Survivors News and Reviews

Two different murderers that used Facebook to track down their victims, one of whom pretended to be a different person to kidnap and murder a 17 year old girl, received life sentences of 35 and 22 years this week in British Courts.

The stories are at the BBC here and here respectively. The first case has now moved on to analysing the police handling of the case due to the admission of murder which sped up the legal process.

We have not written an entry about Jon Venables, one of the 1993 murderers of two year old James Bulger in Liverpool, England. A Facebook group calling for him to be named before any trial on his as-yet-unconfirmed new criminal charges, slandered an innocent man who had been mistaken for the killer as an adult on previous occasions (despite clearly having a different hair colour to the offender and being on the outside whilst Venables is back in prison). The group in the course of being shut down but as with the Baby P campaign, it continues through text messaging.

The UK media is now listing every possible crime it can think of to try to get Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, to name the correct charge through a process of elimination. Therefore, it’s the newspapers that must take responsibility for David Calvert’s persecution.

We will report on any such formal charge when it actually happens and write about the case properly when it is over, later this year or early next year.

Crossing the Line: Violence And Sexual Assault in Canada’s National Sport (hereafter known as CTL) was the commentary on Canadian Hockey referenced in Sheldon Kennedy’s Book Why I Didn’t Say Anything (WIDSA), so we decided to check it out from an Amazon marketplace/Zshop seller.

It’s a thoroughly researched look at the sport in the 1990s which, like Playing With Fire 13 years later, gives analysis of Hockey as a national sport and what it means to Canadians. Robinson’s sporting pedigree in skiing and cycling and journalistic writing skills give any outsider as much of a clue as the recent action in the Winter Olympics.

The structure of Laura Robinson’s book is its strength – at any point you can skip to case studies but there is no demarcated line where her commentary ends and the case studies begin. The book flows freely from her social comment back to the illustration through case study even though CTL serves as a reference. You can read the section regarding Sheldon Kennedy alone for example, and when reading in a single sitting, not get lost. In fact it was starting with the case studies that had me reading all the way to the end in one sitting and then restarting at the beginning.

As well as a bibliography the afterword sections give a timeline of the events that occurred before and after the highlighted case studies with quoted responses from officials involved (where comments were filed).

CTL is a useful historical reference 12 years on, but could use a second edition which splits off the central subjects of child abuse, sexism and racism/xenophobia within the sport; these are big enough subjects by themselves to receive separate treatment rather than this initial smorgasbord approach, however well written and edited the book was.

The other downside is that Crossing The Line also skirts dangerously close to giving its central noted paedophile Graham James an excuse when reporting his own coach was arrested on abuse charges – with 100 victims by James alone, this excuse in the name of analysis has become tiresome, especially when there was no proof of the abuse, assumption causes damage to the argument. Thankfully elsewhere in the book, the one doctor quoted agrees with the same 30% generational abuse rate for sexual abuse that was borne out in lie-detected research on sex offenders’ own abuse history in The Seduction of Children by Christiane Anderson. To be fair to Robinson, this view is of the period when Sheldon Kennedy disclosed and was going through the legal case and before his own book was released. Now the passing-on of child abuse from one generation to the next is becoming seen as the choice that it is, linked in with the refusal to obtain help for the adult’s own past – on a positive note, this is the quoted view of a police officer who would have seen that happen already.

The same goes for the sexism comments; though we will have to wait for the ratings to come in, both Canada’s women and the men won Olympic Gold a month ago and the women won first; some might say the winning and the worldwide audience of billions (not to mention the Own The Podium proceeds) will help the cause of female hockey ten times as much as any suggestions put forward in this book.

Crossing The Line is still worth a read though 12 years on you’ll need Ebay or a private Amazon seller to pick it up (which keeps the price cheap), or look for it in the library.

Otherwise the Amazon pages follow below for more information;

Canada

US

UK

- CBG

Following the revelation of child abuse allegations at Jesuit schools in Germany, now similar charges were levelled at Catholic Schools in the country, with one survivor testifying to his experiences.

The Associated Press report is located here.

- CBG

It’s been a week since a former high school student who used Facebook to blackmail several of his classmates aged 15-17 into sexual acts – after being previously in contact with the police after threatening to blow up his own school.

Though you can Google or Wiki Anthony Stancl’s name for the extended details, there has been an interesting debate springing up in the comments at CNet News, and you can read them here. If you head to the Huffington Post news aggregation link, its own glossary will lead you to video at CBS news about the case. The second video is in a separate link that pre-dates the sentencing, but it re-iterates basic advice about Facebook in general which is repeated in the CNet comments.

- CBG.

Nathan from DadWagon sent me a note today to let me know about an interview they did on the site with Joel Johnson. Joel is a gadget geek, and has worked on such well-known blogs as Gizmodo, and BoingBoing. Recently, he posted on his personal site about having grown up a victim of sexual abuse and how that has affected him into adulthood. You can read the interview over at DadWagon, and here’s the link to his original piece, which may be a bit graphic for some.

