CANADA
CTV
Sheryl Ubelacker, The Canadian Press
Published Monday, November 14, 2016
Miykhaela reaches back in her memory to the summer day when it all began. Her older brother had taken her into the bush on their northern Ontario reserve to join a few of their cousins, young teenaged boys like her sibling who had all been attending residential school together for several years.
They gang-raped her.
She was five or six years old.
As a mother years later, Miykhaela had to confront the ugly reality of familial sex abuse once again — but this time it was her daughter, who one day confessed that her teenaged half-brother had raped her a couple of years earlier.
She was 10 or 11 years old.
Miykhaela and her daughter are just two of the faces of intergenerational sexual abuse, a dark legacy connected to almost 120 years of government-sanctioned, church-operated residential schools, where aboriginal leaders say many First Nations, Metis and Inuit children were physically and sexually molested by clergy and other staff, spawning a cycle of mimicked behaviour in generations to come.
Extensive interviews with social scientists, indigenous leaders and victims undertaken over the past few months by The Canadian Press suggest child sexual abuse is an open secret in many aboriginal communities — and its prevalence in some is shockingly high.
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