Childhood sex abuse survivor: ‘It’s important to speak up’
A 43-year-old mother of 7 shares her survival story after being assaulted at 12
WEST CHESTER — On a fall day 31 years ago, a 12-year-old girl met with a detective from the Willistown Police Department and saw her life change forever.
And not necessarily in a good way.
But the decision that Shannon Haas — then known as Shannon Schroeder — made that day is one that she does not seem to regret years later, and is one that she encourages others who find themselves in her shoes to follow.
On Oct. 15, 1992, Haas reported to police that the man whose family she had been babysitting for the past several months sexually assaulted her in the bedroom of a house in the township where he was a caretaker. She was able to fight him off, she said, but on the way home he threatened to harm her, indicating he had a gun if she ever told anyone about what he had done.
She decided to tell her story anyway.
Initially, she said that the man, John Barton Hand, kissed her and put his hand under her shirt. But a year later, she went back to the detective to whom she had first reported the assault, David Boyle, and revised her story. Hand had molested her in far more serious ways than simple groping, she said.
“Although she doesn’t want to talk about the incident,” Boyle, who has since died, wrote in a 1993 affidavit accusing Hand of aggravated indecent assault, “she stated it should come out what he did to me.’”
That message — making sure that the world would know about the crimes committed against her — is one that she has returned to decades later now by speaking out about the importance of sexual assault survivors unburdening themselves about their own experiences and reporting the offenses committed against them to authorities.
“I think people are afraid to speak up,” Haas told a reporter in an interview Wednesday. “They are afraid of what’s going to happen to them. I am not going to lie: I went through what I went through, and I went through hell in my teenage years. But if I would have kept that in, I believe from what I have heard of people that have kept it in and then later down the road … they got into drugs and it was a cover-up because they were so scared of what happened. Or other paths that people have taken.
“It’s important to speak up because we didn’t do anything wrong because we didn’t ask for it,” Haas said. “I didn’t ask for that to happen.”
Haas, now 43, a wife, and mother of seven children, who still lives in Malvern where she grew up, reached out and spoke with MediaNews Group as a way to connect with those who have been subjected to abuse and have disclosed it to give them a simple, yet eloquent, message — “You are strong. You are a hero. You are saving other people’s lives by speaking up. You did nothing wrong. You aren’t alone. You didn’t ask for this. You are amazing.”
MediaNews Group does not normally identify the victims of sexual crimes in news stories. Haas, however, gave permission to use her name for this report.
Her case made headlines at the time largely because of Hand’s past. In 1973, Hand had been arrested and convicted of armed rape in Delaware and had been
sentenced to a life term. He was paroled after serving 12 years and moved to Pennsylvania, and after his arrest in Chester County would return to Delaware to continue his life sentence.
Hand died in prison Sept. 9, 2013, at age 63.
According to information from the Chester County district attorney’s Child Abuse Unit, studies show that survivors of child sexual abuse face years of aftereffects of the assaults. Unlike physical assault, where broken bones may heal relatively quickly, the impact of a sexual assault lasts years and evinces itself in harmful behavior.
Those victims are four times more likely to experience drug abuse in their lifetime; are four times more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome in adulthood; and are three times more likely to endure a major depressive episode as adults. Adolescents who were sexually abused have a three to fivefold risk of delinquency and are more likely to be arrested than their peers who have not been abused.
Sexually abused children tend to perform lower on tests measuring cognitive ability, academic performance and memory as compared with similarly situated peers with no history of abuse, those studies show. Adults with
a history of child sexual abuse are more than twice as likely to attempt or commit suicide.
“These consequences impact every aspect of life, percussive effects of the overwhelming impact of childhood sexual abuse,” First Assistant District Attorney Erin O’Brien wrote in an email.
Haas’s own experience is testimony to those impacts.
In the interview, she said that beginning in her years at Great Valley High School, from which she graduated in 1998, she started to change.
“It was everything,” she said. “I ended up having post-traumatic stress from it. I ended up having an eating disorder from it. I became a little bit more sexually active. I wasn’t confident in myself. I put myself around people that were more hurtful. I knew in my head I would not get hurt in that way because I already knew the type of person they were.”
“I was already down on myself and felt like crap from what happened,” she said.
Hand groomed the 12-year-old girl he met at the Charlestown Greene apartment complex, including her as a babysitter on family trips and parties, making her a part of his family and getting her to trust him. As a teenager, she gravitated toward those boys and men she knew she could not trust from the start.
She became pregnant while a senior at Great Valley, married the father of the child, and did not attend college.
Haas said that she began to turn her life around with the birth of her son.
“I knew I had to change,” she said. “I had a baby who needed me. That was a ‘click’ when I had to do better for myself, and I had to take care of my child.”
She divorced her first husband, and in 2002 met Matthew Haas, who lived in the same townhome complex as her parents.
“We clicked right away,” she said. “He saw me for me and it was different. That’s what fully changed.”
She also told him what Hand had done to her. They married in 2003.
“It is something that happens,” said Matt Haas, who accompanied his wife for the interview. “I knew it’s not her fault. She was a victim of that. For God’s sake, she was 12 years old. What I knew is that Shannon was a good person. We talked a lot.
“It’s not something that bothered me,” he said. “And I knew she had the eating disorders and confidence problems because of it. I knew we had to build her confidence back up. Here is a really smart and attractive young woman who has exactly no confidence. The world was just beating her down. It just seemed wrong.”
Even though Hand was returned to prison in Delaware and spent the remainder of his life behind bars, Haas’s memory of the legal process in her case is not pleasant. She remembers being intimidated by Hand and his wife as they appeared for court hearings, and of feeling afraid of what he could do to her as he stayed free on bail.
Then, as she prepared for trial in March 1994 more than a year after coming forward, she learned that he had agreed to plead guilty to indecent assault, the less serious of the charges against him. He was given probation by Judge M. Joseph Melody Jr., who has since died.
And even though she had praise for the way she was treated by the prosecutor assigned to her case, David Pless, who died in 2015, she regrets the way the case ended.
“I was bothered that I didn’t get to speak up,” she said, recalling that she was denied a chance to give a victim impact statement, something that is commonplace today in the county’s court system. “I remember I was really mad. I remember saying to my mom, ‘I’m not okay with that. This isn’t fair. I want to speak up.’ This happened to me.
“It would have brought a release to me,” she said. “Because I was ready. I wanted to speak about what happened. And as happy as I was knowing that he was going to go to jail, but it didn’t give me that full closure. I didn’t get to speak. I didn’t feel like real justice happened to my case.”
Today, Haas is a stay-athome mother after leaving her career working with people affected by dementia. But she still has a desire to help those who have been victimized recover from their ordeal.
“It’s very hard to come forward,” she said. “Because you are facing it again as you speak. You are feeling it a different way as you are speaking about it. And that is mentally draining.”
But in coming forward, “you are saving the next victim,” she said. “That to me is what is so important: You are making a difference. We are not going to let that person go and do that to somebody else.”