Breaking child sexual abuse’s Code of Shame
Art Corneau So we need a documentary to break the Code of Shame. It’s called “A Hard Name” and came out in 2009; it ran on Canadian public television. (The film is online but, unfortunately, can’t be viewed in the U.S. “due to rights restrictions.”) Director Alan Zweig found seven ex-prisoners — five men, two women — and just let them speak. The result was the opening of a raw wound: the public exposure of something so deeply hidden, so wrapped in cynical taboo, I could barely listen without screaming “Why?”
I hadn’t been aware of the film until Dave Atkins of Prison Alpha Ministry in Ottawa wrote to me about it in response to my recent column about the Hollow Water First Nation Reserve in Manitoba, where in the 1980s residents began addressing the hidden matter of childhood sexual abuse that was shattering their tiny community. They began talking about it publicly — they had no choice. The secret stain of it was claiming the lives of their children, who were disappearing into the void of alcoholism and drug abuse.
Burma Bushie, one of the Hollow Water residents, called it “the sacredness of a child teaching you.”
Atkins, who leads a team of prison volunteers, pointed out to me that the phenomenon of childhood sexual abuse is destroying the foundation of far more than small, indigenous communities. He called it the “likely root cause of upward of 80 percent of habitual criminal behavior.”
That’s the way it works in the sophisticated West. Isolation rules. We’re alone with our secrets. Meanwhile, the sexual exploitation and abuse of children continues to link the generations, well beyond the edge of official awareness. Children grow up in their own personal hell. Their rage stays at perpetual simmer. They’re not listened to until they commit a crime. Violence flourishes. The prisons stay full.
This is why “A Hard Name” matters and deserves widespread reach. It doesn’t reduce the issue to cold stats or gaudy spectacle, or turn the phenomenon into a clinical diagnosis. The prisoners simply describe their lives with candor: the crimes they committed, the crimes committed against them. The setting is as intimate and unpretentious as someone’s living room. As we listen — as the Code of Shame is broken — I could feel a sense of sacredness. They were teaching me.
“I was a little boy. At (that) age, I wanted to be loved and cared for. The way I got that was from touching and feeling and being sexually assaulted.”
This is Mike Walsh’s story. He was one of 16 children; his family lived in a small town in Newfoundland. When he was 5, his father was killed by a drunk driver and his mother couldn’t support the family. The government began putting the kids in orphanages. Mike, who died two years after the documentary came out, wound up at Mount Cashel, a Catholic facility in St. John’s shut down in 1989 when news of a massive sex-abuse scandal went public.
By that time, Mike was a young man on his own. When the Mount Cashel scandal hit the newspapers, he was horrified. He said he was “hanging out with criminals” by then, and had a tough-guy image to maintain. The last thing he needed was to be named one of the abused.
This is the Code of Shame that keeps humanity’s dark secret alive.
Art Corneau, who was raped as a boy at a training school he’d been sentenced to, says in the documentary he has tried to commit suicide more than a hundred times — and wishes he’d succeeded.
Art robbed banks, broke into churches, spent much of his life in prison and died earlier this year.
“My concern is the kids that are out there (now) that are going through abuse,” he said. His hope for them is “to not be afraid, to know there is somebody they can go to.”
“When I was a child, I was afraid to tell the police. Back them nobody believed in that stuff.”