Survivors News and Reviews

NOTE: The CSI Episode is from the current season, so if you want to avoid spoilers, skip the latter half of the review

I made reference to “Quarry” from the (2005) 6th Season of Law and Order Special Victims Unit (SVU) in my earlier TV reviews. It actually takes the line of investigating a cold case due to a paedophile murder of a child being denied by a killer on death row and therefore two adult victims of a serial paedophile are re-interviewed as grown adults by Benson, Stabler and the team.

After that, one of the cops on the case has to interview the paedophile in depth. This is one of the main reasons this is probably the best episode of SVU from those we’ve seen in the UK. The performance of John Savage as killer Lucas Biggs should have been Emmy-nominated; it’s understated, yet chilling and precise in the way the offender has taken trophies for every victim, whose names he had memorized. You are left in no doubt that this is a monster, but Savage is never showy, just capable of a performance making your skin crawl.

The other high point of the episode shows the talent of writer José Molina. Going beyond the usual efficient police procedural handling you’re used to in a Law and Order episode is the positive and hopeful, almost uplifting ending for one of the survivors that broke up with his wife, being urged to tackle his fear of repeating the cycle and to be a father to his son. This flies in the face of the negative stereotype they could have recycled from shows like Cold Case.

Going forward to the present day In the 2008/09 CSI NY episode “Rush To Judgement”, resembling Bruckheimer’s other show Without A Trace, child abuse is once again neatly slotted into the show’s more routine fare of murder and funky autopsy music by composer Bill Brown, and writer Wendy Battles gets to play around with the timeline of the episode to mix up the usual format.

The victim is the presumed offender who has been dismembered, delaying the investigation as his body parts finally arrive throughout the first half of the episode. Subsequently, the team have to solve the crime as usual and suspicion falls on the members of the wrestling team that he coached, and the extent of his guilt regarding the abuse allegations.

It’s a realistic could-happen scenario to have a false allegation of child abuse leveled at a public official, in this case a teacher, using technology, which escalated into his murder. The B Plot links in and provides cutaways thanks to keeping one regular character out of the loop and focusing on the main investigation, instead of the usual two cases per episode.

Like Without A Trace’s “Satellites”, there’s also time to fit in a debate about direct action regarding paedophilia and the potentially disastrous effects of either pre-emptive or post-victimization-based revenge attacks. So the episode manages to be about child abuse even though it doesn’t feature direct fictional victims except one referring to child porn. Thanks in part to its reference to the effects on loved ones of abuse allegations, it remains thought-provoking and memorable over and above a more routine episode of CSI. It could even be an episode matching the season one classic “American Dreamers” regarding the skeleton on the bus.

- CBG

Thanks to TV.com for episode synopsis, IMDB.com for actor/writer credits

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

Jimmy Breslin’s book, “The Church That Forgot Christ“, is the account of the author’s growing discovery of and his own personal and the national reaction to, the Catholic Church child abuse scandals in the US. I had to buy the book from an Amazon seller in Ireland since it was essentially only an import to the UK.

The book manages to be an intensely personal journey of faith, yet covers the scope of the problem from the Vatican all the way back to the US, guesstimating offenders in five figures and potential victims in six, in the introduction. It’s is written in Breslin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning take-no-prisoners prose.

The personal nature of the book means there’s slightly less scope for the gallows humour of Breslin’s more recent work like his last UK-released book The Good Rat with its comfortable and familiar allusions to mob crime, borne out of the author’s time on newspapers writing about the real gangsters that the Rat went on to convict. However, sometimes you have to laugh otherwise you’ll cry, and Breslin’s self-appointed promotion to Bishop is a recurring motif which, along with his family, appears to drag him to continue seeking out new victims to interview.

In the centre of the book is the case of Patrick McSorley, a victim that went on to commit suicide. One person’s equalised guilt at his offender’s murder in prison as for the victim’s suicide underscores the real struggle of faith going on with Breslin and other lay Catholics at the entire scandal. Other victims are interviewed by Breslin along with other interjections by friends, family members and other Church personnel, with responses by letter from some clergy officials reprinted in full to illustrate the scale of the problem and its rejection from officialdom.

To be fair there has been a change of Pope since the publication of this book and campaigning advocate organizations like SNAP have also made some inroads into the situation as it was since the book was published. However Breslin’s commentary is an important history, coming from the view of an articulate layman and speaking for those victims who have committed suicide and their families. The book succeeds in giving the “view from the pews” if you will, in other words from those church members wishing to save the church as much as help the victims and survivors.

