Teaching confidence in the face of abuse, The Standard (March 20th, 2007)

The One Thing You Need To Know

TV Ontario (tvo Parents.com)

It's called the funny "uh-oh" feeling.

That weird fluttery sensation in the stomach when something is not quite right.

An uncomfortable reaction to what someone does. It's difficult to say why it's wrong, only that it is somehow.

It's like that with Uncle Harry.

The 15 children in this Grade 3 class all get the "uh-oh" feeling about him.

It was the way he tells his niece she doesn't have to do her homework because they could play a game instead, while his wife is at the store.

The way he touches her shoulders and hair and asks for a kiss. The way he says he'll get her a present afterwards.

"This game, it's a secret, you got that?" Harry says. "You don't tell anybody."

Uncle Harry is "uh-oh"-inducing all right, even if he is just a character in a skit by the Niagara Region Sexual Assault Centre.

"He was being more mean and demanding," says one boy in the class at Valley Way School in Niagara Falls.

"He told her to keep that kiss a secret," another says.

Three workers from the Child Assault Prevention Program tour at least a dozen schools a year, visiting classes as young as Grade 1. They want kids to know they have a right to be safe, strong and free.

The eight-year-olds in this class are asked to trust their "uh-oh" feelings.

Even if it's an adult who makes them uncomfortable.

Even if it's a family member.

Even if they are told there will be trouble.

"You do the best you can," Sharon Pazzaglia tells them. "You're not doing anything wrong. The adult knows he's doing something wrong.

"The most important thing to know is it's not your fault and to tell another adult."

"The most important thing to know is it's not your fault and to tell another adult," Pazzaglia says.

Workers at the sexual assault centre see the long-term effects of child sexual abuse everyday, years after the acts took place.

Most of the centre's clients are adults who were sexually abused as children and didn't tell anyone.

And while the number of men treated is minuscule compared to women, they've been increasing.

Donna Christie, a.k.a. Uncle Harry, says sexual assault happens to one in five boys before age 18 - it's one in three girls - by adults they know.

It's not just strangers off the street who can hurt.

"They need to know any adults, even adults they know, can give them that funny feeling," Christie says.

They need to tell someone.

But what happens if a child confides in an adult and they are not believed?

It happened to Jeff Pearson after staying at Maurice Kennedy's Thomas Street apartment in St. Catharines when he was 13.

Kennedy, 54, was sentenced to five years in jail last week for sexually abusing three boys, including Jeff, in the 1970s and '80s. Jeff's stepfather was the brother of Kennedy's wife at the time.

When Jeff's mother picked him up the next morning, he told her on the way home that Kennedy "felt me up." She got angry.

"It didn't go well," Jeff, now 45, testified in court. So he shut up.

The second time he was touched by Kennedy, Jeff didn't tell anyone because he wasn't believed the first time.

He kept it to himself for years.

That reaction probably wouldn't surprise the children in this class.

Pazzaglia asks them if adults always believe kids. There is a confident "no" from the voices.

What if you tell someone and they don't believe you? she asks.

"Tell someone else," a boy says.

But who to tell?

Pazzaglia says Uncle Harry might be a really funny guy who tells funny jokes. His family might not want to believe he did something wrong.

Tell other family members or a best friend's parents, but keep trying, she says.

A good person to tell is a teacher. "They don't care about Harry," she says. "They only care about you."

Both Kevin and John Kennedy, sexually abused by their uncle, say there were no signals that anyone could have picked up on when they were kids.

They don't think other adults in their lives, whether teachers or family members, could have guessed what was happening to them.

In John's case, he was a motivated student. Told by Maurice he was worthless, he did everything in his power to excel, even running for class president.

"Part of me had been pulled down, so that other part of me was trying to compensate," he says. "So I was always attempting to overachieve. I may not have been successful at it, but I was always attempting to overcompensate on one side to try and build that up."

Every case and the way the child deals with it is different, Kevin says, so it would be dangerous to start pinpointing behaviours.

