On the Road to Change…

Some days I feel like Dorothy, skipping along in my blue skirt through cornfields that roll over hill after hill to the distant setting sun…but other days the sky suddenly turns black (like Emperor Ming’s coming) and I have to keep positive and plodding on, cloaked in my blue rain poncho with my drenched boats squelching like the streets are pathed with frogs. On these days I feel more like Frodo…

I’m already more than 100 miles from Paris, though, so half way to Luxembourg. I’ve noticed my lower legs are solid but my upper legs have become quite supple, like a cats arm. I didn’t expect that. Each day is the same but different. Quiet country roads for 30 miles, a wee sleepy village ever other hour, big dogs bark as I pass. I’ve seen every cute wee woodland creature of France flattened and dried out at the side of the road and the occasional porn. What’s that about? Do people drive around the countryside throwing porn out their window? Or is a customary here to take your porn on a long walk and forget to bring it back? Who knows…The wee villages are always closed. Where does everyone go? They all have a ‘Tabac cafe’ which sells cigarettes and lotto tickets but never bottles of water and there’s always a wee square pond thing with a simple running fountain and sometimes a wooden roof. I wonder if they are the original town wells from way back before the dawn of pluming. Most Villages also have half-life-size crucifixes in the centre but many have fallen into disrepair, which perhaps signifies the church’s hold on these communities is less than it was.

The most sobering sight of this area is the war monuments. There’s hundreds of them. Not just in the towns: all along the road at the sides of what now appears to be random poppy fields. I took time to stop and visit one of the many Cemeteries. Perfect uniform rows or white crosses and stars. I’d only seen them in films but you don’t grasp the solemn awesomeness until you stand amidst the immaculate graves and behold the immensity of lives lost in that ‘great war’. I realise it was the American cemetery but many of the names seemed European. Michael O’Mally, Otto Hecht and many ‘Known but to God’. At that time, I imagine these boys would have been fairly new to America, first or second generation Irish, Dutch, Scottish or whatever, not long off the boat before being sent back to chase that great evil out of Europe. My folk music upbringing had me wanting to sing ‘The green fields of France’. Do you know it?

Well how do you do young Willy McBride?

Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside

And rest for while neath the warm summer sun

I’ve been walking all day and I’m nearly done…

It goes on to sing about the brave young man he was and wither he’s ‘forever nineteen’ in some ‘faithful heart’. A beautiful song really that captures the sadness of war for their families left in sickening worry at home. I guess I’ve had a lot of time alone this week to think about home…

Thank God for Facebook…The kind support and well-wishes from all my family and friends really does make it easier. I’ve had many messages and emails from survivors too, from all over the world, who seem to have somehow been inspired by this wee walk. Some have said they’re finally seeking counselling or disclosing to their families. Stopping the Silence: it’s what it’s all about…

So Paris, feels like months ago already, was as successful as could be. I met and spoke to many nice folks from every corner of the globe and a few heads of international and national organisations based there.

Homayra Sellier, Director of the French ‘Innocence in Danger’ met with me and Mojo in the fanciest hotel I’ve ever not been thrown out of. Thankfully she offered to pay for the meal, which was €4 a snail, and we talked for three hours about the many ways ‘Stop the Silence: Stop Child Sexual Abuse, Inc.’ and ‘Innocence in Danger’ can make the most of our international partnership on the ‘Road to Change’. Homayra is a great advocate for the use of film as a means to convey sensitive and complex issues to the populous and is herself a writer with many successful European productions under her belt. I left with a list of contacts for Luxembourg, Sweden, Poland, Italy and beyond. A wonderful lady, passionate about healing and preventing child sexual abuse across the world and we’re deeply grateful and excited to have her and her organisation on board.

The next lady I met was equally inspirational. Madam Latifa Bennari, director of Ange Blue in Paris, known as the Blue Angel. Thank fully, my friend Fred (A native French speaker who already translated ‘To Kill a Kelpie’ for the French subtitles) was available to translate, so Latifa and I were able to have a very in-depth discussion of her pioneering organisation. She works primarily in prevention and directly with paedophiles. Now here a sensitive distinction must be made. A paedophile is someone who, for whatever reason, feels sexually attracted to children. A child-sex-offender is someone who acted on those impulses and violated a child. The press are guilty of often making one mean the other but they are different and it’s important that we all understand this.