So whilst the book is more of a documentary and a journey of personal faith than concentrating on individual survivor stories, it’s well worth a read for those whose CSA occurred within religious organizations, whether you import it or take it out of the library.

Since the SNAP network was only created two years before the book was published, it’s also of interest to read the interview with the then Executive Director David Clohessy as a parallel to this review and the book itself. You can read that at SNAP’s website here

(If that SNAP link ever goes dead, visit the main site

http://www.snapnetwork.org/

Scroll down the page to the left hand column section “The Snap Viewpoint” and choose “Clohessy’s Q and A” from the menu)

- CBG

British Satellite Station Sky Television recently re-ran this old episode of Cold Case from its very first season.

Cold Case comes across as all gloss and zero substance. Considering this is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, that’s perhaps an easy and unfair charge, but it’s not helped by episodes as lazily written as this one. It marks a progression in quality to 2008’s Without A Trace Episode “Satellites” at the end of season six – same producer, but a thousand times more intelligent on the writing front.

Almost a quarter of the running time of “The Plan” is taken up with the B plot of one character’s missing girlfriend. The abuse is set in a military academy with a swimming coach as the paedophile and I can see why they didn’t even attempt to have this storyline sustain the whole episode – even the interesting twist betrays a second stereotype for male survivors, after the one that is really insulting – that a victim would voluntarily go through abuse again in order to put his abuser in the right place to be murdered. I haven’t met a single survivor that would do this in real life.

Whilst we have the main cast making all the right noises about how unfair it all is, the final stereotype when the killer is revealed takes us all the way back to archaic 1970s prejudice – he asks to be taken in because he has begun “watching boys like [his abuser]” and wants to be stopped. Total nonsense, considering the character was meant to have continued working alongside his abuser for another five years knowing the abuse was happening to other boys all that time.

The saving grace is that this piece of stereotypical crap, written by two female writers (one of whom was the show’s creator) was five years ago.

Fast forward to Without A Trace, whose opening episode in 2002 also tackled Child Sexual Abuse, purely from its missing person premise. At the end of Season Six, The episode “Satellites” features at least two male writers (again, one of them the creator of the whole series) and in terms of the handling of child abuse, steers clear of the worst stereotyping of the Cold Case episode.

Staying true to the show’s format, the disappearance scene is the opening teaser, this time five people at once from a coffee shop, and the episode proceeds to reveal its child abuse theme, but in a highly understated manner, with no departure from subtlety and sensitivity in depicting the effects of child abuse upon surviving adults until the end, which features the single flashpoint of the father of one victim that committed suicide, seeking revenge. In the end, morality wins as must happen on American television drama as both the father and the original perpetrator are led off to unknown fates.

There are two resolutions of other plots; lead agent Jack’s defriefing regarding a shooting nine episodes before, and the birth of another agent’s baby, a son. You are left to join the dots yourself – sons need as much protection as daughters from child abuse. However neither of these other two arcs has been shoehorned into the plot to shore up something unsustainable as in Cold Case, and there is much less distracting music to contend with. In short, it’s the best depiction of male survivors I’ve seen on American television since those depicted in the Law and Order SVU Episode “Quarry” which I will review separately. If I remember rightly, that Law and Order Episode was from the 2004 season, then again the standard of writing on that show has to be higher if it deals with child and adult sexual abuse and rape much more often and more readily than any other typical cop show, and was one of the three strands of Law and Order to survive and not get cancelled.

What we don’t know is whether these two portrayals of male survivors in a dramatic context from two different shows by the same executive producer, have either the genders or the talent level of the individual writers to thank for the progression from stereotypes to rounded characters or whether the past 5-6 years of the way male victims are treated in America, have been partly why Without A Trace stands out for all the right reasons.

Whatever the reason, the need to disclose and report in order to seek justice is another message that the writers found time to cram into a very packed 44 minutes, and since W.A.T. Box Sets are comparatively cheap, makes Season Six’s finale highly rewatchable for those with a special interest. CSA aside, you may want to watch Season Six in general for the cutaway plots to make any sense when resolved in “Satellites”.

- CBG

Thanks to TV.com for its TV Episode Guide tracking.

There is now that much controversy surrounding the events at the two children’s homes on Jersey, an independently governed island off the British Isles, which probably won’t result in any answers, that the best thing to do is read the views of the children that went through them in absence of any proper legal proceedings.

