Survivors News and Reviews

Whilst it’s good to keep track of the new survivor websites opening up for both genders, it’s also important to mark the end of an era where one particular site is concerned. The Foundation of Survivors, backed up and run by the author Joe Peters, reached its 10th Anniversary last Saturday, 24th July, but has had to massively scale down its activities for the moment due to the recession.

As this webmaster has found with the Ning situation at the Community site, the recession is forcing people to think about service delivery in the face of the collapse in donations. The Foundation was partly operated using proceeds from book sales. The fact that his publishers will sit on his new book until the Autumn season is par for the course in the book trade, but unfortunately doesn’t help the Foundation at all. During the hiatus Mr Peters is mulling over different options for the future. In my opinion I’d always advocate balancing out your own health and wellbeing with the zeal for helping other victims and survivors – and a decade of such work is an excellent legacy which we’d hope could form the basis for another book to aid the fundraising.

The announcement details are here.

- CBG

There’s been an ongoing debate about the memory of child sexual abuse and whether it would be better to have forgotten entirely and never have remembered after shutting down the initial trauma, compared to processing the experiences through therapy.

The Guardian newspaper ran a Weekend magazine article today about a survivor whose memories had to be recovered by his siblings following an accident, which provides one viewpoint on the subject. You can read that here.

- CBG

Survivor Island is another resource aimed at male survivors of child abuse with a members-only section to the wider forum. However the initial concentration started with teenagers though the site is open to all ages. Further resources are planned in future. The link is as follows;

http://forum.survivorisland.org/index.php

Meanwhile, back in the UK, AMSOSA, formerly Survivors Swindon continues in the same vein as SI, though it’s essentially members only by default and the UK definition of adult starts from 18 with less of the grey area that arises with American sites. We mentioned it earlier but didn’t link a few articles back, so should you wish to post at the latter forum the password would have to be requested. Follow the instructions on the index page at the following address;

http://www.amsosa.com/

- CBG

There are two further good message board-based support sites out there for male survivors of child sexual abuse. Since the first one launched itself only a week ago, we’ll wait for permission to come back to link up to them.

The other one is MenThriving.org ,which was founded, built by and for adult male survivors of sexual abuse over the age of 21. To balance the walled-off nature of the site there is a Facebook section as well which can be viewed without an invite. We could view it without signing in but to become a fan of the page as you can with this portal and see their updates and announcements, you will need to be logged in to your own Facebook account. The location is;

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=168051679862&ref=ts

- CBG

Note: This episode is from the last complete season and the first half of the plot is discussed below.

In order to shake up the franchise right before the end of season two-parter, CSI takes one of its traditional two cases, a drink-driving car wreck and almost wraps it up in the teaser. Then it concentrates on the second case which has gone cold rather than having just happened in real time, even though the central character from the cold case was hit by the car.

As she recovers from being clipped by the car, we learn that her family was carjacked, with one of her children presumed dead due to the condition of the abandoned car. The evidence review bears this story out although her status as a suspect has never gone away, not even when she roams the same section of highway where the alleged kidnap occurred three years in the past.

Once the CSI team takes another look at the house there’s no good news for the mother. The episode harks back to If These Walls Could Talk from season 1 but unlike the older story it also doesn’t end with the shock point, though it’s a slight American TV cliché in response to something the audience already know but which hadn’t been communicated properly to all the characters.

Once the twists and turns come to the conclusion we get a story with no happy endings for anyone and essentially, a second very quickly wrapped-up new case for the team, with unresolved plot strands and no giftwrapped ending in the same style as Death and the Maiden from earlier in Season 10. Writers Corinne Marrinan with Richard J Lewis (and exec creator credits) do just as well as Death and The Maiden writer Jacqueline Hoyt, in keeping you guessing. Therefore it’s more realistic than the season 1 story by giving us an aftermath, showing how the series has grown up and moved on, aware of its audience reach of nearly 20 million viewers and aware of its duty to handle child kidnappings/murders sensitively.

If you’re a CSI fan you’ve already watched it but if not, I’ve deliberately left the spoilers out. See it as soon as possible and make up your own mind.

- CBG

Episode Tracking: TV.com, IMDB.com

The Rally which we reported on this year is not taking place, however Steve Bevan of AMSOSA made us aware of a different gathering event in Trafalgar Square in London, with the general organisation taking place by means of facebook.

The general note follows; the organiser’s group is open (second link) but for more details of the rally you’ll need to sign in to your Facebook account. We haven’t shortened the links in case you need to copy and paste. The press flyer reads as follows.

“Hello,

We thought your organisation might be interested in attending an event we are organising, it’s a peaceful rally against child abuse being held in Trafalgar Square, London on 7th August 2010.

