I’ve joined forces with Micky at It’s Getting Better and together we hope to offer support to other survivors of childhood abuse. We’ll also be compiling a selection of links to helpful sites.

Over the years it’s become practice amongst certain professionals to break abuse down into components such as sexual abuse, mental abuse, physical abuse and so on. I prefer to take a more holistic view and call all these thing by one name; Abuse.

We’d really appreciate it if you’d visit this site, it’s very new so there isn’t much to see yet but perhaps you could bookmark it for later. If you have your own blog maybe you’d consider adding us to your Blogroll. Better still, maybe you’d use the small picture link, available on the blog, to link to us.

Leaving The Grey Room is all about reaching out to help others who have been through the experience of abuse, please help us to do that.

Please note the use of the word “survivor” for that is how I’m seen. Many people who suffer abuse as children “go under” in their teens and never recover, they become true victims and the damage done to them is incalculable. While my teens were cruelly overshadowed by the effects of abuse I struggled on in my own incompetent fashion, finishing my A and S levels then spurning University to enter the world of work.

Like many before me, and no doubt since, I developed some fairly predictable and silly coping strategies most of which are listed on a publicly available document I recently discovered.

• Drinking – tick
• Drugs – tick
• Over achieving – tick
• Under achieving – tick
• Over working – tick

The list goes on a lot further but you get the idea; I’d do anything rather than face the cause of the pain and outrage I was feeling.

There is also the issue of anger that has to be addressed. I’m still angry that nobody either noticed or cared as a bright, happy and popular 10 year old became surly, uncooperative and isolated. Had these behavioural issues occurred a few years later, as puberty started its ravages there might be some excuse but at 10? That’s tantamount to neglect by parents, teachers and doctors.

I’m aware of the dangers inherent in trying to apply 21^st century understanding to a mid 20^th century problem but such extreme changes should have been noticed by somebody. At the very least my Headmaster should have complained to my Mother about my behaviour thus igniting her anger and possibly forcing the real story out of me.

Since 1963 I’ve suffered from insomnia, acute (sometimes suicidal) depression and terrifying mood swings. I want all of those things to stop, or at least become less of a burden for me and my beloved Gary who never turns away when I’m in pain but who suffers dreadfully because he can’t help.

I’m planning to add another page to this blog which I hope to develop into a resource for information and help on this barely misunderstood but very real problem. While I’m always willing to talk about these issues please remember that I claim no expertise in this field or psychology in general beyond the personal experience of having been abused.

Love

Malcolm Aged Nine

It was recently suggested in a comment that I seem to have been a somewhat difficult child, prone to temper tantrums. To a certain extent that’s true but isn’t entirely fair to my young self.

I was, by nature quite a sweet tempered boy with a very lively sense of fun and a penchant for mischief that frequently got me into trouble with my long suffering mother.

Whether or not it’s a valid excuse I’m uncertain, but I had the temper so often associated with redheads. I was prone to fits of towering rage but they were squalls, not storms and passed quickly.

When I was punished in the way to which boys of my generation were accustomed, there would be tears and anger for a little while, then the whole thing was forgotten; I didn’t brood and I didn’t bear grudges.

One of the chief reasons for tantrums and fits of rage was frustration; my body wasn’t physically up to the challenges I wanted to set it. I desperately wanted to be good at sports so I could compete with other boys, but I couldn’t run very well, had poor coordination and got out of breath very easily.

When my eyesight failed so dramatically I felt completely betrayed by my body and reacted the only way I could, by getting angry. That I eventually adjusted to wearing glasses is, I think amply demonstrated by the big, natural smile on the photo above which I believe was taken when I was nine.

Throughout childhood I always seemed to be ill. Whereas other children got a cold and had a couple of days off school, I could easily be in bed for a whole week. Having my tonsils removed when I was three had been supposed to stop that but the whole thing was a dismal failure and I felt thoroughly cheated. I hated having to miss school and often got angry when I was ill because of that.

At the age of eight I managed to turn a normal autumn cold into pneumonia and missed almost a month of school; nearly dying in the process. I didn’t have any problem catching up and regaining my place at the top of the class but my mother had to put up with a very difficult week once I was well enough to be out of bed but still not fit to go back to school.

Conditions such as dyspraxia weren’t recognised when I was a child and in any case my mother was wise to avoid any suggestion that I had any physical disability. Educational provision for children perceived as disabled was sparse and completely ignorant of the fact that a physically disabled child might still be highly intelligent.

Everything changed when I was ten and being subjected to sexual abuse on a weekly basis. From sunny with occasional storms it became permanently overcast. It was very distressing for me to be feeling such deep, resentful anger; I had no prior experience of it.

