By Maggie Marwah
The Chronicle-Herald
October 14, 2009
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/1147507.html
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A BOOK being released today will tell us how wretched we are at protecting our children. It will give an account of the damning impact that failure has had on a life.
And it will render specious those arguments that we have paid too much attention in recent weeks to a Catholic bishop facing child pornography charges.
If anything, we do not take enough notice, do not do enough. After all, we’ve heard it all before, haven’t we? It’s old news, these stories of child abuse. Our horror and disgust are increasingly tempered; we’re becoming desensitized.
Tell that to Ron and David Martin. To Philip and Warren Latimer. To Sheldon Kennedy and Theo Fleury, and to the countless others whose names haven’t been in the news recently, or ever. How do they live with the abuse, or don’t? David Martin chose suicide.
It is Fleury’s autobiography, Playing With Fire, that is due out today, two days ahead of schedule after a story last week on www.macleans.ca revealed the former NHLer was repeatedly sexually abused by his junior coach, Graham James, for over a decade.
The news is more confirmation than revelation. Even I, with peripheral interest in hockey and less so professional sports, had heard the rumours. After Kennedy came forward 13 years ago, James was eventually sentenced to three and a half years for sexually abusing two players an estimated 350 times over 10 years. The identity of the second player was not made public, until now.
That Fleury does so on his own terms, at his own time, is the least we can give him. For all his successes on the ice — for all his talent and competitive fury — it was clear to many that he lived with demons. He estimates he blew almost all of the US$50 million he made playing in the NHL on drinks and drugs, in casinos and strip clubs.
"The direct result of my being abused was that I became a f---ing raging, alcoholic lunatic," writes Fleury in Playing With Fire. "(James) destroyed my belief system. The most influential adult in my life at the time was telling me that what I thought was wrong was right.
"I no longer had faith in myself or my own judgment. And when you come down to it, that’s all a person has. Once it’s gone, how do you get it back?"
From an innocent, maybe confused, kid to an angry, self-destructive young man with a damaged moral compass — such is the impact of sexual abuse.
Fleury’s account is his own, but it is not unique. To varying degrees, child abuse victims know the story.
Which brings me to Bishop Raymond Lahey — innocent until proven otherwise, to be sure, of possessing and importing child pornography. Still, of all the reaction to the situation and its coverage, I have found particularly offensive a suggestion that authorities have better things to do because the bishop was "simply looking."
For a minute, let’s put aside the well-covered arguments that this situation involves a senior clergy, staking the moral high ground, in an influential institution, occupying a position of deep trust and overseeing areas of Nova Scotia steeped in Roman Catholicism’s powerful traditions.For now, let’s just park the fact that when he signed off last month on a $15-million settlement, he apologized for crimes committed by some of his diocese’s priests over the past half-century.
What is left? Charges that are related to a violation of a child’s sexual being. To make child pornography, a child is abused. Those who would create, possess, import or distribute such pornography are complicit in that abuse.
To say Lahey is charged for merely indulging curiosity and for crimes of "propriety," as one letter-writer to The Chronicle Herald suggested, is a gross failure in understanding child sexual abuse and its life-long impact. Just ask Fleury, and all the others dealing with the pain.
That the hockey star is able to look back at his life to date, see things for what they were and gain self-understanding is to be lauded and admired. Two weeks ago, in his final goodbye to hockey after a good run at a return, at age 41, he appeared before the cameras a man who at last had made peace with himself.But what a toll it has taken to get there. It is a highly public thing Fleury is doing, telling his story in detail.
My hope is that in so doing, he continues to heal and at the same time help others find their way. My other hope is that we refuse to get used to these stories, that we stay vigilant, and that we become better at protecting children.
Contact: mmarwah@herald.ca
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