“Diary of an Activist”

I grew up in a home for little girls. My mother was a single parent. She was abandoned by my beatnik father when I was a year old. She was pregnant and penniless. My brother was born but he died of crib death a few months later.  My mother had to lie about being a divorced single mother in order to get a job. That was the 1960s.

Initially, I was put in daily care with two women in a suburb of Toronto.  They took in the children of women who had fallen on hard times. This was before national daycare. At 2 years old, they convinced my mother that I would be better off with weekly care. So every Sunday my mother packed my valise, and every Friday she came on the bus to collect me. I grew to hate Sundays. I was molested, raped, sodomized, photographed and tortured by a group of pedophiles affiliated with that home for the next five to seven years.

I wasn’t the only one. There were many children who came and went. Street children. Orphans. The children of drug addicted parents. The children no one wanted or whose parents couldn’t care for them. The memories I have of them are fragmented. A first name. A cherubic face. I’ve often wondered where they are and how they’ve managed? I wonder if they remember? I worry that they’ve suffered over the years without adequate healing, validation or help. Did their parents believe their allegations of child sexual abuse and torture? Or did they struggle alone with the horrors of a violated childhood, as I did?

Of all of those children there is one face I remember well. So today’s blog is for Cindy. Wherever you are, I hope you’re well.

My generation was the SILENCED GENERATION. When we complained as children about child sexual abuse no one listened. When we talked about child pornography, the torture of children and ritualized pedophilia, no one believed. When we tried to speak out in the early 1990s, the false memory syndrome poisoned the media with false medical science. Denial has ruled the day around most forms of extreme child abuse until just recently. Now the internet is coughing up photographic evidence that adults torture children, even infants, for pleasure and profit. The tide has turned. There is now hope for this generation of victims.

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I have spent most of my life crippled by fear. Fear of crowds, fear of strangers, fear of intimacy, fear of public scrutiny, of failure and of success. As a result, I spent the early years of my life avoiding people and places. I was agoraphobic and reclusive. I spent my time trying to build a life that was safe and free of stress. But as I got older I saw that I had only built a more comfortable cage to hide in. And I was still fearful.

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I presented on a panel recently at the 20th Anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. Someone asked me after I had shared my experiences of pedophilic torture as a young girl: How did you survive all that?

I found myself reviewing the last 25 years and listing all the different healing modalities I’ve tried: Jungian analysis, psychotherapy, intensive regression and feeling work, massage, Rolfing, acupuncture, meditation, tantric and otherwise. But still my list didn’t answer the question. There wasn’t just one technique that did the trick or even one level. I worked on the physical, emotional and spiritual levels. I tried everything to get well. And getting well seems like a dally event, an ongoing process….But what was the key? What did all these therapies have in common?

After the conference I was talking to my colleague Jeanne Sarson, who said to me “We’re practicing a new kind of feminism. Relational feminism.” She mentioned the words: human connection. Then it hit me….the one thing that had been healing in every case, was a positive human connection.

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This remembrance day I drove to the town where my abusers grew up. I stood in a large crowd in the surprising November sunshine, and listened to the speeches and watched the offering of the wreaths. One of these wreaths was laid in honour of a man I knew privately as a child sexual abuser. As a child, I grew up in an unofficial foster home where I was ritually abused, tortured, trafficked and photographed by a group of men. Some of them were veterans. I now understand that these were men traumatized by war, who came home and began using the techniques of war: intimidation, torture, and violence on the women and children around them. They enjoyed public prestige but were private bullies. I thought my case was an isolated incident until I began doing activist work.

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