To see yourself change from happy and successful to permanently angry is a terrible experience for a child. When nobody seems to care as long as your marks are still good it is deeply depressing.

Love

The findings will test the reputation of the Catholic church here, on the eve of Pope Benedict XVI’s first visit to the UK.

The disclosures raise questions about whether the Catholic church have followed recommendations made nine years ago to rid the church of child-abusing priests, our investigation has found.

In 2001 one of Britain’s most senior judges, the late Lord Nolan, recommended that any priest sentenced to a year or more in jail for sexual abuse should normally face “laicisation” – the stripping of their priesthood and privileges related to the post. The UK Catholic church agreed.

Catholic abuse in England and Wales revealed
Channel 4 News has compiled the first map of Catholic abuse detailing some 37 cases across England and Wales where Catholic priests have committed sexual offences against children.
Over the last few months more evidence has emerged of systematic child abuse within the Catholic church from around the world, writes investigative reporter Antony Barnett.

Yet at least 14 of the 22 priests convicted since then remain members of the clergy today.

Channel 4 News has also discovered that Lord Nolan’s rules appear to have been quietly watered down. The recommendation was that for those convicted of the most serious sexual abuse “laicisation” would be the norm – it now appears that “laicisation” only needs to be considered in these cases.

Channel 4 News discovered that at least nine of the 22 convicted priests are still listed in the 2010 Catholic directory as members of the clergy. Only eight of them have been dismissed from the church.

We tracked down Father John Coghlan, who was sentenced to jail in 2005. He no longer takes part in active ministry but remains listed as a priest and is living in church-owned property in the Diocese of Westminster.

In the wake of Lord Nolan’s report, the current Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, was put in charge of the body responsible for implementing the recommendations.

At the time, he said: “To those who have suffered abuse, those who have felt ignored, disbelieved or betrayed. There can be no excuses.”

Words ring hollow for victims

These words ring hollow however for Father Coghlan’s victim Luke Holland, who was abused as an altar boy in West London.

He said: “It’s absolutely outrageous. It’s outrageous. It’s a kick in the teeth for me, isn’t it? You know, why did I bother exposing him for what he is?”

Mr Holland told Channel 4 News the abuse first started when he was ten years old, when Father Coghlan made Mr Holland perform a sex act on him. The abuse continued for four years – and today it is the thing in Mr Holland’s mind “that never goes away”.

Still taking anti-depressants daily, he said: “I was ten when it started. My parents couldn’t deal with me. I became unruly. I started getting into drink and drugs at a really early age just to blot stuff out, I suppose.”

Spiritual punishment

Dr Margaret Kennedy, who campaigns for victims of clerical abuse, told Channel 4 News that dismissing paedophile priests from the church sends a vital message both to the victims – and to the abusers.

“Imprisonment is the secular world’s punishment. Laicisation is the spiritual world’s punishment and they’ve got to have both,” she added.

Dr Kennedy said it was crucially important for a victim to know that his or her abuser is no longer a priest.

“The victim then knows that he doesn’t have status or power. And for the victim the fact that the priest has been laicised means that the church is taking it very seriously.”

Father Coghlan’s case is not unique. Of the 14 convicted priests that remain listed, six applications for dismissal are underway; one further decision to pursue dismissal has been made; three dismissals have either been rejected by Rome or not pursued for health reasons, and finally in four cases no application has been made but the priests are subject to risk management in the community.

The church told Channel 4 News that the process of dismissal can take time. “A Bishop has to apply to Rome for a priest to be laicised and neither the duration nor the outcome of the application is in the Bishop’s control.”

Meanwhile the academic Phillip Gilligan has been researching the church’s response to convicted priests. He said the delay in dealing with them is unacceptable, and he was angry that Lord Nolan’s rules have been “watered down without any public announcement, without any clear justification”.

“I’ve asked specifically when they were changed and what discussion took place in order to change them and I can’t get an answer. I’m told that these are not changes. These are translation and finessing,” he said.

The UK’s Catholic church is said to lead the way in taking action against paedophile priests, claiming it has cracked down hard on the abuse.

Victims such as Mr Holland however, may disagree. He said: “Well, it’s not dealing with it, is it? It’s still looking after the perpetrators of the abuse, isn’t it?”

“They say one thing in public and do whatever they please in private and they’ve always done that and they always will do that until someone gets grip of them.”

In response the church referred us to its record on taking action against priests and reiterated that its policy was entirely within the spirit of the Nolan Recommendations.

