Survivors News and Reviews

One of my frequent notes about auto/biographies featuring child abuse is that they fail to go into relevant detail about the recovery process. Josh Cannon’s Silent Scream, which I read in hardback, sets this right by bookending the whole story with being shipped off to recovery, some in the UK, but at the beginning of the story it refers to the American rehab and therapeutic help that saved the then-suicidal author’s life.

At 213 hardback pages Silent Scream is also a quick read and a good “note comparison” memoir when referring to therapeutic help for anything you might have missed in your own recovery. Probably best of all is that the book finishes with the author in a better place but mindful that it doesn’t equal a happy end, rather recognising his good fortune in not having pressed the self-destruct button with the desired success he might have wanted earlier.

So it’s a great book, actually dating back to around the time of Our Little Secret by Duncan Fairhurst but overlooked in the sales rush for the latter book. If you need a male survival memoir, it’s potentially triggering in places but worth the read.

Amazon Page is here;

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Silent-Scream-Josh-Cannon/dp/0719520983/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296299271&sr=1-7

- CBG

Rick Belden was kind enough to comment on my post calling for contributors and let me know that he had posted a review of the film we have talked about here before, Boys and Men Healing.

Rick does a great job of sharing what the film is about, and how it affected him as he watched it. I hope to get to see it myself someday, but in the meantime, you can check out Rick’s review on his site:

http://rickbelden.com/blog/2011/01/03/film-review-boys-and-men-healing

Sarah Burleton, the author of Why Me? was kind enough to offer me a free electronic copy of her memoir to review. Luckily, I had some spare time, and her book isn’t very long, so I jumped at the opportunity to read it.

Why Me? is Sarah’s story, plain and simple. She shares some of the many, many stories of abusive behavior she experienced at the hands of her mother and stepfather, as well as some of the things she did as a child to cope with an insane situation. If you’ve never experienced or had someone in your life share these sorts of stories with you, it will seem pretty intense, and shocking. Sarah does a great job of communicating the seemingly irrational world abused children live in, and the constant state of hyper-alertness required to navigate day-to-day life. Every time it seems that Sarah stops to enjoy a moment, it turns out badly.

Eventually, Sarah shares some of the details of how she got out of that house, and where she is now. While I do wish she could have shared some more details about the time after leaving her mother’s life, and how she managed to heal during that time, I also realize that would have made for a much longer book, and wasn’t what she set out to do. I believe that Sarah set out, through telling her story, to try both to explain her own life, to herself and the reader, and to provide a story of hope for other survivors. I can only assume that writing her story was therapeutic for herself. However, I do know for a fact that her story provides a glimmer of hope for other survivors, and children going through abuse currently.

Not only did Sarah survive the abuse she endured, but she found people willing to step up and help her when she least expected it, and she was able to move beyond her childhood and find happiness as an adult. So many survivors struggle with thinking they will never really feel happiness, and Why Me? provides a great example of someone proving that it is, indeed possible. For that, I’m extremely glad that Sarah has shared her story with us!

Jimmy McGovern is an acclaimed British TV screenwriter. His newest series Accused was co-written with other newer writers for each of its six episodes. The show always starts on the morning that a criminal is about to be sentenced and in flashback we learn the motive for the crime (usually murder, with occasional previous crimes). The drama always ends back in real time when the sentence is handed down.

Episode 5 of 6 involves Kenny Armstrong, a dad with three children and it differs because firstly there was so much advanced publicity we knew that the crime was child sexual abuse, and Armstrong’s daughter was the victim, an annoying trait of the modern BBC drama trailer. The series has already been criticised for its unrealistic handling of everyday details, either for factory work laws or Army procedures. People are surprised by this because McGovern created Cracker which was remade into the American drama Fitz. Details of police procedure were slavishly created for this older classic show so to have McGovern getting lazy over the details now is a shame. It’s realistic enough to have the lead investigating cop put a theoretical scenario about what might happen during the trial exactly halfway through the episode before the arrests happen in flashback. I suspect that had I known that this was a prediction of the end of the episode I would have stopped watching, but only the great acting kept me interested as the emotions were more realistically portrayed than the storyline.

The first flight of fancy from the script is when Armstrong runs into the family of the victim at the hospital because he breaks his wrist in the course of trying to seek revenge. However, it’s even more unrealistic that Armstrong would run into the bereaved family on multiple occasions after this first coincidence that you’ve already suspended your disbelief to accept.

