When journalists cry: Darcy Henton on covering the clergy abuse scandal in St. John’s Training school for Boys.

In 1995, award-winning journalist Darcy Henton, working with survivor David McCann, wrote Boys Don’t Cry: The struggle for justice and healing in Canada’s biggest sex abuse scandal. The book was a bestseller and remains the most definitive account of the abuse suffered by men like William O’Sullivan at the hands of the Christian Brothers. Here is an excerpt of Grant LaFleche’s interview with Henton about St. John’s and the book:

GL: What was the reaction, Darcy, to Boys Don’t Cry when you published?

DH: For one thing, I didn’t know who would want to read a book like this. It’s not your standard summer reading material. But I felt compelled to write it, to tell the story of the victims.

It took five years to get this book published because book stores didn’t really want it either.

Every copy of the book printed, sold, and they had to do a reprint and it sold out, too. One of the best things that, or one of the things I take pride in, is one of my friends who I’d given a copy of the book in Saskatchewan, his stepdaughter came home from college one day and she was looking at the bookshelf and she said, “What are you doing with this book on your shelves? We’re taking it in school.”

I get emails about this book probably once every few months, even today. I get emails from family of the victims, and children of the victims. I’ve maintained close ties with Tim Smith (another survivor) and David McCann. Since then, we’ve become actually really close friends. This friendship, I guessed, was forged in the fire of this controversy. David McCann was a Roman Catholic, Tim Smith was a Roman Catholic, I was a Roman Catholic, and we found ourselves pulled into this horrid, horrid story.

I was just thumbing through the pages of it last night in preparation for this interview, and there are still parts of the book that make me cry.

GL: It’s obviously emotional. I can hear it in your voice. It’s a bit of a gutpunch to think about it, is it not?

DH: For sure. These are the most vulnerable people in society. There’s nobody standing up for them. And we put it in the hands of government bureaucrats, and we put this veil of secrecy over all of this stuff, and all it does is cover up the misdeeds and mistakes of the bureaucracy. It should be wide open. We should know when these children are mistreated. We should know when they die in provincial or government care.

GL: You wrote Boys Don’t Cry in 1995, and these stories continue to pop up. Have we not learned as a country to better protect these kids, whether it’s from priests or the way they’re treated in foster homes or other institutions?

DH: No, I don’t think we have. If we really cared about these children, we’d have ombudsmen representing them. Somebody that they could go to who is like an officer of the legislature. Somebody who had real power and authority to change laws and recommend changes to laws, and what we have are people with no power, no ability, all they do is write reports that get unheeded, pile up on the shelves, and I’m not sure children are any safer today than they were before, much to my chagrin.