This is the link to the event on facebook:-

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=121663397854205&ref=ts

I have also attached a copy of the flyer/leaflet with more information and if you would like us to send you some hard copies, please don’t hesitate to ask, we will be happy to send them.

Your support would be greatly appreciated!

Kind regards

Against Child Abuse

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=118986584797562&ref=ts

Spoiler Note: This is a current season episode and the entire plot is outlined below.

This second-season episode of The Mentalist features an incident of sexual humiliation which is visited upon the victim rather than being something he was pushed into from a hazing/initiation perspective, as with Criminal Mind’s Elephant’s Memory episode (2008).

In the fictional story the victim is dead of an overdose following failure in therapy and drug addiction in his 20s though it’s the offender’s relatives that are interviewed as he and his wife have been murdered on the eve of their 15-year high school reunion. Naturally, it can’t be the historical victim that did it, leaving an instant mystery for former TV psychic Patrick Jane and the CBI team. The other strand of the story involves a local politician which folds into the main storyline by the end. The other cutaway running plot is the relationship between two agents in the same field office which threatens to go public and jeopardize their careers.

Despite the abuse victim being dead and the generally lightweight comedic format of this show (when the running storyline isn’t about the serial killer Red John), the late victim receives full exposition through the vice principal character and the audience gets to see the flashbacks at the second and final act of the episode.

What makes this episode memorable despite the show’s fluffy nature is the method of flushing out the killer. Having the agent who physically resembles the historical victim in his 30s, pretend to be him and make the speech he might have given were he still alive, is a stroke of genius. Together with the end flashback scene, the writer makes pointed and deliberate modern-day cultural references to Kanye West’s drunken awards speech and the prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War. Unlike Numb3rs “Growin Up” (2010) which just threw in CSA as a cipher, the impact on the historical victim is never minimized or forgotten amongst the other plot strands or the lead character’s interplay and banter with the CBI agents. There’s also an allusion to indirect revenge of another bullying victim as a parallel to the old case, partially influenced by Jane’s advice.

So the writer Leonard Dick (with creator Bruno Heller in executive credit) deserves praise for maintaining the format of his show without trivializing the traumatic impact that just one school prank with sexual overtones can have on a school student of any age. It’s one thing to have it verbally described as with the Criminal Minds episode mentioned earlier, but it’s another to have it acted out and articulated by both the victim and surviving offender that committed murder to try to keep the secret. Some fans of the show labelled it filler; that isn’t the case for male survivors. Hopefully there will be a lot more episodes of American TV like this in future when dealing with hazing and/or child abuse, as opposed to Numb3rs.

- CBG

Episode Tracking: IMDB, TV.com

Note: The entire storyline of this episode from the last complete season is discussed below

For the second time in Numb3rs history, a child abuse storyline has had a supporting character in a running B-plot, except for this time, he’s back rather than leaving and the wedding of two other characters also pads out the episode.

However, the teaser is all about the abuse of three boys, trial and conviction of a multiple offender and presented in a schlocky true-crime manner as the main supporting guest character is a journalist and brother of one of the victims, that went on to commit suicide. There’s also time for some action in the teaser too as season six of Numb3rs racked up the gunplay to balance out the talky number-crunching and keep ratings high.

In between all of this, we see the survivors grown-up, one of whom is a high flying lawyer, the other an author and the third a fellow army veteran with the lawyer and now his chief of staff and mutual friend of the whole group. You expect to be wrong-footed by the plot of this episode – and writer Robert David Port, doesn’t bother, as the script gets too concerned with the math wizard’s wedding plans and the NASA guy’s extended return from space to give the A plot even a third of the screen time.

Having the paedophile (well played against his normal comedic typecasting by Alan Ruck) and two of the three survivors as ex-military feels like a red herring until it points to method, if not the motive, for the shooting at the start. The math-wizard’s piece to camera explanation is also dealt with very quickly and any more of his calculations are more about aping CSI with forensics. Along with plots B and C there’s the usual comedy cutaways with Judd Hirsch as the brothers’ father and the brothers themselves get to bond over a compulsory polygraph.

The writer does make a few realistic, if understated, points about CSA – the shame felt by one victim and the fear of his parents finding out about his having been abused, the morality of dramatizing CSA events in some show-within-a-show irony (that isn’t lost on survivors when watching), the potential for recidivism of the offender and the perp’s follow-through into blackmail following his release from prison. The inference of Stockholm’s syndrome for one victim is also possible in real life, but thankfully less commonplace than the inferred by the script. The same goes for direct revenge taken by older survivors descending into abuse of its own. The sister of the suicide victim provides the exposition regarding her brother and the counter evidence of the revenge attack whilst the offender’s ex-cellmate provides the “voice of conscience” about how offenders should be left alone after their time is served.