With all of the celebrity suicides in the news recently, John Grohol took advantage of the uptick in people looking for information about suicide and untreated depression to give a brief glimpse into the risk among young adults, and some of the warning signs to look for in this post today. I’m copying the important bullet points under how you can help, but read the whole thing to truly get all the information:

Every single day, another 11 young adults will choose death by suicide.

What You Can Do To Help

It’s important to recognize the warning signs of a teen or young adult who may be thinking about suicide:

• Talking about suicide or death or “going away”
• Talking about feeling hopeless or guilty
• Pulling away from friends or family
• Losing the desire to take part in normal activities
• Having trouble concentrating or thinking clearly
• Exhibiting lots of self-destructive behavior (drinking alcohol, driving too fast)
• Giving away prized possessions or their stuff
• Big changes in their eating or sleeping habits

Experts recommend that, if you’re an adult in a teen’s or young adult’s life, to stay involved:

• Watch and listen for warning signs
• Keep lines of communication open and express your concern, support and love
• If your teen doesn’t want to talk, suggest a more neutral person such as a relative, clergy member, counselor or doctor
• Ask questions, even tough ones, such as if he or she has had thoughts of suicide
• Get psychological help if your child is thinking about suicide
• If your teen is in a crisis situation, your emergency room can conduct an evaluation and refer you to resources
• Make sure you keep an appointment with a mental health professional — even if your teen says he or she is feeling better

Playing with Fire (PWF), co-written with Kirstie McLellan Day is Theoren Fleury’s autobiography released at the end of last year and delayed by a postal strike in the UK. It goes off in a different direction to Why I Didn’t Say Anything (WIDSA) by Sheldon Kennedy, despite both players having been abused by Graham James. This means that the two books cross over each other, in the case of PWF, running throughout the first half the book. That’s why they were read and reviewed back to back for this site.

The first main difference to Playing With Fire is the style. Compared to James Grainger’s journalistic tautness in making Kennedy’s book very accessible and quick to read, Fleury’s writing is no-holds-barred upfront, honest, perceptive, cutting, sarcastic, bitter, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, other times extremely angry, reflecting his style of play. The final book reads as if co-writer Kirstie McLellan Day transcribed some sections from recorded interviews, which might explain the odd missed word here and there that suggests dictation rather than composition. The contrasting tone is a reminder that Fleury’s career was longer but the fallout from the abuse was greater, in spite of finishing off with a Native Reservation and quick International Hockey Stint in Northern Ireland.

You’ll read the general setup about Fleury’s early childhood and home life and then Graham James enters the picture around page 23. In this way it’s similar to WIDSA and so is a lot of the grooming process. You get further insight into what happened to both players and the harassment from the media. This gets you to halfway through the book and James isn’t mentioned much until he is charged halfway through, since Fleury was never interviewed properly by the police it was left to Kennedy and so the fallout continued in his personal life, with only one sole interjection representing continued manipulation with James’s setup of his own hockey team and contacting Fleury and Kennedy for financial support. There are other elements to that story which are fleshed out beyond Kennedy’s book, though the media and landlords were the cause of the extended issues this time rather than just James. Just about halfway through you get additional insight into those that continued to support James post-firing, ranging from players to management.

Thankfully for people who know zero about Ice/Hockey, Fleury’s book gives you a potted history of the game, and the players before during and after their careers whether he liked them or not (though there are distinctions about player characters on and off the ice).

In fact, Fleury describes almost everything you could need to know about the sport if you were born outside of Canada, besides the rules (kindly supplied by the BBC at the time of this review, thanks to the Olympics). When talking about referees and coaches  it’s mostly dislike, but described in that blackly humorous way, depending on the coach. Sometimes you do get the sense of scores being settled after being saved up for a long time and you do hope that by writing about it, that level of bitterness is off the author’s chest for the future.

The alcoholism, drugs, affairs and substance abuse problems cascading down from the abuse and negative coping are described with flat-out candour and the suicide attempt which is the preface after Wayne Gretsky’s foreword, happens chronologically 30 pages before the end of the book and represents the de facto rock bottom after which Fleury begins the slow ascent up from the floor of the barrel. His charity drives reflect more about his own health issues, more than just child abuse, as opposed to Kennedy’s nationwide skate.

On minor notes, the pictures are in colour, making for a better hardback package than Kennedy’s book, but sometimes I felt in need of a glossary for the “Fleury-isms” you will find throughout the text – when talking about “clotheslining” a player on the ice you can at least use your imagination, but “puttin’ on a clinic”, “serving [the other team] a pizza”, getting “T-Boned [in a road crash]”…who knows, maybe it’s hockey slang but whilst you struggle to understand the Fleurish you’re reading, it won’t distract enough to take you out of NHL-world, neither will the sports report sections describing the fights with occasional hockey play.

So if you haven’t read either Sheldon Kennedy’s or Theoren Fleury’s books and they come up on a 2 for 1 at Amazon deal (as they normally will at the American site), you really need to read them back to back. This will give you a more rounded picture and also some idea of the way some of the current Olympic Hockey team got to where they are now in the 2010 Olympics, but describing events earlier in their careers.

