It happens. Child abuse happens whether we want to admit it or not. For centuries, children who told adults they had been touched, raped or molested were punished. They still are. No one wants to believe them. Surely Daddy, Uncle Tom, Grandpa or Father John from church wouldn’t do such a thing. The child must be lying.
Or so people thought until several years ago, when so many adults accused priests of touching or seducing them when they were children, it started a landslide. Although some priests have been convicted and/or removed from positions of trust with children, there are still adults who cannot, will not believe that a respectable adult — someone they know and trust — can take advantage of that trust to satisfy his or her own needs.
Not here, you say? Not on my island? Don’t be so sure. It happens more often and closer to home than you think: recently Eastern Maine and its islands have been hit hard.
In April 2006, 42-year-old Mount Desert choirmaster Tom Wallace was convicted and imprisoned for sexually molesting two 11-year-old boys.
In December 2006, Arley Marks and his father filed civil suits against Howard Evans, 63, a Blue Hill acupuncturist, accusing Evans of sexually abusing the then ten- and eleven-year-old Arley in 1994 and 1995.
In February 2007, without knowing about the Marks lawsuits, Robin Farrin removed her son from Blue Hill’s Liberty School to get him away from Evans, who had been mentoring him and about whom she had begun harboring suspicions of inappropriate behavior. Farrin then saw a letter Evans wrote Maynard and Ann Bray in 1996, apologizing for the damage he had done to their son, Nathanael, between 1984 and 1986, when the boy was in high school. In the letter, Evans admitted to “The sexualizing of a deep trust and friendship” and enclosed a check “as a way of creating a final end to the abuse and harm” he had caused. Evans wrote, “What I did to Nat will never happen again with any young person entrusted to my care.”
On March 28, the story of the Marks lawsuits hit the Bangor Daily News with Alicia Anstead reporting that a group of concerned Blue Hill townspeople called “Breaking the Silence” had formed to support those feeling betrayed or victimized, especially by Evans, and to see that offenders were held accountable for their actions. That story was followed, on March 29, with three-plus pages of coverage by editor and publisher Nathaniel Barrows and others in Blue Hill’s Weekly Packet.
The Packet listed a staggering number of positions of trust Howard Evans has held, many of which put him in contact with young boys. He has either been removed or has resigned from all these positions, the paper reported. On April 13, Evans voluntarily surrendered his acupuncture and massage licenses while, through his attorney, maintaining his innocence.
In response to a published letter suggesting that if Evans is not criminally charged, he is the victim of a witch-hunt, Jon Wilson, of Brooklin, founder and editor in chief of Wooden Boat magazine and the director of Just Alternatives, a nonprofit organization devoted to victim-centered justice and corrections, wrote in the April 26 issue of The Weekly Packet that rather than being so clear, sexual exploitation and abuse can begin in subtle ways. In 1986 he had spoken to Evans and his wife, Vicki Pollard, about his behavior towards Wilson’s then 13-year-old son whose thigh Evans had “caressed” during an overnight stay at his house. Wilson’s subsequent feelings of misplaced trust towards Evans and his wife fueled Wilson’s willingness to act as facilitator of Breaking the Silence.
The core of the group is made up of parents, friends, former friends, and colleagues of the accused who also feel angry and betrayed. Five years ago Mary Offutt, of Little Deer Isle, warned Arnold Greenberg, then Liberty School’s director, about Evans’s alleged proclivities. She said, “It’s astounding how many people had prior knowledge about Howard, and nobody said anything.” Greenberg admitted in a published letter he’d been told, but because Evans was a friend, wrote, “I rejected [the information] and did nothing.”
Wilson said the group’s “Overarching mission is to stop [Evans] once and for all, and it’s OUTRAGE that drives us. But the outrage arises from his denial that anyone has been harmed. We can deal with the reality; we can’t deal with the denial.”
To say that the child molested by a parent or other relative is “harmed,” hardly begins to make the case. A 77-year-old area man victimized at 17 said, “It’s a memory you carry with you the rest of your life.”
Far from being that stranger offering candy, the sexual predator in our town or island is more likely a relative of the victim. Incest does damage beyond the act, creating guilt and self-loathing in the child. With great sadness, a coastal father of a son victimized by his mother at age five spoke for many when he said, “It’s frozen my son in terms of women. It’s left him with very little sense of self-esteem.”
An MDI native said she grew up thinking her breasts were dirty because of an uncle’s behavior. A Sedgwick native, abused “physically, sexually and emotionally” by her uncles and grandfather, said, “There’s so much incest in our communities, and it’s never talked about.” She said she knew a dozen child abusers when she was growing up and certainly twice that many abused children.
An island woman whose father touched her sexually from ages six to ten-plus said, “You know something’s wrong.” She remembers “One time fighting him off” and said, “You don’t know what’s happening to you.” She thought by letting him molest her, she was protecting her younger sister only to discover years later that he had abused both her sister and her brother. She advised, “The main thing for kids is: you have to tell somebody.”
If children can’t tell a parent, they can tell their teacher, doctor or nurse. An island nurse practitioner said that before she gets to a physical exam, she asks both adults and children questions about their home life. “I ask, `What’s your home life like? What do you do?’ And I always ask, `Do you feel safe in your home?’ And whether it’s an adult or a child, I always ask, `Is somebody hurting you?'” She said just asking those questions opens up a way for both adults and children to talk about taboo subjects.
“I’ve had a lot of women say they were abused as a child,” she said. “More adult women have said that than I would ever have imagined.” She asks them how the abuse affected them then, how it affects them now, and how she can help. “I offer counseling,” she said. Her island has a medical center and a counselor who comes to the center a couple of times a week. “Islanders feel freer seeing a counselor at the medical center,” she said. “There’s a strong air of confidentiality about it. It’s made a big difference.”
“There is no more important thing we can do right now than to enable everyone to break silence,” Wilson said, adding that he’s been amazed at the number of people who have come to him and told him stories of fear of, or victimization by, perpetrators at home or next door. “First we have to make it safe to break these silences,” he said. “Then it will be spoken about.” q
Further Reading:
Note: To find the legal definitions of sexual contact, sexual touching, and sexual assault go to: http://janus.state.me.us/legis/statutes/17- a/title17-ach11sec0.html.