too young to get it for myself. However I'd heard about a friendly store owner who would pick up booze for teenagers. All you had to do was ask.
"Sure," he answered when I worked up the nerve to tell him what I wanted. "Just drop by the store tonight. Come around back because it will be closed and I'll have the beer for you."
And he did, along with a movie he wanted me to watch ... some eye-popping porn that my young eyes had never seen before.
And could he just put his hand here and his mouth there and no one would ever know and it would be okay and I must promise to never tell.
I never did, until today. So why now, after all these years? Maybe it's something of a catharsis ... a cleansing of my conscience.
But more than that it's because I just don't understand why others are haunted by their own episodes of childhood sexual abuse, and why they can't let it go.
Granted what happened to me was pretty mild stuff compared with the horrors inflicted on some kids, but it was clearly abuse, it was wrong and it came with the self-guilt that seems to be common in sexual abuse cases.
It had to be kept secret because to admit what had happened would be to admit my own guilt.
I'm not proud of what happened to me, but neither am I ashamed. I haven't taken to abusing others and, as far as I know I haven't been left with any permanent scars.
It's simply something that I went through, just like I went through falling down a lot when I was learning to ride a bike. Just like I went through periods when I smoked too many cigarettes and drank too much booze and lied to my parents and stole from the corner store.
I did all those things and I wish I hadn't and I don't do them anymore, but I don't lie awake nights thinking of my misdeeds. Nor do I plot how I can get even with the three men who took advantage of my innocence because to tell the truth it's just not that big a deal for me.
Besides, life has loads of way better memories.
Geoff Matthews is a columnist with Sun Media Newspapers.
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In Tuesday's The London Free Press, they printed my following column as a rebuttal with the heading, For Child Molestation Survivors, It Is A Big Deal
In Molestation memories tainted with guilt (LFP Feb 17), Geoff Matthews says of the abuse three men perpetrated on him as a child, “It’s just not that big a deal for me.”
I, too, was abused by three different men, but unlike Mathews, I didn’t wait 50 years to profess my “wellness”.
I used his line when my older brother’s parole officer tried to get me to “talk” about my abuse when I was seventeen. “Hey, it’s just not that big a deal, okay!” Three years later when my first therapist tried to get me to open up, I shot back, “Listen. It’s just not that big a deal for me. My problems have nothing to do with what happened. You should talk to my siblings…” And again, four years later, when a doctor told me to plan my fifteen-year-old brother’s funeral after his first of many suicide attempts, I explained, “It’s just not that big a deal for me, but my brother just couldn’t deal with his abuse.”
Mr. Mathews, I sure hope you don’t get the wake up call I experienced when I was 21 in the months following my abuser’s trial. I was so detached from my emotions, I appeared to be ‘Superman’ – able to juggle the public attention and private drama.
In actuality, I was riding a roller-coaster that I didn’t know how to stop. What a relief when the president of a chapter of Parents Concerned with Crime against Children looked me up and offered to represent me to the media. Eventually she set up an interview with “Pendulum” magazine.
When the female interviewer arrived at our home, she was polished looking, very businesslike with a briefcase. She tape-recorded a two-hour interview and cried at all the appropriate moments. I thanked her and asked her if she had a copy of her magazine with her. She looked through her empty briefcase and apologized, but assured me that she would mail me several copies. In the ensuing months, I received no correspondence from her, and tried unsuccessfully to find a copy of Pendulum. Then, while reading a newspaper, I happened upon the headline: “Pendulum Magazine Charged with Child Pornography.”
My nemesis not only stopped my roller-coaster, it threw me off. The knowledge that my story of being sexually abused was used for child pornography was devastating. That it was arranged by a children’s advocate sent me into orbit. Emotionally and mentally destroyed, I simply checked out. I closed up shop. No more talk of abuse for ten years. Only therapy (individual and group) enabled me to speak of the abuse publicly again.
