Survivors News and Reviews

Another short e-book for your consideration. In Let’s Play House, Hannah introduces us to 6 survivors and/or childhood offenders in their own words.

In one sense, this book could be a bit difficult to read. There are stories told by people who offended as children, taking advantage of younger children. I recognize that not every survivor may be able to read that without becoming a tad overwhelmed. As always with any of our reviews, please be aware of your own limitations, and be careful out there!

On the other hand, the stories told in this book, taken as a whole, do teach us certain things about child abuse.

Within these 6 stories you see a wide variety of victims, and circumstances. There are poor minorities exposed to pornography at a very early age, there are children from wealthy families victimized by an adult, there are male and female victims, male and female offenders, those who have been successful adults, and those who have never truly reached healing. As I finished reading the different stories I couldn’t help but notice this fact, and be reminded that it doesn’t really matter who you are, there are other people just like you who are survivors. Of course, that also reminds us just how prevalent child sexual abuse is. It’s affecting all different ethnic and religious groups, at any economic level, whether there are two parents in the home, or a broken home. No one is truly safe.

One other thing that occurred to me as I read this, and excuse me if this veers a bit from a typical review, is that all the victims and offenders talked specifically about being introduced to sexuality before they were ready. Whether it was the availability of porn at mom’s boyfriends house, a peep hole discovered by young boys, or simply hearing parents having sex or having an adult purposely introduce sexual images and acts on a young child, each story talked specifically about not being ready to handle sexuality. Obviously, in 2011, I’m not sure that it’s really possible to completely prevent any child from seeing sexual images, or reading about sex, before they are ready. In fact, I’m willing to bet that most, if not all, children have seen and learned plenty by the time they are 9-10 years old, which seems to be the common age for this collection of stories. Yet, in many cases that doesn’t turn into the sort of sexual abuse that occurred in these stories. As I read back through them a second time, though, another interesting connection occurred to me. Not only were the children in these stories exposed to sexuality very early, but they were also left to deal with it on their own, with no adult to provide proper context. Granted in some cases because the adult who was supposed to provide context and explanation was the offender, but in others there simply was no room to go to a parent or other adult with what was happening.

I don’t know that I have all the answers to eliminating the sexual abuse of children, but this book did remind me of the importance of having adults involved in the life of a child. I don’t think in this day and age we can prevent any exposure to sexual images and sounds, but we can be sure that kids have a safe place to bring their questions, and their concerns. Maybe that’s really the best we can do.

What do you think?

Obviously, for a short e-book, Let’s Play House does provide quite a few perspectives, without ever wondering away from the simple stories. The stories are enough by themselves to stir many thoughts, and presenting them without comment allows us as readers to consider our own thoughts and experiences. I imagine it would make for a good group discussion too, so if you’ve read it leave a comment with what your thoughts were.

I mentioned this novel a while back on the blog, and now that I found some time to read it myself, I wanted to share some thoughts.

First, the background. This is a novel. I can only assume some of it is based on Tara’s own experiences, but it is not a memoir, so it’s a bit different than many of the other books we have reviewed here. The exact details of the story may or may not have actually happened, however if you’ve grown up in an abusive, dysfunctional family, I do think you’ll be able to identify with Marla Conroy, the narrator and central figure.

If you don’t have that sort of background, this book may not be very easy for you to read. Not because it is overly graphic, or disturbing, in fact it is not any of those things, but because it is a bit haphazard. In telling her story, Marla tends to skip around, sharing a short memory from the time she was 10, then another from years earlier, followed by something that happened in High School. While there’s a rough sense of a timeline, it is not consistent, and the events do not necessarily even fit together in any logical way to you, as the reader.

That was my first impression as I started into the story, but it was a short-lived one because I realized that’s exactly the way I remember my childhood, in bits and pieces. Sure, there’s a rough timeline of growing up, but if I spend much time thinking about it, or trying to document it as Marla is doing in the story, that is pretty much how it would come out. One story would remind me of another story, or there would be a story about something that happened when I was 12 that I felt the need to explain further by telling you about something else that happened a few years earlier. In my mind, those details may be part of the same story because I somehow connected them in my head, but the connection wouldn’t be clear to anyone else. They didn’t live those memories, I did.

So, while a true literary review might disagree, I give Tara a plus for staying true to the reality of how an adult survivor would communicate their story in the real world.

As far as the story is concerned, again it rang very “real” to me, even as I acknowledge that it is a novel.

Growing up with the assumption that everyone’s family was like this, they just hid it and so should you? I did that.

Blaming yourself once you realized that no everyone’s family was like this? Did that too.

Discovering later in life that your parents have told you things about aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents that weren’t true, for unknown reasons? Still learning that lesson.