Robbie Garner’s book, assembled with the help of female survivor Toni Maguire, manages this view from the horse’s mouth very effectively, and describes the entire lives of his brothers and baby sister as they are taken from their violent and rowing parents , sent to live at Sacred Heart and the more infamous Haut De La Garenne children’s homes on the island. The brothers are split up according to age and their baby sister disappears quickly. For the younger kids at the Sacred Heart/Sacré Coeur, the regime is more one of intimidation, physical abuse and violence that borderlines into organized torture from the nuns and their male puppets, with one paedophile on site and the other connected to one of the schools.

The book has a slightly different structure to other abuse memoirs in that its chronological structure puts the author’s worst sexual abuse incident nearer to the end, and the release of children from social care aged 15 on the island, rather than 18 on the mainland UK, essentially kick-starts their adulthood straight away. Life improves but not by much. Much of the fighting back is indirect and the orphanage boys have to pull together to survive, but Garner manages to increase his confidence through sport and the occasional scrap in school. There is one more incident of revenge by proxy which I won’t spoil and the fact that the abuse was island-based, wasn’t something the offenders took into account, and which the victims could exploit later on.

There is further family-related heartache for the boys when grown up, though that is dealt with quite efficiently in a fait-accompli manner as their mother and father essentially ceased to be parents after their placement in care.

The final sentence in the product description on Amazon UK is slightly misleading. There are 2-3 children described in the book that effectively disappear, but the vast majority of the author’s friends are accounted for at the end with their various fortunes in life, which takes Garner a few years to ascertain. The sentence about wondering about the missing refers to the worst victims of Haut De La Garenne, all of whom decide to get off the island and never return.

The book is brave not only for the author’s suffering throughout his childhood and his survival of it, but also for the fact that he didn’t derive any satisfaction from the media revelations regarding the story or any catharsis. So many memoirs attempt to give a happy ending and the reality is that it just doesn’t happen for many sexual abuse survivors, as shown by the suicide of some of the victims as Garner grows up, and Garner continues the role of carer to his younger brother into adult life due to the physical abuse that caused his sibling permanent damage.

It’s a powerful and instructive read and one to add to my collection in future, having borrowed it from the library.

The Amazon Product Page is here:

Amazon UK info

and a general news trail regarding the Jersey Care Home stories from the Daily Mail UK Website is here:

Daily Mail Story Trail

- CBG

You can check British Google News for more background information but some of the better articles and ones where comments are referred to in the book, are listed at the Daily Mail website below.

Daily Mail UK Online

Essentially, those will tell you the story in a nutshell and at least one of the photos described in the book is on one of the reports. Child C expands upon the male victim’s story, which is a companion volume following the same history told from one of Christopher Spry’s foster sister’s perspectives.

Essentially this private fostering arrangement was made permanent by the foster mother’s manipulation of both parents and social services and Christopher Spry and his real sister were renamed and fostered alongside her existing children, one naturally hers and another of whom was facilitator/cheerleader for the abuse. Spry makes top 5 lists which pop up throughout the book between chapters, and these are at times banal, at other times as horrifying as the abuse suffered. Whilst there is the high point of a holiday in Florida, it is only a brief break in the abuse which continues into Spry’s mid-teens.

Whilst the abuse is horrific, in some places it simply defies belief in its scope, forcing children under ten into various house construction projects is something completely alien to most normal people, but Spry did it, including nearly 20 attempts to install a shower when renovating properties.

It’s quite realistic that once Spry stood up to his abuser, just the once, there was no celebration and his problems weren’t over – just like Charlie Mitchell in The Nipper – and nor was it the last time he would see her before court, but the sentence and writing of the book marks a new start for him.

For all of the foster mother’s incessant chanting about God and punishments, there was no such observation or connection made with her systematic abuse with the aid of one daughter, and the massive tragedy which strikes the family on their second holiday within the UK, where her abusive behaviour also comes under scrutiny. You wouldn’t have to be an expert on religious matters to see what went around for Eunice Spry, coming round. In fact that major tragedy starts to create the beginning of the end for the abusive regime.

Usefully there is description of the step-by-step police investigation and therapeutic steps taken to reconstruct Mr Spry’s life, are of benefit to other British survivors. The sentence is also certainly one of the longest handed down for child abuse in recent English history and especially for a female abuser, so this was a book worth reading, despite occasional repetition in some places. I suspect that Mr Spry’s wish to take on a child protection role won’t be available to him until he discloses and processes his CSA, which he alludes to several times and doesn’t elaborate on, but given the crimes that his foster mother was convicted for, it’s certainly easy to believe him.