On continued support for some convicted priests the church said “successful minimisation of future risk can be assisted by individuals having access to appropriate accommodation and acceptance of supervision and monitoring within a church context.”

Bill Kilgallon, chair of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission, told Channel 4 News the church cannot just wash its hands of abusers.

He said: “I think that’s particularly galling for victims [that the priests remain priests] because it could appear that that person has not been dealt with. But the judgement is taken, and it has to be exceptional circumstances, that because of the particular situation of that individual, it would be safer to monitor and control him in the community.

“In some cases it was judged that we have more control if they are retained in the clergy. The decision is taken not by the church on its own but in communication with police and probation…The important thing is to make sure that these people will not offend again.
“The church can’t just wash its hands of these people and say we’ve taken them to court and we’ve sacked them as priests.”

He said these cases were very specific, stressed the church does “get it” on child abuse and added that laicisation remained the general rule for convicted abusive priests.

It’s very easy to get sucked in to the media furore surrounding the increasingly distressing revelations of systematic abuse of children who were in the care of Roman Catholic institutions.

I think, however it’s important to remember that the RC church has been but one offender in an historical tale of woe. The abuse of children both sexually and by cruelty has been endemic in all societies for millennia; in the UK the Church of England, Social Services and others have all been implicated over the years.

I am not a victim of institutional abuse; I am a victim of abuse by one person who nominated me for his personal pleasure when I was 10. I don’t diminish the suffering of others but, by the same token nobody should diminish my suffering.

A distressing proportion of abuse cases still occur within a family or close group and these children suffer as greatly as anybody else. It is disingenuous to allocate a scale of suffering based on something as fragile as religion or institution.

One of the purposes of my blog is to strive for an understanding of why I was chosen for my particular fate. Was I partly responsible? Did my upbringing in a predominantly female household after my father disappeared make me more vulnerable?

One of the most powerful effects that abusers have on us, the victims is the transference of responsibility; we are made guilty. As a child I suffered dreadful torment as I asked myself if I’d somehow sent out a signal to my abuser that I welcomed his attention.

Ill equipped, at the age of 10 to answer my own questions I sank into profound depression and behavioural aberrations which were treated as naughtiness and punished accordingly. When I started wetting my bed it was deemed a phase that I’d grow out of.

Hopefully the world has moved on from those benighted days and children demonstrating these problems are taken a little more seriously. Generally there is a valid explanation for anomalous behaviour and the more intelligent the child, the more adults should question the cause.

I’d like to offer this piece of advice to all of those people who believe that a child is a legitimate target.

Consider the consequences of your actions; not in legal terms but in the harm you do to your victim. You may not rationalise your actions with the facile argument that it was done to you thus it is acceptable that you do it to others.

 As long as that rationalisation exists children will continue to suffer.

Actually it was a bomb crater which had been created when a plane was forced to jettison it’s payload during World War II; local wisdom was that it had been a Luftwaffe bomber.

We were under the strictest instructions to be careful around the pond because it was deep and, being a bomb crater had very steep sides. Being a non-swimmer and somewhat afraid of the water I always obeyed that rule.

When I was still only 10, on bad days when someone had made me do things that I didn’t want to; I used to kneel at the side of the water and just stare at my reflection for a while.

The boy I saw in the water was usually very sad and often had tears on his cheeks; I used to talk very quietly to him in an effort to cheer him up. Eventually I would leave and head back home with my best smile firmly in place.

Some nights, while I was waiting for sleep to come I used to wonder; was the boy in the water still weeping?

Love

Given the traumatic nature of the experience why didn’t I simply go to my Mum and tell her what had happened?

There’s one very shallow and unconvincing answer which is that I was afraid of being punished myself.

Anyone of my generation will know how naughty boys were customarily dealt with and that would certainly have happened but I was hardly a stranger to this sort of treatment by the age of 10 and a sore bottom doesn’t stay sore for very long.

A slightly more realistic answer is that I was scared of K, the teenager who committed the offense. He was a great deal bigger than me, physically a full adult and tough, with a reputation for violent behaviour when crossed.

An even more convincing answer is the sense of shame I felt after that morning. I knew that everything I’d allowed, sometimes encouraged to happen was wrong not so much in the legal sense but in the moral and religious sense.

I had a pretty strict Christian upbringing and had been given a fairly strong set of moral values, most of which I appreciated and tried to live by. I wasn’t a cruel boy and never joined in when another child was picked on at school, I was far more likely to offer comfort to the victim.

It may seem facile to some but there was a trust issue as well. Every time I’d been with K he would extract my promise that I wouldn’t tell anybody what we’d been doing.