There were a great many things about Marla’s life that I could identify with, and can recognize now as highly dysfunctional. I also remember all too well those feelings of worthlessness, and impending doom whenever something good did happen, because I couldn’t possibly deserve it. After all, no one protected me from my childhood, therefore I wasn’t worth protecting, in my mind.

It takes a lot to overcome that, let alone write about it, even with a fictional character. So while the Reverse Psychology e-book might not be a literary classic, it does speak a very important truth, and gives a realistic voice to the many, many survivors of abuse and dysfunction that have remained silent for all these years.

You can order your own copy using Paypal from Tara’s website.

This episode, written by Jonathan Greene, falls over itself with its issues and is another that suffers from the need to provide twists and turns but ends up pandering to cliché and prejudice. The teen in the equation is the aggressor rather than the teacher but this is one of the twists after initially presenting him as the victim, defining the kid as the sex addict with zero origin aside from “looking on the internet.” However a deal is worked out following face-to-face discussion between the lawyers, the cops and offender and victim, making you feel like SVU is swapping places with Law and Order itself, but unfortunately branding every boy in a teacher abuse case a potential liar.

The deal sends him off to an institution where he is raped himself and then the social commentary turns to the treatment of offenders. The issue of compensation is left hanging as if a teenager would just take the cash and not want to have the same kind of justice as the female victim. Just for once that twist shouldn’t have been ambiguous if it was going to form an assumption with no further input from that character, just a patronising “[He’s] going to be all right”.

The slick writing fulfils the TV brief at the expense of wasting the opportunity to explore the multiple issues at length. They might have been re-examined properly in the next four seasons, but UK viewers would need to rent them on DVD to find out.

- CBG

Thanks to the wonders of multiple TV rights, UK viewers saw this episode last week. “Captive” departs from Law and Order tradition because the victim isn’t found dead at the start, but rather the “distraction actors” doing something totally unconnected to the crime, stumble upon a kidnapping that happens right in front of them.

Post-credits, we see the search for the kidnapped child and the distraction over the kidnapper’s car but he is found dead, taking us out of SVU territory and back to the main show about figuring out the killer.
Let’s save some time here; Law and Order quite happily took real-life events (eg the Mel Gibson anti-Semitic meltdown and child abuse in religious cults) and made episodes out of them , making a mockery of its disclaimer, but usually getting the tone right and provoking thought. It was an accident of timing that the first air date for this episode was two months after Shawn Hornbeck was returned under similar circumstances to the fictional story and parading the returned kidnap victim in the media is the sole accurate point of the story.

It seems a lot more like the writers asked themselves the question “What if Steven Stayner turned out like his killer brother?” and had great fun reinforcing ignorance and prejudicial assumption, it’s no accident that we have the prosecutor asking the “why didn’t he run/call the police” kind of questions aimed at children in these situations, when in real life, the first kidnap victim aided the second to some degree, in Stayner’s case, directly rescued him.

So “Captive” was a pointless exercise, deliberately falsifying reality because it didn’t provide a dramatic enough outcome, instead choosing the one that reinforced stereotypical assumptions. They might as well have left the subject to their sister show, which has spent its entire run on episodes with this subject matter and (mostly) handled them with more realistic, sensitive treatment whenever the writers weren’t preaching. It certainly marks the point where the show started going downhill ahead of cancellation and if this is how any further CSA episodes were written then the show won’t be missed.

- CBG

Review: Abused, Breaking The Silence (2011, UK)

Abused: Breaking the Silence (hereafter known as ABTS) is an independently produced BBC documentary. It reported on two Catholic Schools run by the Rosminian Order sect; The Grace Dieu in Leicestershire, England and St Michael’s, Soni in what is now known as Tanzania, back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. All the men featured in the programme reported systematic physical and sexual abuse, and the recording of photographic Child Abuse images as well by one priest.

The filming recounts shades of the BAFTA-Award winning documentary Chosen, except that in Channel 4’s film, the survivors told their story and verbal voiceover was dumped in favour of short subtitling and clever CGI illustrating the school environment. ABTS chooses the more conventional pictures of the men as kids and a voiceover that treats the viewer like an idiot, especially in its introduction.

The men describe how the token disclosers and parents who tried to complain were stonewalled and the children ostracised after speaking out. The alleged offenders were, as we have heard many times over with Catholic CSA, moved on to other Catholic establishments, usually in contact with more children. Sadly there were also cases of parental failure as some parents disbelieved their children or did nothing post-disclosure, so the film is at least balanced in sharing out the blame and doesn’t just attack the church.

