Survivors News and Reviews

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CTL is a useful historical reference 12 years on, but could use a second edition which splits off the central subjects of child abuse, sexism and racism/xenophobia within the sport; these are big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

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

Spoiler Warning: This is a current-season episode, and half the plot is discussed below.

The opening of the episode will show any C/SA victim that the episode is about male rape with the showing of a textbook reaction. The other indication is that unlike most CSI cases, this victim isn’t dead, and the textbook reactions to a rape continue to be described as the first case progresses.

Later on the traditional second case of murder, begins overlapping with the earlier assault. There’s a general “teach the audience” section regarding male rape which includes the potential for the police joking about the victim, which isn’t overly cynical. After the episode almost turns into Pulp Fiction as the CSIs work to find the guilty person involved in the other crime as multiple suspects pile up, the ending is open and realistic, rather than getting wrapped up in a bow to satisfy the audience.

In short, following on from “Satellites” at the end of Without A Trace’s penultimate season, this is another Bruckheimer TV drama whose creators are conscious of its worldwide reach as a high-rated American cop show. It also escapes the cliché of the first season episode “Blood Drops” which featured incest in its B-plot. Adult-on-adult sexual assaults have not been handled with this much intelligence on American television since Oz and the writer Jacqueline Hoyt deserves credit for this (Anthony Zuiker’s credit is purely exective according to IMDB).

CSI now seems aware of its global reach and it’s good that there are more hits than misses in the ten years the show has been running. Having premiered in November 2009, American viewers should be able to catch the re-run very soon, whilst UK viewers should have two more chances to watch it before the week ending 21st February – search for the Five USA digital DVB/Freeview listings on www.tvguide.co.uk .

- CBG

This episode, in attempting to stay within its legal framework setting, soon moves from a slow-burning drama into completely and totally unrealistic garbage. One male character has been sexually assaulted, shown by his walking into the office with a black eye and bruised ribs, tipping off the audience until a cop reports the rest of his injuries whilst trying to get the character to pick out his perp from an array of photographs.  His shame stops him from testifying to the fact until his attacker starts to organise a plea-bargain for 1/5th of the jail time he might serve. The B Plot features a boy who witnesses his mother sleeping with his best friend which the lead character plays advocate to decide custody and residency.

At this point, The character agonises and almost everyone in the office and his mother seems to know the exact details about what happened (mother’s intutition is realistic, the rest, pre-disclosure, is a stretch). We see the victim indirectly asking the secondary witness not to testify, and finally buying a gun and threatening his offender into changing his plea to drop the bargain and allocution which goes with it, in order to stop his name becoming public.

This was the final season of this drama five years ago, though it’s only just getting a second run in the UK due to its main star appearing in another hit show. After taking a realistic premise and going off into cloud cuckooland in order to wrap it up in one episode and also managing to remind TV fans of LA Law (except that lawyer took a beating in the LA Riots before turning armed vigilante), this does a complete disservice to male victims of abuse and will now go down in history as one early dramatic credit for a younger Zac Efron, than being useful to survivors. Thankfully more modern drama  has taken a different, more intelligent approach.

- CBG

This man made a massive and historic contribution in his field which still persists to this day. However, he was to tarnish his reputation following accusations of child sexual abuse against boys. During and after his trial his status brought him an extremely high level of support, much more so than if he was a non-famous offender.

He was also recently deceased though unrepentant about his unconventional lifestyle and the way in which he sought his career breakthroughs, and still has colleagues and fans that play down the abuse to celebrate his wider achievements.

However, I’m not talking about Michael Jackson; the man in question was scientist Carleton Gajdusek, whose story was the subject of this BBC documentary in the Corporation’s Storyville strand.

His scientific research and endeavours throughout his life took him from Cal-Tech in California when that institute was still quite new, to travelling across the world making contact with hitherto undiscovered indigenous tribes and researching their customs and also plant life. The fruits of his work gave rise to the discovery of prions, the transmitters of degenerative brain diseases. The first one that was localised to the Asian/Oceanic tribes, known as Kuru. That early research would reveal links to BSE in cattle and as a result, the base work for CJD decades later. Gajdusek was the pioneer though the reaseach also contributed to further progress on Measles, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, and polio and malaria. All of this led to a Nobel Prize in 1966.

