Survivors News and Reviews

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

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/

Deliver Us From Evil cuts together footage from videotaped depositions by priests, cardinals and other church staff, parents, written testimonies and histories and grown-up victims of both genders describing the abuse suffered as children and the lengths to which the Catholic Church went in order to keep it covered up. It concentrates on one particular paedophile, Oliver O’Grady who abused dozens of children over almost 20 years as he was moved across the state of California by various church authorities.

The second half of the documentary illustrates the way that the church at first attempted to continue the cover-up, then concentrates on the first family of victims to be introduced and their grown-up daughter as they travel to Rome in attempt to hand deliver a letter to the Pope.

As with Jimmy Breslin’s book, the crisis of faith caused to victims and their relatives is also well documented. The film ends with a montage of shots regarding what happened after filming was complete. The documentary is powerful and thought-provoking even if your abuse didn’t happen in a religious environment. It certainly deserved its Oscar nomination.

Sadly, the only flaw with the documentary is giving the last word to the paedophile involved before the end montage; considering this person was frankly, far too chipper and genial given his crimes, it makes him far too sympathetic, though you are left in no doubt that he was simply allowed to carry on offending until his eventual imprisonment and deportation back to Ireland. We watched the film on its British digital network premiere. Hopefully on the official DVD, O’Grady’s final word is given its own chapter that you can skip.

Whilst an irritant to survivors, those who have not been abused can certainly see one offender commenting on his crimes in the same tone as talking about the weather, and see the banality of evil made real. If they actually live in Ireland, they can also check if anyone is bothering to monitor O’Grady properly three years on from the making of the film.

Amazon Information Page:

US

UK

- CBG.

Louis Theroux’s Documentary A Place For Paedophiles is a film made at Coalinga, a “halfway house” jail for Californian paedophiles who have served their primary sentences but who have been deemed unsafe for release back into society. Theroux wrote a companion article about the documentary on the BBC News website and you can read it here.

The article gives non-UK residents the summary of the programme without necessarily spoiling it. Louis Theroux has re-edited and extended his documentaries in the past, whether for television or retail DVD. Keeping A Place For Paedophiles down to a single hour is too short a running time to cover anything comprehensively about the inmates of this prison, their treatment or their crimes. This subject is screaming out for the same re-editing and extension given to his other shows and would result in a  completely different film.

Sadly, the TV cut felt very disjointed to watch. Footage of a Halloween party and a choir was, in my view, irrelevant. Ironically, the inmates themselves also complained about bias in the documentary so the less “poster boy” inmates rebelling against the therapeutic structure of Coalinga were then given a few more minutes.

From the broadcast cut of the film, whether in therapy or not, the majority of the featured inmates gave the impression of simply backsliding, minimising or talking down their crimes with a few exceptions. One stalking paedophile’s explanation of his abuse of 10 and 11 year old boys was “I’m gay,” and you’d hope that gay people wouldn’t accept that excuse for child abuse in their ongoing campaign for better rights.

So whilst the documentary would have benefited from a longer running time,  in its broadcast form A Place For Paedophiles is a missed opportunity. Going full circle from judging the inmates at the start, by the end of the TV cut I certainly had a bigger problem with the presentation and editing, than the subjects. Hopefully a future DVD release with at least another thirty minutes to an hour will give as well rounded a view of an offender as “Deliver Us From Evil” (2006).

I also hope that British broadcasters will show some programmes less skewed in favour of the offender during Child Abuse Awareness month next year, even if that will bring less media attention and potentially lower ratings. The BAFTA Award win for Chosen (2008) in the same month was a happy accident, concentrating as it does on three victims.

- CBG

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.