Again, the American publishing schedule for this book is unknown, but definitely get this from the library if you want the background behind the linked headlines.

- CBG

Charlie Mitchell starts off his physical/mental abuse survival memoir with a bite-sized education for people outside Scotland of the world of Dundee, almost 30 years back. Much of the speech is phonetically written so you may find it easier to imagine a Scottish overall narrator to the book (or Mel Gibson doing his Braveheart accent). Once you do that, all speech in the book becomes easier to understand.

The book is routinely horrific when describing the alcoholism, violence and mental cruelty and you find yourself reading and thinking it couldn’t get worse, and then it does, over and over again in chapter after chapter. From an early age the author seemed able to analyse his father, know his moods and routines, and survive as best he could up to the age of 16 when he leaves and the abuse stops. As we all know on this network his problems do not end at that point, but Mitchell charts his early adulthood in an edited manner, sticking to the exact events when he worked outside the UK, his meeting with a British public figure/sort-of celebrity and the earliest spark to his present relationship. He also knows himself very well and it’s clear that he has made peace with the past.

As with all abusive childhoods, even with this level of violence this kid, as they do, still found time to have some fun. Mitchell points out the peaceful and tender and lighter moments in his first 16 years though they were rare. The humour ranges from high comedy down to gallows. Whilst you are well immersed into Scottish life at that time thanks to the writing, the best part of the book is the camerarderie of all the victims as they become teenagers at the same high school and compare notes over their various forms of abuse going on in their homes, without judgement and with an element of peer support that, as far as modern-day England is concerned, has definitely fallen by the wayside. This contrasts with the adults who refuse to get involved and leave the kids to suffer their fates. The author appears not to have had therapy thanks to his support from friends, siblings and stepfamily, but that doesn’t detract from the book. On a visual front, it’s quite refreshing to have generic down-at-heel packaging and a disclaimer that the picture on the front ISN’T the author as a child. Hopefully that means British publishers are toning down the annoying heartstrings technique to sell books with powerful stories.

I don’t know the American publishing schedule for The Nipper and they may change the title, but it’s definitely worth reading as a complete story, so, maybe get it from the library if think you’re only going to read/handle it, the once. In my case, I did borrow it but like Criminal by Caspar Walsh, it’s on the buy list for the future.

Check the existing information for it here;

Amazon UK Page

- CBG

I read the book Sleepers and then watched the film at the time, 13 and 14 years ago, then bought the film on VHS and more recently, recorded it on DVD when shown on TV. I think it’s only now the somewhat manufactured controversy surrounding the book and movie has died away with time, that it can be reviewed objectively.

The irony is, the media has taken general delight in showing up when autobiographies are untrue and since Lorenzo Carcaterra’s account was 20 years in the telling, the wide belief is that the book is false. Had Carcaterra put the word “FICTION” on the back of Sleepers, he would have been guaranteed an infinite amount of demands from the public and the media to know the book’s basis in reality instead – and been celebrated rather than vilified.

I read the book and went to the cinema to watch the film and bought the soundtrack, then bought the movie on VHS. A few years later it was one of several abuse books, true or fictional, that I gave away to a fellow survivor long before I got help. Now in therapy I’m grateful of the ad breaks in the TV version which break up the reform school section of the picture. Even though it was transmitted on one of those digital channels with a burned-in logo, in the wrong ratio, and with ads, the film is still powerful and mesmerizing.

With the way the abuse sequences have been filmed, it takes the power of TV drama The Boys of St Vincent and takes it to the big screen, with MTV jump-cutting and monochrome clipping to give you the idea, but let your imagination run wild as to what happened to these boys. Intercut with this sequence is the questioning of one of the guards. Had you read the book before seeing the film you would have had your imagination replaced by something a little less powerful, and one abuse scene shown to us in real time in the book, is made a flashback in the film with more than one character present. Ultimately the three acts of the film could have all made their own separate movies.

Since IMDB has since removed the comment I can quote freely regarding one viewpoint; the poster in question thought the best thing about the film was the fact that the flash forward concentrated much more on Jason Patric’s Journalist and Brad Pitt’s DA trying to scratch out a life in spite of the past, and keep in touch with the people they grew up with, than the criminal work of the killers summed up in voiceover – once the two thugs pulled the trigger for the one time we’re actually shown, they were really in the background, in jail or the courtroom. Despite the entire film dripping in revenge, one character states “It’s not worth throwing away your life just to get even” and there are other characters who have their own moral decisions to wrestle with. It’s a little unfair to call the film devoid of morality when, as in life, it’s complicated, people have to think things over and then make a decision that we, the audience, may disagree with.

