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CTL is a useful historical reference 12 years on, but could use a second edition which splits off the central subjects of child abuse, sexism and racism/xenophobia within the sport; these are big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

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

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

The Survivors Club isn’t a book that is specifically about child abuse survivors, but there are some interesting takeaways from the book that I think are very relative to abuse survivors. Due to that, I’m not going to do a normal “review” type of post, but just bring up a couple of points of interest.

Mr. Sherwood sets out in this book to try and determine why, in life threatening situations, some people survive and others don’t. In the process he shares some of the leading research into survival, and some intriguing theories as to what determines the likelihood that you will survive. He looks at everything from airplane crashes, to cancer patients to Holocaust survivors to try and figure out what determines who lives and dies. He concludes that, some percentage of the time, you are going to die and there’s very little you can do about it, but in most cases, there’s quite a bit you can do.

It’s fairly fascinating reading, but for our purposes here, I want to direct your attention to a couple of key points in the book. The first being that “you’re stronger than you know”, the third rule of survival. To my mind, surviving childhood abuse proves that you are strong, but most survivors don’t give themselves credit for that.

The second is the idea of resiliency and how adversity makes you even stronger. Sherwood goes into great detail to talk about how resiliency may be like any other muscle of the body, the more it get’s exercised, the more easy it is for you to bounce back from difficult events. As I was reading these sections, it occurred to me that abuse survivors have already dealt with so much adversity at a young age, that they have an amazing ability to be strong and overcome that. But, they don’t always realize it.

Lastly, Sherwood also spent a great deal of time looking into the idea of luck, or why some people seem to have good luck more than others. He talked to some of the leading psychological researches on the subject and came away convinced that attitude can determine how “lucky” you are. He talked to someone who studied whether people who had been “lucky” had a tendency to be more observant, perhaps they were more likely to notice an opportunity that helped explain their luck. He also talked to experts who had studied the likelihood of people who were unhappy with their lives to have more accidents than those who were happy, who theorized that people who were unhappy took more risks in everything from driving to being in the wrong place, etc. It reminded me of how often abuse survivors who have convinced themselves that bad things had always happened to them, and would continue to happen to them, tend to be correct, and how it might not be a matter of destiny, but a matter of developing a healthier attitude.

If nothing else, the book serves as a good guide to the importance of taking care of ourselves, physically and emotionally, to increase the likelihood that we’ll be able to survive whatever live throws at us!

You can find out more about the book at the website: http://www.thesurvivorsclub.org/about-the-book/

Emotional Processing is a short book by Dr Roger Baker in which he uses the experiences of some of his therapeutic patients from his 20 years in the practice and supplementary research to explain his view of how people process their emotions generally and in response to key life events, in both healthy and destructive ways.

Rather than separating out the patients’ stories as happens in longer analytical books, the tales are woven into Dr Baker’s commentary. Only the background research is contained in a final appendix. This approach helps make Emotional Processing more immediately accessible to the layman. Occasionally, Dr Baker illustrates more than one client’s story within the same section to compare and contrast how both might be right or wrong about their choice of emotional processing – and whether there is a sole right or wrong way in every case. I was stretched by reading the title and when you recognize some of the highlighted behaviours in yourself, the book becomes inspiring and helpful in helping you dig yourself out of whatever rut you were stuck in, and move on.

It didn’t feel like 200 pages, I finished it in less than four hours. It’s certainly worth a loan from the library, I found the book at the right time and at some point, will buy my own copy. It’s certainly worth a place on your shelf if you think you need to hammer home the points made by Dr Baker. Otherwise you can check out his other work regarding panic attacks and self-esteem if you’ve experienced those issues in addition to general emotional problems.

Amazon information page is located here.

- CBG

What did I get when I read A Brother’s Journey by Richard Pelzer today? A shot of confidence and a flash of inspiration from a male physical abuse survivor. A wish to write my own story tempered with the need for a new day job, but renewed optimism and self-esteem in making that application and any others that may arise. I also gained a key hint for eliminating shame and lack of confidence which the author seemed to discover at 12 and which took me a further 25 years to work out, and which would have taken longer but for reading that book. Also a substitution for the cancelled therapy session and a timesink for the long bus journey. In the case of this specific book, it’s also a primer for Dave Pelzer’s own bestselling series which had been re-issued in the UK, but which have sat on the shelves waiting for me to psych myself up to read them.

For some reason, I don’t get tired of reading these books, I know they are necessary and Strong At The Heart as reviewed previously, gave similar advice, and like A Brother’s Journey, managed to do it with a single line standing out from the text, rather than an entire chapter or even both books as a whole. If reading them helps with inspiration and confidence and optimism then they are worth making the time for, at times especially now when the economy might make you feel like you’re just too busy to read anything.

I’ve found personal survivor stories and the heavier clinical bibles such as Courage To Heal and Victims No Longer, and tales regarded as apocryphal like Sleepers, to be a hell of a lot more useful than out-and-out fiction related to CSA, which to be frank, probably won’t be written by victims and in fact, the less the viewpoint of the victim is featured, the better the book seems to sell. This is something Richard Pelzer is aiming to fix with the books after his third and final child-to-adulthood set of autobiographies is released some time this year. For grown-up survivors it won’t matter so much, but kids and teens emerging around now it will be much more useful to have fiction that can be recommended by teachers or other responsible adults. Back in 1987 there was only Mac by John MacLean for teenagers, which Pan Books chose to import among a collection of American teen fiction covering CSA, AIDS, teen pregnancy and other subjects which were deemed as necessary for education to teens of that era.

I didn’t think books would save my life, but now I can say that they definitely have, from that 1987 teen novel all the way to any of the books I’ve reviewed in the Survivor News and Reviews section of this blog. If you consider yourself too busy, or disconnected, from a survivor of a different generation, race or gender, then you’re closing yourself off to something they might say which you might find useful in your own healing, not to mention in the case of “Burnt” by Ian Colquhoun, something genuinely inspiring even if it’s not abuse-related. So if you feel like your own healing process is wearing you out, take a break and read about someone else’s – and come back to your own, newly refreshed and with ideas to steal!

- CBG

Speaking of the Strong At The Heart Blog, she has republished Tony Sandel’s well researched list of books regarding CSA, here – the lists are separated by gender. To read the other general look at CSA in teen and young adult fiction, then go to the main blog’s homepage and scroll to the bottom of the page, clicking the penultimate link.

Caroline Lehman’s book Strong At The Heart from 2005 features interviews with 11 survivors, 4 male and the rest female. She very wisely sets the tape recorder going, lets the interviewees tell their stories and takes their pictures, otherwise her intro at the beginning is her only other contribution aside from a few listings for further information at the end.

That’s the book in a nutshell, since it’s aimed at teenagers it’s shorter than implied by the advertising blurb and a flick-read to anyone used to reading longer individual survival memoirs. The book’s packaged nicely and with clear readable type. You could sit in the library and read it in one sitting. It’s useful for emerging victims so non-survivors could buy it as a starter gift for a newly disclosed teen victim on the way to reading something heavier like Beginning/Courage To Heal and/or Victims No Longer.

Just when I thought there was nothing useful in some of the stories when drilling through the book at breakneck speed, a single line or quotation can pop out of the text when re-reading. That’s how minor details can become significant to your own healing process, so the book is well worth a look, even if only as a launchpad for the author’s high quality blog on the same subject, which you can find here.

- CBG