During an enclosed online school reunion for the two colleges from people who had re-emigrated across the world, one disclosure over Skype opened the floodgates to the mass disclosure of at least 35 men. At first they co-operated with a separate church inquiry into one of the priests that was already happening. However one of the alleged offenders had been decorated with a Royal Honour, a MBE, which was returned when the allegations became more public. Only then did one of the ostracised survivors learned that the priest silencing him had been implicated in the allegations of abusing other children at the school.

Following its internal inquiry the Rosminian Order later admitted wrongdoing leading to the surprising move of individual priests writing letters asking for forgiveness for their offences. If these were not satisfactory though, individuals requesting meetings sometimes had to endure blanket verbal denials, the complete opposite of the earlier written admissions and the request for forgiveness became a more repeated, manipulative demand from the instigator of the inquiry. Also, one of the deniers mentioned another child who grew up to be a lawyer, in part explaining the class action lawsuit involving at least 23 of the 35 disclosers.

ABTS is a powerful documentary but packaged in a more conventional way than Chosen; it was dumped out at a late time of 10.35pm which seems to have been BBC policy for the summer and worst of all, it has been screened before the legal action has finished, leading to an incomplete story. We hope it will receive an extended repeat when the legal judgement has been made in the future and we get to hear more experiences from other kids at the school and their feelings at the end of the lawsuit rather than focussing on only a few of the 35. The film hasn’t done them justice in its present, too-short edited form. To be fair to Olenka Frenkiel’s documentary directed by  Maninderpal Sahota, it underlines the Mike’s earlier point in the main blog about how the internet has helped male survivors in a big way.

At least the documentary can be seen on the BBC iPlayer for another seven days (to 10.35pm Tuesday 28th June) and we highly recommend that you catch it before it goes, despite its shortcomings. The iPlayer direct page is here and should revert to a summary page when the week for streaming the show expires, or go to the iPlayer’s front page and search on the alphabetical bar if the previous link fails to work.

Little Victim is Harry Keeble’s second book with co-author Kris Hollington and goes into extended detail following on from Baby X, his first book which described his transfer from the London Metropolitan Police Drugs Squad into Child Protection.

Being the second book, Keeble goes into detail on a handful of individual cases over the course of a year. This gives a wider idea of the unit’s inner workings and the unpredictable day-to-day workload his unit could encounter. In an extreme example, that included the pursuit of either witnesses or suspects abroad at a moment’s notice. It also illustrates how the falsely accused can also become victims, a fact often forgotten. Simple neglect all the way up to serious CSA are all covered along with the false allegation case, and Keeble makes no apologies in stating what would make the life of police and social services easier in providing good frontline child protection and mentions feedback from all concerned to his first book.

Little Victim is another absorbing book which you can speed-read or take your time over the procedural sections. You’re getting the cop’s eye view here but his assertion that cases would never be forgotten is a platitude and an unrealistic one – looking at his workload over just the one year, added to the cases that probably didn’t make the book, and Keeble is human and clearly too busy – though he is big enough to accept all viewpoints on his books.

That one annoyance aside, this is an excellent book and we’ll review Baby X as part of our general catchup at a later date.

- CBG

The danger with taking real-life cases and turning them into drama as cop shows often do, is that you end up with empty preaching and pandering to voyeurism. Thankfully that’s not what happened with the season five opener of the now-cancelled Bruckheimer drama Without A Trace. This 2006/07 series opener which was missed in the UK until its rerun on DVB television channel More4, brings a modern-day update to the Steven Stayner/Timmy White kidnap and rescue case of the early 1980s and with eerie timing, would have had its first UK showing a few months after the return of Shawn Hornbeck as well.

The central storyline is fictionalised to fit the general style of the show but doesn’t make reference to any B-plots from the previous year. Bruckheimer’s production simply cuts out the lost time to make it fit the 45 minute timeframe, although like P911 before it from Season 2 of Criminal Minds, there’s no scene of being reunited with the parents at the end, that’s left open-ended. The show will be on regular re-runs now which is how we caught up with it to watch it properly. There were other paedophile kidnap epsiodes in the show, most notably the very first one with a character that recurred later on, but it was good that Without A Trace retained the high quality which it would later apply to the Season six closing episode “Satellites” when handling child abuse issues in general. Hopefully other shows will retain this standard now that WAT has finished.

- CBG

We already reviewed an older Cutting Edge show from its modern run. This newer film focuses on the most high-profile case of child abuse at a nursery in the UK from the last decade, and the other offenders that were in contact with each other by phone and Facebook.

Wisely, this film has been released just over 18 months after the convictions so it’s by no means lazy or comes across as if interviews have been sat on. It’s also slightly longer than the Dugard film. However some of the same problems remain – it’s almost all about the offenders and we hear from the offenders’ relatives who talk on the record as well as the police. We have the parents of one victim in shadow and they are given two or three scenes to comment on their rubbish treatment and the after-effects of the alleged abuse – and then it’s back to the cops, the porn and the paedophiles.