The drama doesn’t redeem itself by letting the twist crop up at the end of act two, causing Armstrong to fall out with the brothers before deciding on various strategies following their arrest.

In short this drama ditches its general asking the audience what they would do but keeps the flashback structure. That turns Kenny’s Story into Law and Order meets Lost in the English suburbs. Unfortunately it’s 15 minutes too long compared to both those shows. The writing is geared more towards compulsive viewing and re-watching it for this review still had me hooked thanks to the acting, but two parts per story (like Cracker) would give these characters room to breathe rather than the edited highlights we get here. It at least shows that it’s not just American dramatists that will use child abuse for cheap shots to get their programmes highlighted in the press for ratings.

The lack of/sympathy you may feel for Armstrong is the only payoff for the audience as you are expected to make up your own mind. It’s not as off-base as some of the other stories in the series, but could have been much better.

UK viewers can now stream this episode on the BBC iPlayer until 9pm on 27th December 2010. To check for future repeats of the show after this date check the main iPlayer page and click on the alphabetical search bar.

- CBG

Put it this way, I have not put the usual spoiler warning on this episode. That’s not just because it’s the last season to American viewers and we’ve only just watched it this week in the UK. Any charming family scene in a show like CSI/Miami only serves to make the episode predictable.

It’s not even predictable in a good way like Law and Order Criminal Intent where you are either shown the killer, or spend 40 minutes taking a guess. This episode lets the second case unfold right at the end and is a cutaway that continues to the penultimate episode of the whole season. Since child abuse is suspected, this is another annoyance, if the abuse storyline can’t carry the whole episode when it’s the lead case, it feels like lazy shock value however well written and however good the acting.

That’s the greatest problem; Mommie Deadest feels recycled from Season 1 of the original CSI (Vegas) episode “Blood Drops”, except for the shift to physical and emotional abuse. It might be well done but without letting the other case become part of the story as with the Vegas episode “Lost and Found” from last season, “Mommie Deadest” was doomed to be half a good episode. It’s sad that child abuse is still filler on American television especially for a show that had at least one good, multilayered and intelligent episode in season six about the tracking of offenders (“To Kill A Predator”).

- CBG

The author of Many Faces of PTSD, Susan Stocker, was kind enough to send me a free copy of her book. I have to admit that I was a little ambivalent about reviewing it, simply because I’ve never really had an official PTSD diagnosis, or any specific PTSD therapy. Being a child abuse survivor, I’ve always assumed there was some PTSD symptoms mixed in with my healing somewhere, but was never quite sure how they fit in. Reading this helped define that for me.

The book is, in essence, 12 case studies, conglomerations of years worth of Susan’s therapy clients. Each individual is presented in a typical case fashion, starting with their story, their symptoms, their treatment steps, and finally what was learned by the therapist from that treatment.

As I started the first case study, Brenda, I did have my one moment of disagreement with the author. Brenda was a victim of domestic violence, and Susan chose that time to write the following:

The domestic violence abuser will usually, but not always, be a man. The abused will usually be a woman. Men tend to act out, and women tend to internalize. Please understand that these are generalizations, and stereotypes. (All we need to do is look at same sex relationships to see the exceptions.) However, generalizations and stereotypes don’t make themselves up. They evolve from repeated examples.

I had to put the book down after reading that. I’m going to assume this statement is based on the clients the author has seen in her practice, that it’s woman or homosexual men who have come to her for PTSD symptoms created by domestic abuse, and therefore she has not familiarized herself with the growing number of studies that show that it is, indeed, fairly common for women to be the aggressors when it comes to domestic violence. Male victims are, however, much less likely to seek out professional help, thus perpetuating the stereotype that is, nonetheless, completely false. (By the way, if stereotypes do not make themselves up, I wonder how the author would feel about other racial and sexual stereotypes?)