I’d learned some very painful lessons in my short life about the importance of keeping promises but didn’t have the analytical tools to understand that a promise of secrecy under those circumstances was meaningless.

Thus when K made me actually say the words “I promise not to tell anybody” after each meeting I believed that I had to keep that promise.

Intellectually, and I use the word advisedly, I knew that these clandestine meetings with K were wrong, that being naked around him was wrong and that letting him touch me (and touching him in return) was very wrong.

So why did I allow it to happen again and again? Taking my courage in both hands and admitting to Mum what had been going on would have changed history, well mine anyway.

Every time that K went too far and either hurt or frightened me his apologies were contrite and seemed utterly genuine. He would invest a great deal of time comforting me and would then scale back his actions while slowly building towards the next major event.

Like countless abuse victims before and after me, I accepted his apologies and allowed myself to remain in his power. That is the key word when discussing the successful perpetration of child abuse.

It’s all about power.

Love

I was tempted to pass over number 9 in my list and go straight to number 10 but then I remembered why I started this blog.

The purpose of writing about my childhood and teenage years is to face the unpleasant things that happened and not to avoid them. Glossing over this grim episode in my life would be dishonest.

This story is not entertaining, at least I hope it’s not, and it deals with some fairly serious issues. I’ll refer to the teenager who molested and then proceeded to abuse me as K.

This story probably isn’t told very well but that’s mostly because it’s one of the most painful of all my many unpleasant memories from those days.

It’s important to understand a little bit about the 10 year old boy that I was. Apart from the companionship of my best friend I was quite a lonely child and didn’t relate well to my peer group.

Most of the other children in school were wary of me, my high reading age, abnormally large vocabulary and already proven high IQ gave many of them a sense of inferiority. Despite Mum’s best efforts to ‘persuade’ me to be more sociable I simply didn’t have much in common with other 10 year olds.

Added to that I’d had no older male in my life since my daddy ran away when I was 4 and I spent my formative years in a female dominated household. I was easy prey for any older boy or man who was nice to me.

I was also, for want of any other description, quite a ‘dainty’ boy and physically delicate which brought out the paternal side of most of the men in the village but brought out a different side in some of the older boys.

I have no doubt that K targeted me carefully for planned abuse and he conducted the whole matter with what can best be described as professional skill. One thing he did, from day one, was constantly stress the need for secrecy, I wasn’t to tell anyone what had been going on.

Knowing in my heart that these things were wrong and that I’d be severely punished if Mum found out, I readily complied and in the early days was quite excited to have such a secret to keep.

From the first day he molested me in the village bus shelter K was very careful to ensure my compliance in our activities and was at great pains to avoid frightening me in any way. Each time we were together things went a little bit further to the point where he finally persuaded me to be completely naked for him.

That was the day everything went wrong for me and it was partly my own fault. Having begun to enjoy our little ‘games’ I paraded for him as provocatively as I knew how, deliberately wiggling my bottom at him.

I can only assume that teenage urges overrode his carefully devised strategy and without any warning I found myself impaled on him with my feet clear of the ground.

Wriggling around, frantically trying to get away from the pain, I tried kicking him but couldn’t really get any power into it, my arms were hampered by his arm round my chest so I couldn’t hit him. I tried to scream but he’d got his other hand over my mouth. I even tried to bite his hand but he was holding me in such a way that I couldn’t.

At last he got what he wanted and let me down to the ground again where I collapsed howling with pain and terror. Realising that he’d gone too far he hastily dressed me then sat me on his lap, rocking me the way Mum would do when I had a bad dream.

It took him a very long time to calm me down and he kept saying ‘sorry’ over and over again and then he said something that can only be described as shifting the blame onto me, the sight of me naked had been too much for him to resist.

He actually begged my forgiveness and it’s a measure of how I was brought up that I felt obliged to forgive him. I’d been taught that if someone was genuinely sorry then you had to forgive them or you were as bad as them.

For several weeks after he’d raped me K scaled things back and didn’t try to do anything that would frighten or hurt me. Naively I allowed things to continue and inevitably other unpleasant incidents occurred but he’d induced such a sense of fear and fatalism in me that I did nothing to dissuade him.

This isn’t a memory that’s suddenly sprung up in the course of my mental archaeology; this is something that’s been gnawing away at me for a very long time. This is not a funny story and some of you are going to, at the very least, wince as you read it.

On Wednesday I had an outpatient appointment to discuss the treatment of a varicocele that I’ve had since I was 16. This is not an uncommon condition in adolescents and often clears up of its own accord however in my case it wasn’t a natural occurrence.