Sadly Cutting Edge seems to have preferred the downmarket tabloid approach to documentaries in general, the fact we hear more from the offenders on tape than the parents of the toddler victims ruins what could have been a good film, like a lot of Louis Theroux’s work, the subject was too big for the time it was given and the production team went with the slavish media retread angle the rest of the time, to put a framework around the talking heads of the offenders’ relatives and the police. You do learn a few more details on the case itself which weren’t highlighted due to guilty pleas, and that’s the best thing you can say about this documentary. Hopefully the next nursery abuse documentary will be handled by Channel 4′s Dispatches strand, where the tone will be as serious as the subject deserves rather than leaving you feeling you’ve just read the News of the World or National Enquirer.

The Youtube link is here and it’s on 4oD’s own site here for UK users. If either link fails then search on the programme title. The Youtube version will have an age confirmation screen to click through prior to viewing.

- CBG

Spoiler Note: This episode is from the most recent season and the plot is discussed below.

“Justified” is part of a story arc in the last series of CSI:NY rather than a strict two-parter. The body in question was discovered during a previous story, and then becomes one of the two cases in this episode and much more naturally intertwined as we discover the fallout from a third crime.

The show wastes no time in trying to wrong-foot the audience and continue the mystery that started in the previous episode. It’s almost sad then, that for all the excellent buildup and the great acting from Christian Kramme and Brad Beyer as the teen and adult versions of the same character and the writing from John Dove, that “Justified” ends up with a storyline closely resembling that of “Mommie Deadest” from the penultimate season of CSI: Miami.

The main difference other than the cast is the method of revelation of the culprits. Since the killing in the Miami season 8 show was brand new and the culprit is led off into the unknown at the end, half of the apprehension of the culprit forms the flashback element to “Justified”, and we see the same character verbally explaining his actions with the customary CSI flashbacks. The outcome for the characters forms part of the twist at the end; normally a CSI show will hand down a message or a judgement of some kind using its global reach to attempt to educate; it’s welcome that “Justified” has a bittersweet conclusion for both the characters in two directions, one happier but unresolved, the other having to face the general consequences.

The grittier style of the New York franchise makes “Justified” better than “Mommie Deadest” in my view even though the abuse element feels shoehorned as a necessary part of keeping it as a reveal near the end after two episodes. There’s room for both approaches and this epsiode doesn’t undo the good work of “Rush To Judgement” and other abuse-related CSI episodes. The studio has confirmed that neither of the spinoffs will be cancelled guaranteeing at least one more season each. We hope they can both maintain this standard, although avoiding predictability will remain a challenge.

- CBG

Spoiler Note: This is a current-season episode at the time of review.

This episode is from the middle of season 11 of CSI Vegas and the episode title refers to the Missing Person and Kidnap police radio codes. Within the context of the show, both new cases are combined from the start and they lead on from an old one that we learn about in exposition. The wife of an FBI Agent is shot and her daughter missing. With Laurence Fishburne’s character away, it’s another departure in that the straightforward cop Lt Brass leads the case rather than any of the CSIs.

The FBI Agent in question is obsessed with the subject of his biggest case, a serial paedophile that he had been tracking for years, caught and jailed, but saw walk away due to the evidence technicalities, and threatened the agent’s family. Thankfully the way the episode unfolds manages to rise above these and other clichés thanks to the acting both from the background regulars like Paul Guilfoyle that receive expanded roles and the guest stars, particularly Patrick Stafford as the Agent’s son. I’m sure that real-life cases involving a FBI Agent’s family would see the official in question confined to headquarters instead of walking around like John Wayne. However you can tell that the producers allowed some limited fictionalisation of Federal as opposed to Police procedure to allow the episode to resolve itself without needing a second part.

You would normally watch CSI NY for all action episodes and CSI Miami for the stories that revolve around major tragic devastation of one single family (as well as the fear of a paedophile). “418/427″ brings together these elements neatly to the Vegas franchise following “Lost And Found” from series 10. Having a major character missing did not reduce this episode to filler. Like “Rush To Judgement“** from CSI NY, paedophilia is an element to the story but that’s not all it’s about, and the episode is better for it. Aside from one throwaway line the episode doesn’t seek to lecture the audience – in fact it feels more like the writer is grinding an axe with the FBI. It’s not the best of the episodes dealing with child abuse but the acting rescues it from some of the more predictable elements.

The episode will receive its UK re-run tonight on Freeview/DVB on Five USA at 10pm GMT with a possible final showing on Sunday 20th March, before it goes to the re-run schedules.

- CBG

**Quoted episode is the second one reviewed.