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.

Still, for those mistreated in decades past, the search for truth and justice has been fraught with obstacles. To cope with the rage and frustration I felt around public denial, I turned to activism.

Every year I try to attend at least one feminist or survivor conference in the U.S. and Canada to present on different forms of human rights abuses against women and children.  Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson of Persons Against Ritual Abuse-Torture and I have given talks on the sexualization of torture, on human trafficking of young girls, on healing from ritual abuse-torture and child pornography. Typically at these conferences, I share personal details about my own childhood suffering, and although I often feel skinless and exposed after wards, generally people listen with respect and are supportive. They are almost always surprised by the depth of human cruelty there is out there, and anxious to do something to change it.  Every time I speak out I feel like I have done something to break the cycle of  silence and denial. I have transformed my rage into a vehicle for social action.

In this way, activism is healing.

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I was afraid because when I was a little girl I was warned repeatedly that if I told, my mother would be murdered. The first time I told my therapist, I was suicidal before hand. Sick afterwards. For six years I slept with the lights on. But my mother didn’t die and neither did I. Still I kept waiting for the fear to leave me, but it didn’t.

Then a fellow activist, Linda MacDonald said to me, “You don’t just wake up one morning courageous. You get that way by working through the fear.” I realized that I was going to have to do the things that terrified me if I wanted to be truly free. After all, the perpetrators wanted me to be fearful. It was a tactic to keep me silent. Pedophiles thrive on secrecy.

So to overcome my fear I began approaching people, speaking out, going to conferences, disclosing to friends. I began doing things I was afraid of. Initially, there was a huge backlash. After every talk, I was ill, I had anxiety, I didn’t sleep. I learned I had to take baby steps. I still feel fear all the time. But I am not as limited by fear. So now I do one thing I’m afraid of a week. It’s my rebellion! It’s my one-woman act of non-violent resistance. I feel sick before I do it and after I’ve done it, I feel victorious, liberated and best of all, fearless!

What frees you from fear?

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.

My grandmother was the only adult I knew as a child who told me I was a good girl. I thought of myself as difficult and unloved because those were the messages I got from the pedophiles. I was often a bother to my single mother who couldn’t cope with the needs of a traumatized child. Later in my twenties I found a kind woman therapist. Her listening validated my experience and gave me the courage to share. On my healing journey I have been blessed with at least one kind stranger who offered me compassion. Those single acts of kindness, even when they were fleeting and far between, as they were in my girlhood, were the raft that kept me from drowning, and upon which I began to build a healthy self, healthy relationships, a new faith in myself and the world.

We often don’t realize how one small act of generosity can resonate in a child’s life. Next time someone asks me what helped me survive, I won’t list all the techniques I’ve tried. I will say: human kindness saved my life. Simple human connection.

A therapist told me just a few years ago, that 80% of her practice is comprised of women abused by parents traumatized by war. I mention this not to denigrate our soldiers past and present, who have made a personal sacrifice the young and free can only imagine, but to point out something important. We cannot send young men off to war and then forget them when they come home. A recent article in The Globe and Mail November 10, 2009, was titled Brain changes from PTSD observed in soldiers. A large proportion of soldiers suffer terrible post-traumatic symptoms after war. On another note, the women’s U.N. list serve posted a recent Israeli study that showed survivors of rape suffered even worse post-traumatic stress symptoms than soldiers. Why? The Israeli soldiers’ suffering was acknowledged and they received support whereas the rape victims did not.
So next year, let’s remember that the war is not over when it’s over. Not for the soldiers. Or their families. Help those who return home. Perhaps, we should remember those who have been abused by the soldiers of war too. Nobody gave me a medal.

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