So far, so great. In the more innocent first half of the 20th century, Gajdusek’s decision to adopt 57 kids he encountered on his journey across the world (one of which was a girl) was not questioned. In fact it was celebrated as an act of kindness befitting anyone wit a mind to adopt. The children were essentially “billeted” in Gajdusek’s large home, naturalized to America, but no abuse complaints were formally indicted into charges against Gajdusek for another 30 years. In fact he was accurately described as a “Rock star” by one of the cops in the case when describing his stature among his scientific peers.

Gajdusek didn’t restrict himself to abusing his adopted charges. The children of professional peers and/or colleagues were also victimized and one grown-up survivor spoke on camera about the abuse and its effect on him and other victims. We also get the view of the lead police officer that took the scientist to trial. Like Deliver Us From Evil, the viewer listens to the comments from the offender himself in what turned out to be his last days.

It’s Gajdusek’s unrepentant nature (at the hour mark of the documentary) and his narcissistic Messiah complex that may prove more triggering than anything that the policeman or adult survivor describes, not to mention his scientific colleagues calling the abuse and legal fallout “boring” compared to the research, or one peer symapthising with the offender. I hate spoiling the ending, but having made history and after enjoying a comfortable lifestyle, it will be some limited comfort to his victims that he is dead. His sentence was as expected, derisory, even without the plea bargain.

A spectrum of reactions to the abuse was reported, whilst the on-camera survivor represents the worst affected, the post-film credits and the survivor recount other reactions which, as ever, vary according to duration and degree.

As is almost taken for granted, the documentary is well structured, balanced, acknowledging the historical achievements whilst paying equal attention to the crimes for what may possibly be the first time since the trial and conviction.

Despite its transmission nearly six weeks earlier than Michael Jackson’s death, The Genius And The Boys provides proof that the divided reaction to talented individuals accused of child abuse has happened before, in a totally different field than the music world. It’s a piercing, challenging film that you should definitely catch and it was a good move by the BBC to offer its Action Line service with a toll-free number to call for anyone affected by those issues.

For anyone who cannot access the documentary, the wiki file on Carleton Gajdusek is here.

- CBG

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is a downbeat but straightforward British gangster revenge movie with none of the America-friendly cheeky-Cockney-chappie charm of any of Guy Ritchie’s films. Since it’s from the director of Get Carter, what appears straightforward soon becomes multilayered and complicated.

Mike Hodges reunites to direct Clive Owen, who broke through in Hodges’ earlier arthouse hit Croupier (1998). Owen plays the brother of a male rape victim who committed suicide. Whilst the revenge in question takes place, the director is careful enough to make Owen’s character the layman searching for reasons and answers for his brother’s death.

This slows the film down in pace to compensate its short (100min) length because Owen’s character re-establishes contact with his old firm and has to resist their wish to return to their glory days. At the same time, his old rivals also threaten him, refusing to believe his wish to find his brother’s attackers and then leave London again. Charlotte Rampling provides the emotional heart of the movie and actually lists some of the effects of surviving abuse, but directs them at Owen rather than his brother. Every performance from the leads is cold, detached and understated, with the gangster flunkies providing the downbeat black humour.

This journey leads to the uncovering of his brother’s fate through a second autopsy and referral to a counsellor who frames one interpretation of the psychological effects of male rape for this character and the audience. These scenes help make the movie rise above the normal Brit gangster clichés (no matter how well-loved they might seem) and become useful to victims of abuse, who could then take or leave the rest of the film after taking what they need.

The film feels slow enough in pace to be a stage play rather than a movie, which has divided the audience and critics alike. An American setting would speed up the action, increase the profanity and glamorise the location; here, the low budget renders both the attacker and the head rival gangster displayed on screen, as living in normal houses with attempts to create prettier front doors, despite their nice cars – it’s very kitchen-sink and 1970s for a 2003 film and Owen’s character doesn’t clean up and forsake his rural lifestyle until near the end, to emphasise the return of his character’s murderous skills.

Also resembling the 1970s, at least two plot strands are left unresolved by the end, one annoying and clichéd, the other more plausible though one of them links into the “end at the beginning”. Whilst Hodges’ enduring hit Get Carter had an ending, here it’s left open to interpretation. By virtue of events you could basically use your imagination rather than the full stop applied to Hodges’ classic hit.