Once I did, I learned my experience was and is a big deal. Going public with our stories is not about seeking revenge, or about ‘getting even’ as Matthews hints. Does he really think he was the chosen one by each of his three molesters? Our collective silence encourages victims to feel that way. In reality, each victimization is usually a pit stop on the perpetrator’s path.
Mathews wondered why others are haunted by their own episodes of abuse, why they can’t let go. Methinks he doth protest too much, for he felt “compelled” to disclose his abuse first to his father and then to us. He called it a “cleaning of my conscience.”
His email address was published at the end of the revelation of his secret. I predict he’ll hear just what a big deal molestation memories are to his readers who are survivors. Donald D'Haene is the author of Father's Touch (fatherstouch.com)
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My prediction was correct. Mr. Mathews followed up his first column with another (below)...I don't think my fellow survivor writers would appreciate being compared to "aligators who are hungry" but I wrote him that at least it was better than being called crocodiles!
For some victims, sex abuse casts a long shadow
By Geoff Matthews
A newspaper columnist needs a thick hide. If you're doing the job well, you're bound to stir up discussion from time to time.
Maybe even a little bit of controversy.
But every so often you discover something you have written has placed you neck deep in the waters of a swamp, and the alligators are hungry.
Last week in this space I owned up to the fact that I was sexually abused as a child. It was a secret that I had kept tucked away for years but decided to share with readers.
Three different men in three separate cities took advantage of my innocence to satisfy their own sexual urges, and then relied on my guilty conscience to keep me from talking about what they had done.
And they were right. I did keep it to myself, too embarrassed to tell my friends, my parents, my teacher. Too naive to think about contacting any authorities.
But while I may have kept silent about the events, I refused to dwell on what happened to me. Refused to let it fester in my mind. Refused to let it prevent me from getting on with the rest of my life.
And that's where I ran afoul of some readers ... other victims of sexual abuse who told me in no uncertain terms that I was some kind of freak for feeling as I did. That if I wasn't angry and bitter I was some kind of screwed up individual.
One woman lamented that my own abuse had not been severe enough to teach me a lesson.
"Maybe, just maybe, if you had been sodomized in the basement of that church, you would 'get it,'" she wrote. "There is most definitely something wrong with you."
I'd like to assure her that being groped and fondled by a burly, naked man was plenty traumatic for a four-year-old. I "get it" that what he did was wrong. I know, half a century later, that I should have reported it but I didn't.
And as an adult I see nothing to gain by thinking constantly about the abuse I suffered on that long ago day. Or about the subsequent incidents that happened to me as a teenager.
But I never meant to suggest -- and I never would -- that every victim of sexual assault should react the same was as I did. Others suffered far more violent abuse than I did, and I said as much in last week's column.
Some of their stories make the blood run cold. Most of the people who wrote in response to the column asked that their names not be used and I'll respect that, but here's what some of them told me:
"I am a survivor of sexual abuse by my stepfather for seven years and I can tell you I DO lie awake. It does affect me! I'm 42 and I sleep in a curled position, one eye slightly opened from years of wondering if tonight was the night I would be abused once more. If tonight was the night I would have to zone out of my body just to get through it ... so I find it insulting that you say 'it's simply what I went through.' It did affect me, it still does and I can never forget or let it go."
From another reader:
"Are you out of your mind? It is this type of minimizing that keeps pedophiles believing that they are doing nothing wrong, lets them delude themselves to think that there are no 'victims' and places the victim in the hot seat again at having to defend their psychological wounds from the abuse (more often much more horrific than your own) they suffer.
"If you cannot support the victims in your column, for God's sake, do NOT give the perverts and pedophiles fodder for their sick and demented views."
A third wrote:
"I was sexually abused ... I have nightmares and flashbacks that didn't start until after I gave birth to my first child, which is over 15 years after the abuse stopped. Are you suggesting that I am choosing to feel this pain and horror now when my life should be perfect? ... Please tell me how to make my nightmares of sexual abuse go away since you seem you be such an expert."
No, an expert I most definitely am not. I'm just another victim who feels sympathy and empathy for those who have suffered, and who hopes that every one of them can eventually find peace.