That being said, I did pick the book back up again and discover that, despite my early disagreement on this point, there was indeed quite a lot of valid information in the case studies. I began to see many of the same symptoms show up in case after case, and recognize that these same symptoms have existed for me, and many other abuse survivors that I’ve come in contact with. Things like shooting ourselves in the foot repeatedly, hyper-alertness, anxiety, distrust, etc. are very common to me. Even some of the specific examples she cites are things I can easily relate to, such as the need to scan every detail of a room and who is in it before I can feel comfortable, and the idea that those of us who grew up in trauma as opposed to developing our mental “houses” with a good foundation are quite susceptible to being traumatized again and again. I even identified a little bit with a mention about PTSD survivors and what can seem like psychic abilities. Due to our constant, and sometimes subconscious, alertness, we become aware of things that indicate what is about to happen without fully realizing that we are doing it. We’ve grown up looking for any sort of warning about what was coming, and it’s something we don’t ever really stop doing. That does explain why, even now, nothing upsets me more than something I didn’t see coming. It throws me for a loop.

I also found myself agreeing with the author in many of her findings about how the world views, incorrectly, PTSD sufferers as weak, or somehow at fault, yet having the resiliency to survive what we have, and continue on, is actually a sign of strength. So, despite my disagreement with domestic violence generalizations, I do think this is a good book to pick up if you are questioning whether you might be suffering from PTSD, or want to better understand what someone you know with PTSD is going through. Each case’s story and symptoms will help you identify with them as a person, and the explanations will help you better understand what is going on inside of yourself, or your loved one.

If nothing else, as I’ve always said about blogging on this topic, the book will help those of us who have been or are dealing with PTSD symptoms feel just a little less alone. That is a good thing to me.

So, now that I’ve finished the book, should we figure out a way to give away this copy to one of you folks?

This is a Season 9 (06/07) Episode that aired only last week in the UK. A package is delivered to One Police Plaza featuring suspected child pornography, but when an ex-con with a record for burglary is ruled out as the suspect, Benson and Stabler re-investigate until the child and his mother are traced. When parent and child collapse and Benson is also poisoned, an assassination attempt is also ruled out, and eventually the photographs and videos trace back to a different kind of child abuse entirely.

There was an episode in the parent series Law and Order which also had the same twist, but it wasn’t used to wrong-foot the audience quite so spectacularly. In the storyline it makes a change that it’s Benson who gets to go out on a limb and be obsessed by a case. Due to the up-in-the-air potential divorce storyline in that season, only Stabler (Chris Meloni) ever seemed to be out of control which was in danger of getting boring even when the acting was as good as this show. The show’s writers of are still trucking along handling abuse storylines to an extremely high standard and Loophole is intelligently handled, with just the right amount of grey areas and an ending that doesn’t resolve everything.

Since this episode will be an oldie to American audiences, we’re sure it will roll around on a repeat showing in your area soon or the individual episode could be sourced from iTunes.

- CBG

Note: This is a current series episode and the entire plot is discussed below.

Confession, series 2 Episode 4: Confession By Terry Cafolla is an updating of Bad Faith written by Réné Balcer for the original American series.

A cop is found shot dead in Battersea Park and so the story opens with the notification to the widow. The childhood best friend who went through the academy with the victim refuses to see any fault in the victim’s background but his elder partner (the regulars in the show) last saw him drinking heavily and shadowing a now-ex Parish priest. The younger copper tips off the audience that this priest is a paedophile and that’s when the Crown Prosectution Service (the equivalent of the DA’s office) is brought it to see how to bring him to justice, in addition to trying to find other witnesses following the initial death ruled as suicide.

The problem is that not only was this storyline reheated from the American series, but the now-concluded police series The Bill covered similar territory without the Catholic Church angle and proved to be much more powerful as a result. Law and Order UK throws away too much time on the frankly wishy-washy idea of educating the audience through the dense younger cop who isn’t sure whether he was a victim himself when everyone else knew they were including the remaining witnesses discovered off-screen. The writer conveniently, though realistically, gives the replacement witness a flaw that can lead to discreditation on the stand. In short, this episode was rubbish; the Catholic Church situation is still unfolding so hardly needs fictionalising for entertainment purposes just yet or if it is, starting with a suicide as a means of editing for time was lazy. Until Law and Order UK has its own screenwriting team the situation isn’t likely to get better, this wasn’t a patch on The Bill’s handling of both child and adult sexual abuse over the years.

Ironically, if the decision is ever taken to Anglicise Law and Order Special Victims Unit which is half the age of the parent show, that might be a better way to approach the subject if all the production companies concerned insist on continuing to remake old work in new countries.

- CBG

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