Thistletown held out a lifeline

Abuse victim asks why province wants changes to renowned SAFE-T program for traumatized kids

These are not the words most fathers use to summon their daughters. Bitch. Stupid. Slut. Whore. But for “Helen,” now 41, growing up in a household west of Toronto, these were everyday salutations her father employed, accompanied by frequent beatings with a belt, spoon, or any handy implement.

“That’s what I was used to — it was normal’` for me,” she says.

The product of an arranged marriage — her mother was married at 16 to Helen’s then-32-year-old father and delivered her at17 — Helen suffered the brunt of her father’s bitterness when her mother fled the family home. Helen was 9.

“He took it out on me when she left,” Helen says.

She was shunted between her father’s house and his brother’s household, where Helen lived for periods of time with her uncle, his wife and her cousins. It, too, was a dysfunctional family with various forms of abuse.

When she was about 17, her uncle put a shotgun to her forehead.

“The gun was right at my forehead when someone came to the door and rang the doorbell,” says Helen, recalling that her uncle put down his gun and left at that point. He was charged with aggravated assault and eventually acquitted, but Helen believes she literally dodged a bullet that night. Her father was never charged with anything.

Later, as a result of investigations at her uncle’s household, a court ordered a psychological assessment of Helen, which was carried out at Thistletown Regional Centre’s SAFE-T (Sexual Abuse Family Education Treatment).

The assessment concluded she needed cognitive therapy. Helen had the choice of whether or not to get therapy.

She said yes. And today she regards it as the lifeline that helped her heal and become confident enough to get an education and turn her life around. She’s now an instructor-therapist working with children diagnosed with autism and is earning a degree so she can work with high-risk teens. The sort of teen she was. “If it wasn’t for SAFE-T . . . I’d probably be dead by now,” says Helen. She has come forward because she worries what will happen to kids who have undergone similar trauma when, under government orders, Thistletown Regional Centre is shut down. The province says the interna-

41-year-old Helen says if it wasn’t for SAFE-T she would probably be dead by now

tionally renowned SAFE-T program, which helps abuse victims and offenders, will be transferred to other mental health agencies when the centre closes in a year and a half. But no details have been released. Helen wonders why the province would tinker with, or fracture, a program with solid credentials. “When I started, I’d never tried to kill myself, but I had absolutely no regard for myself. I’d do risky things. I would hitchhike, walk around at 3 a.m. I was emotionally shut down,” Helen recalls. “I realized I didn’t care about myself.” Five years of cognitive therapy at SAFE-T— the first year especially intense — made her a whole person again. It also helped her cope with another gigantic emotional trauma — the 2001 murder of her mother, who had remarried and come back into Helen’s life when she was in her 20s. (The stepson from her mother’s second marriage was convicted in her murder.) “I’d grown up being told I was worthless ... what I liked the most about the program is that they taught me to think before I acted, to understand it’s not my fault, what happened to me. “They’ve given me the tools to live my life,” says Helen. “I’ve had crises and I’ve gotten through them because I have these tools. “These children should have the (same) opportunity. . . .They deserve the chance to learn that there is life after abuse and it doesn’t have to be bleak. It’s bad enough their childhood has been compromised — their chance to have a happy and productive adulthood should not be ripped away.”