Reunion Online

When  1in6’s founding Board member, Dr. David Lisak, and I were talking with a group of students and staff at Brown University recently, someone asked for ideas about how to best  support a friend or family member who is coming to terms with unwanted or abusive sexual experiences in childhood.

"Good" and "evil" always seem like handy labels, especially when describing those involved in incidents of child sexual abuse.

So depending on your point of view, I was either blessed or cursed by lessons I learned 25 years ago from Roger, a complicated man who upended any certainty I had that the distinctions between "good" and "evil" are actually so sharply defined.

Why haven't I worked through all these issues? Why am I still not healed?

Most of us who are survivors ask ourselves these questions many times. "I've been on this journey for five years. When does it end?"

They are the questions we ask on our worst days.

If you walk into my home office in Austin, Texas you will see two posters—one of Emiliano Zapata and the other of Cesar Chavez. Both of these men struggled for the rights of the poor and oppressed and organized movements that changed society; however, the tactics they used to achieve this social change differed greatly. As his birthday approaches, I would like to reflect on the example of change set forth by Cesar Chavez.

Chavez once said:

Los Angeles is going through a crisis of confidence in the capacity of the Los Angeles Unified School District to protect children from sexual abuse by trusted adults: their teachers. In the span of a weeks time, 4 adult teachers were arrested for alleged sexual abuse of students and one entire school?Miramonte Elementary?was emptied of its entire faculty and administrative staff and replaced with a whole new team.

This is my first blog for 1in6. I guess a good way to introduce myself is to tell you a little about what I have gone through and the feelings I dealt with along the way.

If you're like me, you watched in disbelief as the news media uncovered recent childhood sexual abuse allegations at Penn State University, Syracuse and numerous other institutions. I couldn't help but wonder how these allegations were kept from authorities for so long. As someone who endured seven years of sexual abuse as a child, I understood why the alleged victims didn't feel safe to talk, but I couldn't get my head around how or why the adults who were made aware of the alleged abuse were so reluctant to demand justice.

It's been gratifying to see the Justice Department's recent revisions to the definition used to compile statistics about rape. Language is an important part of any discussion about sexual abuse - for men, filtered through the lens of cultural expectations of males. Words shape, define and categorize experiences. And the shift may have some deeper implications than are immediately apparent.

On September 28, 2011, five weeks before the Penn State story would dominate news and sports pages, NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit aired "Personal Fouls," a groundbreaking episode on sexual abuse of boys in sports. For viewers of the original airing, "Personal Fouls" was a remarkable prelude to, and preparation for, the revelations of November: the detailed charges against Jerry Sandusky, the institutional complicity that allowed it to continue for years, and the individual courage that, when backed by family and community support, can bring such tragedies to an end.

 Tonight is a very important one—for Joyful Heart, the community of survivors we seek to serve and for millions of viewers who will tune in to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.