"Really, there's no tell-tale sign," Kevin says. "It's too bad. The only way to know is to have the child say something, whether it's at the age that it happened, or 30 years later."

His wife, Nancy, says years ago, child sexual abuse may have been taboo, but people kind of turned a blind eye to it, too. They didn't talk about it and nobody acted upon it. Even if a family knew "Uncle Joe" was doing something, they'd push it under the carpet so it wouldn't offend their reputation.

She thinks it's different now with programs in schools, education, community centres and the media.

"It's now, not accepted. Period. So if it is happening, kids are supposed to tell. Back then, you didn't tell."

Experts say the biggest thing parents today can do is keep the lines of communication open so the child feels safe to talk - about anything.

Ken Harris, an intake supervisor with Family and Children's Services, says open communication gives children permission to talk about things that are scary or they're not sure about.

He says parents can also educate children about what's OK, and what's not OK, and have a safety plan for any situation in which the child may feel uncomfortable. That includes what they should do and who is always available to provide help.

If a child does confide in a parent, it's important the parent doesn't alarm the child by panicking, Harris says.

Believing the child and not minimizing what they have said is key, says Bonnie Filipchuk, manager of the Family Counselling Centre.

There's a lot of pressure sometimes on children to retract their statement, she says, because it's too difficult for the family to handle. In cases where the abuser is the father, siblings may blame the child because the father's left the house.

Filipchuk says parents really need to let their children know telling is OK.

Christie says parents are sometimes afraid to talk to their children about this kind of subject matter. But when kids are given proper information, she says it's less scary than what's already in their heads, from TV or movies.

Sometimes, of course, manipulation or threats by the perpetrator are so great, children don't say anything until years later, as adults.

The Niagara Region Sexual Assault Centre is starting a men's group in September for survivors.

Counsellor Ann Wilson says the centre currently treats eight men, but that's an all-time high compared to one or two men a few years ago.

She says a lot of men are realizing it's OK to talk about what happened to them and that it wasn't their fault. Publicized cases going through court also make the issue more open and encourage men to come forward, she says.

"It kind of normalizes the experience for them and they start to recognize that, 'Oh, there's someone else who had a similar experience so it wasn't just me. And maybe it wasn't something that I did that made it happen.' "

The Niagara centre is one of a number of women's sexual assault centres in Ontario trying to assist men.

There's only one centre dedicated to male victims of sexual assault in Ontario funded by the Ministry of the Attorney General. The other 34 sexual assault centres are for women, says Rick Goodwin, executive director of The Men's Project in Ottawa.

The Men's Project, which also has a branch office in Cornwall, serves 300 to 350 men a year, almost all suffering from long-ago abuse.

Goodwin says The Men's Project goes to other towns and trains therapists, but they still haven't seen movement provincially in terms of funding and establishing the service as a core resource.

"It's a very awkward situation, it's horrible for survivors who are isolated. It doesn't help the infrastructure of serving survivors if someone can only service part of the family, but not all of the family, but that's the situation in Ontario."

Valerie Hopper, of the Ministry of the Attorney General's office, says the government has put $1.4 million into community grants for male victims of sexual assault since 2003.

In terms of expanding, the government is awaiting findings and recommendations from a Cornwall public inquiry, which is looking into allegations of decades-old sexual abuse of young men in Cornwall.

Hopper says those recommendations will inform the ministry of the most appropriate ways of assisting male survivors of sexual assault.

For boys struggling with abuse today, there's always the hope they'll tell someone before the secret haunts them for life.

The children in the Grade 3 class are repeating the mantra "safe, strong and free" over and over again.

They fold their arms across their chests, hold them out flexing and lift them straight up in the air.

Safe. Strong. Free.

"We're evening the odds, I hope, for kids," Christie says.

There's a two-year waiting list of schools wanting the program to visit.

It's interactive and quick, and the kids, at least in this class, were enthralled.

The program's workers often hear after they leave a school a child has disclosed abuse to a teacher.

Pazzaglia says that's the measure of success.

"Kids don't know they have a right to talk. Oftentimes, they don't know that," she says.

"They're kids."

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