I’ve indicated in the past that bullying as well as sexual abuse had a tremendous psychological impact on my childhood and teens but there is a physical cost as well. I’m not talking about the three or four small scars, one quite prominent one on the bridge of my nose. This varicocele was the legacy of an appalling act of cruelty.

During a confrontation at school, the details of which aren’t relevant, my antagonist knocked me to the ground and with, a speed that makes me suspect he’d planned it, grabbed me by the balls and lifted me clear off the ground. Now I’m not a heavy person, I’ve been clinically underweight all my life, but the pain of being held dangling like that was indescribable.

Only when he was satisfied that my screams of agony were as anguished as they were going to get did my assailant simply let go and drop me, completely careless of the fact that I barely saved myself from hitting my head on a concrete floor.

That particular torture was inflicted on three more occasions and the last attack was so vicious that I almost passed out but to my utter horror I also got what I hoped was a completely random erection. This so disgusted my attacker that he dropped me and I was unable to avoid banging my head when I landed. I spent most of the rest of that day feeling ashamed, dazed, nauseous and in awful pain.

A few days later I noticed the abnormality but said nothing. For better or for worse nothing went wrong with me during the next two years that needed a doctor to investigate there, otherwise my parents would have been alerted.

During an email conversation today a friend of mine expressed astonishment that something like this could have happened with nobody being any the wiser but, as is so often the case, events conspire to benefit miscreants.

One of the things that sexual abuse taught me, at the age of ten, was how to keep secrets and this secrecy became second nature to me in almost all aspects of my life. Nobody in my family had the least idea what I was going through at school, all that ever got home was the good stuff about how well I was doing and how happy I was until I started losing control at about fifteen, but that was put down to me being a “bad” boy.

Similarly no member of staff ever witnessed the many acts of cruelty and violence committed against me and I, being who I was, didn’t say anything. I just counted off the many days until I could finish my last A level paper and get the fuck out of that god-awful place.

One of the things I’ve realised about bullies is that they are an entirely different species from mere thugs. Like abusers, bullies are cunning and opportunistic, always prepared to wait for a brief moment when the intended victim is completely isolated. Of course all of that opportunism would come to nothing if the victim couldn’t be relied upon to keep silent, enter the sexually abused and secretive child.

In 1976 I spoke to a GU Consultant about the injury and, after he’d got over his shock, he advised me that treatment was still somewhat uncertain and that the only real disadvantage to leaving things as they were was a severely depleted sperm count. I’d long since abolished confusion as to my sexuality so that didn’t seem like a particularly serious issue. I decided to leave well alone.

Treatment now is a great deal better and considerably less invasive than in 1976 so, as I’ve been getting a bit of pain recently, I’ve decided that it’s time to eradicate this visible legacy of a desperately unhappy school life.

Love

How can anyone who believes in the essential innocence of children possibly remain part of a church that has systematically connived in the concealment of the abuse of those most vulnerable of people?

I have said before, and I reiterate it now, that I lost my faith at the age of 10 when the God that I had been assured loved children ignored my desperate prayers for help when I was being abused. I did not, however stop reading the bible rather I read it more carefully because I was looking for the part that said it was acceptable for children to suffer this torment. You will not be surprised to learn that I did not find any such passage. What I did find was Matthew 18 and here I present that section from the Douay-Rheims Bible

1 At that hour the disciples came to Jesus, saying: Who thinkest thou is the greater in the kingdom of heaven?
2 And Jesus calling unto him a little child, set him in the midst of them,
3 And said: Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
4 Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, he is the greater in the kingdom of heaven.
5 And he that shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth me.
6 But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea.
7 Woe to the world because of scandals. For it must needs be that scandals come: but nevertheless woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh.
8 And if thy hand, or thy foot scandalize thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee. It is better for thee to go into life maimed or lame, than having two hands or two feet, to be cast into everlasting fire.
9 And if thy eye scandalize thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee. It is better for thee having one eye to enter into life, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.
10 See that you despise not one of these little ones: for I say to you, that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.

I make no apologies for using this version to illustrate my point. Far too many translations water the message down and present a scenario that talks of complicity on the part of the child. This, to me, is a distortion and a wicked rationalisation of reality whereby the clergy who perpetrate these obscenities seek to mitigate their guilt using the argument that “the child was willing”.

I’d like to make an observation before opening this discussion. At 7 Jesus is not accepting the inevitability of these atrocities, rather he is lamenting the fundamental wickedness of men and at 10 he reminds us that the little ones have the countenance of God so woe betide the evil men who use them badly.

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