What’s irritating is the notion that, as the suicide’s sister calls it, “doing something so you were so ashamed of you just couldn’t tell anybody” but as the writer knows, this could also be referring to the CSA itself – it’s frankly patronizing unrealistic bullshit to say that seeing your perp get the crap kicked out of him would finally tip your drug-medicated self over the edge into suicide out of guilt and get you to keep the evidence that would convict a supposedly close-knit group of victims bound by two sets of experiences. The ending that results in another suicide so the final survivor in jail for murder – but not of the offender – and the offender himself returning to prison for blackmail and having the story redefined by the lead suicide’s reporter sister as one “with no heroes” just points to the voyeuristic exploitation of the issues.

The problem apart from the largely exploitative voyeuristic BS main storyline is that this is the episode before the end of season six so those other distracting cutaway plots were in the process of being resolved due to the potential risk of cancellation of the show – this led to the slick writing taking preference over realism beyond the subtle ciphers of the undeclared victim. Maybe it’s a reflection of the character but it’s racially convenient that Alimi Ballard’s character is the moral centre that puts his foot in it when trying to build bridges with the lawyer survivor’s deeper interrogation.

The episode is a car-crash in its main plot despite the slick writing and it’s a shame that when addressing male survivors, the writer opted for simplistic 1980s assumption of direct revenge rather than the more intricate plotting of offender attacks back in season 3’s “Killer Chat” regarding female victims- even after the child victims & families in the flashback history decided to go through a trial rather than just taking the revenge.

It’s a shame that two British film directors with Hollywood pedigree have opted to serve up such garbage on TV as Executive Producers which panders to myths and unrealistic stereotypes. “Growin’ Up” indirectly apologizes for the child sexual abuse in question in making out the greater degree of guilt at revenge taken and recorded than abuse endured, resulting in suicide. Whilst Ruck’s performance makes the offender seem like a regular guy which is needed for the stranger danger sledgehammer the American public is battered with endlessly, it’s the writing that gives Ruck’s character too much sympathy when attempting balance.

Even so, if the wedding storyline and comedy cutaways matter more than getting child abuse right because it might not be as entertaining, then the plug should be pulled on Numb3rs at its natural end in the final season six episode and it’s a shame that unlike The Bill and ER, it couldn’t pull off a useful episode about male child abuse before its end and unlike the Mentalist, it couldn’t incorporate it into its own format in an effective way without trivializing the issue.

- CBG

Episode Tracking: TV.com

The NY Times has published another interesting article, this time about the level of detail people tend to reveal or conceal when either blogging or social networking, and how this level may differ among the generations. The long comment role is also insightful.

Read the article here.

- CBG

You could be forgiven for thinking that saturation of crime drama is beginning to result in repetition; just as the plot of the very first episode of CSI NY was influenced by Mark Billingham’s Sleepyhead, now we have Suffer The Children by Adam Creed (hereafter known as STC), which, like Ian Rankin’s Dead Souls 11 years before it, has elements of the movie An Eye For An Eye starring Sally Field in featuring a support group for victims of child abuse and their parents forming a core group of suspects.

In the more modern title, unlike Rankin’s book, there are almost no overlapping cases with the main plot aside from the one with a trial that finishes when the book starts. The rest of the STC is reserved for fleshing out the lead cop DI Wagstaffe as he tries to track down the vigilantes, much to the community’s disgust and interference of the investigation. There’s more than one paedophile in question being questioned over the revenge perpetrated against them.

The action is written present tense for a reasonably fresh stylistic perspective and cliché is minimized, but the ending is perhaps just a little too neat, even it it’s emotionally sprawling for the actual characters. Whilst the intricacy of the plot seems well thought out and the author’s experience of having daughters seems to inform his female characters well, considering there is a badge on the front stating “As good as Rankin or your money back”, Creed’s DI Wagstaffe is an emotional blank slate compared to Rankin’s DI Rebus without any Scottish hard drinking or winter-hewn wit to make you laugh occasionally. It would be easy to complain about the lack of any mention of male victims, but since the older book by Rankin seems to redress this despite its age, this isn’t as big an issue compared to trying to plug the book with comparisons with another crime author who is at least 18 books ahead of him.

Lots of promotion went into Suffer The Children, it’s reasonable, slick, examines some of the modern-day attitude to child abuse but has “TV Adaption” written all over it at the same time. It’s entertaining enough, I read it twice for review purposes and if the character progresses in his over-arching trek for justice separate to the A plot then it will be worth returning to Creed’s books in future, but since it’s previewing the next book in the series it’s best waiting for special offers at the supermarket or get it out of the library.

Amazon page is here.

- CBG