A documentary of Ange Bleu’s work has been screened a number of times in France and every broadcast creates a bombardment of emails from such individuals who are aware of their potentially dangerous feelings and want to stop themselves from ever acting on them. Latifa said she’s not always aware when the film will be aired but the sudden surge of emails and calls tells her it must have been on again. Her work is truly unique in the word. It takes bravery and compassion on both sides to talk about these feelings and I was humbled to listen to the many examples of individuals she’s helped who were originally petrified to admit the things they were imagining and now, with the help of Ange Bleu, feel confident that they will never harm a child. This is true prevention at work.

It’s uncomfortable to accept that some people are sexually attracted to children but a child is sexually abused every 30 seconds, so this either means there is a lot of evil people in the world, or there is in fact a massive presence of people in every country who have this attraction and very little support to help prevent them from acting on it. If your best friend told you they fantasised about sex with children how would you feel about them? It would appear that many people who had these feelings went into the priesthood, perhaps hoping that a life of enforced celibacy would prevent them from ever acting on them but we all know how that worked out…These people need help. Where can they get that help at the moment? In most western countries, the law only gets involved once someone has committed a crime. We need to wait till a child has been abused before we can identify and deal with child-sex-offenders. Latifa stops paedophiles from becoming offenders. She accepts the world as it is and reaches out to these individuals to support them, without judgement, and directly prevents children being sexually abused.

When I talk about prevention, I normally mean warning people that child-sex-offenders could be living on their street or in their family, explaining clearly the integrated presence and prevalence of child sexual abuse in the hope that greater understanding will help people keep their children safe from potential attack. We share this information openly at Stop the Silence public talks and consider it ‘prevention work’ but Latifa maintains that all this is just ‘information’ and that her work in actively engaging and supporting paedophiles is the only true prevention. I am inclined to agree with her. Child sexual abuse is a complex and sensitive issue with many complex and sensitive issues around and within it. Accepting that many people are sexually attracted to children is essential if we are to really address this problem and stop it from continuing in future generations. I would like to see her work begin to have a presence in every country, because there is a definite need for it, and I am thinking hard about how this might be achieved. I am hoping to meet with a colleague of Latifa’s in Luxembourg, who is currently creating the first satellite office there, and further discuss future possibilities.

My uncle used to say to me ‘I love you lots and lots and lots and lots’ and it was almost as if he really did. When I finally told him to stop touching me, he began to cry and said ‘I only do those things to you because I love you’. It was like I was breaking up with him. Quite disturbing and a lot for a 13 year old to comprehend but that’s how it happened. I spent years in counselling talking through my anger and confusion over these things but now my overriding feeling towards my uncle Terry is that I feel really sorry for him. A lonely fool. He’s sitting in jail right now because he wrongly acted on the impulses he had towards me and my brothers. I’m not saying I’m not still angry about it. All the damage his selfish actions caused is still very real today but if I’m honest, when I think of him I just feel pity. Feeling sorry for paedophiles isn’t a concept floated around much. I was involved in a thread on Facebook this week where some people were advocating execution or castration for child sex offenders but Latifa opened my mind to considering what it must be like for people who have this attraction and want only to get rid of it before they destroy someone’s life and throw their own life away and in the process. If Blue Angel were around in Glasgow before my Uncle touched any of us, our lives could have been very different.

Latifa certainly made me think a lot. She is a survivor too but doesn’t call herself that. She told me that identifying yourself as a survivor (or victim) locks you into a mindset and prevents you from progressing with your healing. An interesting idea. Many call themselves survivors as they want to differentiate from being identified as a victim. I learned recently from a lady in Germany who has been chatting to me since she learned about the Road to Change (and am planning to meet when I reach Hamburg) that German’s don’t use the word ‘survivor’ when referring to child sexual abuse. Only someone who lived through an accident or natural disaster gets called a ‘survivor’. People there who have been abused are always referred to as ‘victims’ regardless of how long ago the abuse was, or how they’re coping with the consequences today. I identify as a survivor as it seems to empower others to know that I was once a victim but I’ve taken my power back and am able to get on with my life and even create something positive from the tangled mess of a life my uncle left me with. Having said that, I was encouraged by Latifa’s challenge on this idea and I will further consider how I perceive myself. If it means letting go of restrictive physiological status that I currently subconsciously hold myself in then perhaps it’s time I do stop identifying myself as ‘someone who was once regularly abused’ and start seeing myself as ‘someone whose alive and well and getting on with their life’…I don’t know though, but I have 100 miles walking alone to Luxembourg to think about it…

We need to get Yvonne started so I can head on. Spent the last 24 hours stressfully working on her, walking 12 miles to and from the nearest petrol station and running the generator to charge her two van batteries on the day I’m trying to rest from the walk…Still no joy but I better keep trying stuff…fingers crossed…

Thanks for reading, feel free to comment…

Matty x

 

A Frodo day…