For survivors’ purposes though, the lack of a bow to giftwrap the plot strands, lets them concentrate on the victim and its effects as described. For trigger concerns the movie takes the same line as Midnight Express (1978) by cutting away once you are shown the start of the rape, and it’s at that point that the movie is cut when shown on television. The movie loses none of its power when broadcast on a TV channel with a visible logo in the corner and the first time I viewed this, the breaks were necessary. If you want an action movie though, look elsewhere.

- CBG

Wasted by Mark Johnson started life as a series of articles about his past as a homeless drug addict in London. These were published in the Big Issue weekly magazine that is sold by the currently and formerly homeless people in several UK cities as a job, and has been in print for 15 years and counting.

Johnson suffered physical abuse at the hands of his father and one incident of sexual abuse from an older teenager aged 10, which led to his petty theft at seven, drinking by the following year, building up to his first hit of heroin aged eleven and a downward spiral into addiction and more serious crime. This is the background revealed in the book prior to the compilation of the author’s entire time spent homeless in London and his attempts to escape both drugs and criminal gangs, something he achieved nine years ago.

The hardback version of the book is a 300-page speed read though the limited edition paperback was naturally longer. My sole criticism of the book was that it was overpriced for two years but now the paperback and Amazon third-party sellers have solved this problem, whether you buy it to keep or borrow it several times from the library, the quality of the writing will show you why he was commissioned and then signed up by a publishing house, and the homelessness section to the end reads like one long nightmarish rollercoaster ride. Criminal by Caspar Walsh is the nearest comparison although Walsh’s problems stemmed from his father’s continued presence in his abused addict son’s life, compared to Johnson’s father’s disappearance through divorce.

Now the author is a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper in the UK and works for a charity helping teenagers with problems, which are archived and help give you the “what happened next” angle following the book. You can find those articles here with new content added on Wednesdays in the Society section every fortnight to four weeks.

- CBG

The first 15 pages of Cry Myself to Sleep serve as a summary of the first book Cry Silent Tears. The story continues as the author relates his move to London, southern England and finally Wales.

Sadly, in echoes of Mark Johnson’s Wasted, Peters had to learn to survive when homeless and face more tragedy alongside violent brushes with both sides of the law and a life-threatening experience to follow up his childhood abuse.

Resembling The Nipper by Charlie Mitchell, the overseas getaway and the meeting of his wife has been shoe-horned in at the end. There’s also some limited resolution relating to events from the first book, but it’s good that overall Cry Myself To Sleep is more about the next stage in Joe’s life. Various social agencies of London dealing with the homeless and the probation system in general did more to help the author at the time than social services in his childhood, as Peters regains his fragile health and makes a new life after several false starts.

It’s a shame the publishers went straight for broke with a paperback launch. Many further details had to be cut to keep its average length so hopefully the publishers will be satisfied enough with the sales of this one to release an expanded second edition, or a third book to make the story completely rounded.

In terms of the UK launch around the first long weekend in May, the stock situation has now been resolved and the book is now widely available at retail as well as online.

The author’s improved writing makes “Sleep” feel shorter than the previous book’s hardback edition, despite being of a similar length. If you read the first then it’s a natural step to progress to reading what happened next. As before, check the author’s site for more information.

- CBG

After writing two books of her own before moving to fiction, abuse survivor and author Jenny Tomlin interviewed other survivors she met before during and after the composition of her own story and has told their stories, and like the American book Strong At The Heart for teens, Not Alone features four male survival stories and the rest are from female survivors. I read the re-issued paperback which can be found for an average price of £2 when on special offer, balancing out the lack of male survival stories.

Unfortunately the book takes the smorgasbord approach and so there are fewer CSA stories than implied by the marketing of the book, there are also male and female domestic violence survivors and people who have experienced other forms of abuse such as stalking. Like Strong At The Heart there may be small elements of the varied stories that might be inspiring to your own healing process but it’s a double-edged sword to spread the focus too thinly in this manner, as it means that only a few chapters will feel relevant to you as a survivor of child abuse. There’s also one case where Tomlin fails to remove herself from what is supposed to be her friend’s account of their own history.

So this book is best borrowed from the library and treated as reference, unless you can find the reduced-price edition of the book which represents fair value for money for its scattergun approach.

Amazon UK Page (for newest edition) here

- CBG