If the third unnamed player who charged Graham James ever discloses you’ll get the complete triangle. For now Playing With Fire, with its complete abuse to self-destruction and self-rebuilding order, combined with the description of the literal and AA-designed steps taken to have another life after the sport, is well worth the money to survivors as well as fans.

The Amazon pages for the books are as follows;

Canada

US

UK

- CBG

Sheldon Kennedy’s book, co-written with James Grainger, felt like an accident of timing, having been in Canada in the year it was published and becoming the second book I would ever read in recovery. In between that gap of a year there was a news report about Kennedy and the catch-up explanation by the webmaster here about Kennedy’s life and career up to then and the general case background.

Why I Didn’t Say Anything (hereafter known as WIDSA) is a tautly written book starting with Kennedy’s early childhood in Manitoba, Canada in the first few pages, before life essentially on the road took over on the climb through the youth leagues of Canadian Hockey and ending with the AHL in Detroit and NHL in Calgary. As everyone knows, that training was overseen by paedophile coach Graham James.

The book describes the grooming followed by the serial abuse of Kennedy and other players by James almost wherever Kennedy played in his early career and the manipulation that followed when the abuse ended. The fact that this section of the book comprises 131 of the book’s 217 hardback pages, this should in no small way underline the effect that the abuse followed by destructive coping mechanisms had on Sheldon Kennedy’s personal life. For me, five months into healing, Kennedy’s insight into his experience and the effects of the abuse perpetrated felt like a bible in its own right.

The case was all in the news report I heard about, but the rest of the book fills in the aftermath. It also gives the background to Kennedy’s nationwide inline skate and the charity drives leading up to it, which raised CAN$1million for his own foundation, eventually donated over to the Canadian Red Cross. The skate seemed to be a high that springboarded into a massive low before hitting rock bottom and getting to sobriety, where the book ends.

WIDSA is also useful in pointing out how senior figures in Canadian Hockey were quick to disbelieve what happened or at least, Catholic Church-style, move James off to another team elsewhere, to the point where James racked up almost 100 other victims and the media became part of the problem by writing about the case too soon and dissuading other victims from disclosing and pressing charges. This led finally to the paltry three year sentence handed down to the offender. This shows how the sport’s managing authorities and the media acted in concert by accident to ruin the chance for many more players to get justice. Canadian Hockey management’s “patch-up-and-ship-out-to-play” therapy services also get some deserved criticism although we’d like to believe this has improved in present-day hockey players’ care.

In recent times when a male abuse survivor has featured on the Oprah Winfrey show giving his story and being treated with a little more respect than Winfrey usually bothers with, the description of Kennedy’s 1997 appearance seems much more like the packaged male abuse shows of old which were a ratings novelty turn. Sadly Martin Kruze was the other guest on the show and the kid-gloves treatment of one of his offenders helped to cause his suicide a few months after the show aired, and there is more detail regarding Martin Kruze in the male Survivor quarterly newsletter from a year ago, which you can download from here as a PDF.

Despite the fact that Kennedy reflected on being unsure whether he was helping anyone, the other useful facet of the book was the de facto nationwide disclosure which happened, and the “note-swapping” effect that took place across Canada at the time even without the book on the market.

So the book is more than just a sports memoir. It’s a short but bittersweet commentary on the effects of abuse on one male survivor, how dreams are destroyed and how life has to be restarted. WIDSA is analytical enough to help others whether or not their abuse occurred in the sports field. If you’re a newly emerging survivor it’s a book I would recommend in the same breath as a clinical bible like Victims No Longer. My very minor gripe is that the pictures are in black and white which is slightly cheap for a star sports book and the presence of some typos but aside from those minor glitches, it’s definitely worth having in your personal library if you’re a survivor, more so than just the TV film even though that won an award in its own right.

Theoren Fleury was another man abused by the same coach and the review of his book follows next. The Amazon page for Kennedy’s book is here for the US, here for Canada and here for the UK.

- CBG

William Goad is Britain’s worst paedophile to be caught and convicted, having attacked 3000 children and having kept score year on year like it was sport and having boasted about attacking 282 kids in one year at his peak of offending.

A petition has been raised online which is viewed by the staff of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in an attempt to keep him behind bars and help support the grown up surviving victims who will be forced to re-live the abuse via statements to keep him incarcerated otherwise.

The petition is here if you wish to sign it.

- CBG

CNN broke a story today about a doctor arrested for abusing 102 girls and a boy on his patient lists. The video report is here and being a new story, we’re not sure how much of it will remain online so catch it quickly.

It’s more shocking that one single disclosure after a decade was the only element granting probable cause to the authorities trying to nail the alleged offender and that there are three more states where he was licensed to practice with the wider list potentially reaching 7000 patients across all four states. The sole miniscule upside was the creation of the child pornography evidence needed to ensure that the pre-verbal toddler victims would be counted without the need for testifying.

- CBG