The other general view is that the teen actors were as good as the adults, and despite the “Lorenzo leaving jail” conversation scene might not be how teens talk, inside or outside of a youth detention facility, it serves to sum up the general view of sexual abuse and how a child might immediately handle it, rather that disclosing.

So since I was there for Sleepers first time round, at present I’m content with a TV version, but may repurchase it on DVD or Blu-Ray some day if I think I can handle the whole uninterrupted flick. Despite being presumed to be fiction, it’s still incredibly powerful and at the time managed to bring equality of sympathy between boy and girl victims of CSA, up to the level of mainstream American film rather than just a TV movie. For that one service alone, it was good to have the book published and the film made, back in the mid to late nineties, even if the anti-marketing tarnished it.

- CBG

Caspar Walsh, it appears, was born to write. Criminal tells you what it’s all about on both the front and back covers but nothing prepares you for the whirlwind fast pace of both the author’s real life and the apparent speed at which it is told, even if the book is 305 pages long, the writing is so carefully edited that I finished the book in two days. I first saw the book advertised in a summer deal last year then borrowed it from the library and as a result, am buying my own copy to keep.

For a memoir with drug and other addictions as an overriding theme, it’s ironic that the reader will want to devour it with such speed once totally immersed in this tortured mutually destructive father-son-drugs-crime-prison relationship. You will read about Mr Walsh’s more bohemian childhood adventures, largely focusing, as the cover will tell you, on his relationship with his father, drugs, crime and then the complete trio at the same time over the course of his 30 years, followed by incarceration and recovery and new found job, which you will have heard about if you’ve followed the Guardian’s midweek news section with its semi-regular coverage of new initiatives to help prisoners.

Best of all about the book, is comprehensive detailing of the various therapies used to help the author come to terms with the past, which is of great help to anyone with the same father-son demons, or CSA, or drugs, or crime, or both. The self-awareness and self-realisations depicted in Criminal for both father and son put this book one small step ahead of Wasted by Mark Johnson, though the latter memoir enjoyed a higher profile release in hardback and Caspar Walsh had the opposite problem to Johnson of a father who was interested in his son when forced, but not quite interested enough to quit crime. Like Our Little Secret by Duncan Fairhurst, it’s a book where once you have blazed through it you can re-read a little more slowly, that’s how I have gleaned more general understanding about addiction from it.

The speed of my first reading allowed me to glance over some annoying typos (fair instead of fare and so on), especially annoying were the ones that looked like they were an attempt to escape copyright (For example, why spell Darth VADAR wrongly, it’s not like George Lucas is going to sue anyone after 30 years). That’s literally my only complaint about the book, which is more the publisher’s fault especially if this sloppy proofreading was carried over from the hardback print run.

So maybe it’s not so bad that it hit paperback relatively quickly (6 months) if it puts the book in as many hands as possible for the lower price, as soon as possible, although market forces in the UK means there’s only a UKP 2-3 difference between hard back and paperback. Whether it’s as addictive to American readers remains to be seen but you can do what I did and get it from the library first.

The author’s official site is here:

http://www.casparwalsh.co.uk/

Forgotten gives an account of the complete life story of Les Cummings, who had to come back to the UK from his adopted home of California to make a legal challenge to his town council for his abusive treatment when growing up in council followed by foster care.

This book is powerful, well written and I was able to read through it easily in chunks without it being a novel-style page-turner. The author is honest about the times that he wasn’t the perfect person as a result of his upbringing, either when fighting and rowing with siblings or resorting to petty crime.

Since starvation also came into play as well as other forms of abuse, this memoir also brings to mind the story of Unloved by Peter Roche, where food was withheld deliberately and almost made into another drug which drove people to theft. It comes across that Cummings’ legal fight gave him some catharsis. I say that but it’s an assumption, since there is no description of the therapy undertaken by the author overseas, just that he had some. So that’s one minus point for survivors, despite the author’s description of his more direct methods of redressing the balance in his younger days and you’ll have to make up your own mind about the moral boundaries.

Even without any reference to therapeutic action taken by the author you can check the website for more information about the case, featuring scanned copies of some of the social work records at the following location:

http://thechildrenscottagehomesjusticeproject.web.officelive.com/ham.aspx