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	Male Sexual Abuse Victims Demand Better Treatment from Ottawa, Quebec By Jonathan Montpetit Canada East April 24, 2010 http://www.canadaeast.com/front/article/1028487 The problem, for Dr. Real Cloutier, was that no one believed him when he tried to speak about the abuse he suffered as a child in Quebec's orphanages. So he stopped talking about it for more than forty years. The decades of silence took their toll: he once put a gun in his mouth, but couldn't pull the trigger. Now in his sixties, Cloutier still can't escape the nightmares-the psychological ravages that come with being a victim of sexual abuse. "I'm sick and tired of it," he said. "My brain is going nuts." Cloutier joined dozens of other male sexual abuse victims on a sunny Saturday to air dark secrets and demand better treatment from the governments of Quebec and Canada. Carrying placards blasting the Catholic Church, they were joined by family, friends and even a group of nuns in an effort to ramp up the lobby for improved funding and resources for male victims of abuse. Whereas several centres have been set up across Quebec to help women deal with abuse, organizers say there is only one in the province for men. "Men don't talk about their sexual abuse," said Alain Jobidon, who heads the resource centre for male victims of childhood abuse. "For a man, speaking about sexual abuse means losing his masculine identity. He's afraid of being seen as a loser, or being weak." Along with its calls for funding, Jobidon's group wants stiffer sentences for pedophiles. It's also asking the Quebec government to remove the three-year window that victims have to sue their aggressors. The group claims as many as one in six men will fall victim to sexual abuse in their lifetimes. "It completely destroys a person's identity," said Jobidon, himself a victim of childhood abuse. "We have difficulty in our interpersonal relationships, you question your sexual orientation. It brings with it a range of problems." Fighting back tears, Cloutier relates how he forced his wife to have an abortion because he was scared of committing the same crimes that he had suffered. "I sacrificed the pleasure of having a family," said Cloutier, now a practising chiropractor. Cloutier was one thousands of Quebec children who were placed in orphanages in the 1940s and 1950s only to be diagnosed as mentally incompetent. The so-called Duplessis Orphans were often deliberately misdiagnosed by church-run institutions trying to benefit from the higher subsidy paid out to hospitals than orphanages. In recent years, grisly tales of abuse like Cloutiers forced the Quebec government to pay out millions of dollars in compensation. There is, however, still lingering resentment at the Catholic Church's handling of the issue, which the recent spate of abuse scandals has only served to rekindle. Several demonstrators carried crosses inscribed with the words "sexual abuse." "What makes me suffer is that there are priests who did bad things and instead the church hides the priests and pretends nothing is wrong," said sister Marie-Elle Boileau, a nun at a Montreal congregation who took part in the march. "The church should have the courage to organize something to be able to pay for therapy for those who need it." Cloutier says he's tried therapy countless times but it's done little to ease the torment. For years he refused to speak about the abuse to even those closest to him, including his wife, convinced they would never believe the graphic details. "They would have thought I was crazy," he said. But Cloutier arrived at Saturday's march with the intention of telling his story to anybody who would listen. As he joined the crowd about to weave its way through the Montreal streets, Cloutier sighed deeply and said: "I feel better now."
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