Survivors News and Reviews

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

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

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

This book won the British 2007 Booker prize and having won an award, we can vouch for the dreamy quality of the writing even if we can’t attest to the degree of realism to which the overly large Irish family is depicted.

From an abuse survival point of view this book, unlike the Kite Runner, fails miserably, box-ticking the get-no-help-drink-too-much-commit-suicide view of a male abuse victim as something inevitable and inescapable. So we re-read the book a second time to get a better handle on a story which does more flashing back and forward than the TV shows Lost and Flashforward combined and on a second read it’s still self-indulgent on the part of the fictional narrator making it hard to sympathise with the loss when the character’s mother is only fleshed out in the past as a younger woman.
Reading this novel is torture, it’s bleak depressing rubbish (as opposed to trying to convey grief) and the attempt to engender the Life Goes On motif by the end with the last in an endless line of family members we don’t get time to care about, doesn’t work. If you’re Irish and feel like being treated to an unending litany of clichés it might be worth getting this book out of the library but only if you have a lot of time to kill because you need to read over half of it before the flashbacks get into the mid 20th century and stay there.

It’s the kind of book that shows that if you know nothing about child sexual abuse in general then not even bothering to depict the specific character, copping out by killing them off and referring to them as the departed ghost, is something writers shouldn’t bother with. Even the disputed Sleepers by Lorenzo Carcaterra with the same ethnicity albeit in a different country, has a more realistic tone to a character suffering the same outcome – so read the latter novel instead and if you own it, read it again.

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