Transcription of Melissa Bednarowski for the show Stopping Sexual Abuse #244
Dr. Lisa: Today in the studio I have with me Melissa Bednarowski who lives in Biddeford with the her laboratoire retriever Sandy. When was born and raised in Manchester, New Hampshire and moved to Maine in 2000 after spending many summers there with her family. Melissa believes strongly in serving her community. She’s the co-founder and president of Stand Up 4 Me, a non-profit with a mission to end childhood sexual abuse.
Melissa: Good morning Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: Good morning. Thanks for coming in.
Melissa: Thanks for having me.
Dr. Lisa: That’s a tough topic that you’ve chosen.
Melissa: It is a tough topic and it chose me.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me about that. I think this is something that a lot of us are interested in especially give the recent movie that came out Spotlight which I’m sure you’ve seen and which deals with sort of the systems and their impact on covering up things like childhood sexual abuse. Tell me about your story.
Melissa: My personal story is that I’m 40 years old and I made it 37 years without having been sexually assaulted in my life and found it grateful that as I child I never had to endure that pain. It was something that I experience and dealt with on my own, and wasn’t comfortable going to the legal system at 37 years old. Can’t imagine what it felt like as a child. For these men that the back story is that about a year ago there were several men in Biddeford that came forward alleging that they were sexually assaulted as children at the hands of police officers. That intimidation level is strong especially for a developing boy and their process in coming forward has been difficult as adults because of the time span and because of the levels of corruption if you will and the ancestral political being of Maine in itself. Some people got together and decided that we needed to form a non-profit group to help support these men and help support children allover the state in getting their voices heard and finding ways to end sexual abuse.
It’s a point now after seeing Spotlight, after living through the Catholic Church crisis. I’ve never seen my mums world rock so bad. It’s a life that we’ve all known about. It’s a life that we’ve lived but no one talks about it. That’s not a sexy topic, it’s not a popular topic and some of us at some point need to stand up, hence the Stand Up 4 Me and Stand up 4 Maine, and make sure that more children’s lives aren’t affected. To make sure that perpetrators realize that they’ll be caught. We don’t believe as a foundation that we can necessarily rehabilitate the perpetrators, but we can do is educate the children and educate the adults that are surrounding the children to look for the red hot alarms; look for the people that could be perpetrators and look for the symptoms in your child that they could be being assaulted or being hurt. Then provide them avenues to report the crime and end it. That where we’re at.
I was asked to come on and help start the foundation, which I did and was asked to be president. It’s been very rewarding and very cathodic for me to heal. I’m grateful for the opportunity and I hope that 10 years from now we’re not in existence because it has ended but it’s going to be a long journey. There’s a lot of obstacles, a lot of people fighting our course because they don’t want the truth revealed. That’s one of the hardest things for me is a human being to deal with. That somebody actually wants to stop the good.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve been really active in your county for quite awhile. You’re a member of the Child Advocacy Center steering committee for your county. You’re also a member of the steering committee for the Boys and Girls Club of Biddeford and you’re the founding member and board director for the Edmund A. Bednarowski, Jr Charitable Foundation. I’m guessing there’s a relationship there. You also served as a City Councillor in Biddeford and on the Biddeford planning board. You’ve been really in the community and very active for a long time. You’ve been interacting with, I’m assuming, people in law enforcement, people in government, people in all aspects really of Southern Maine. What is this been like for you to try to give voice to something that impacts so many people but also really it kind of goes up against these big institutions?
Melissa: It isn’t easy and I know I’m not the first one to do it. Hopefully more people will understand and will see the importance and we’ll join forces. There’s a lot of different agencies across the state working towards the same goal and part of the child advocacy centers bring a lot of those resources together and I hope that the collaboration will continue. My work in your county is similar to how I was raised in Manchester, New Hampshire. The Edmund A. Jr. Charitable Foundation are based at Manchester, New Hampshire so that’s not part of your county the work there but I was raised in a home with very active grandparents and parents that our belief was you serve your community and I’ve never in my life come across anything like this. It’s been shuttering to me as a professional, as a woman … I don’t have children of my own but I’m a godmother to 4 and to 6, and it’s shuttering as a human being to see these walls that have been built. I just keep going back to that word ‘ancestral’. It’s this deep rooted, I can’t even come up with all the words for it, layers of corruption, layers of let’s forget about it and move on, let’s shut them down.
My hard work in Biddeford for the last … in your county for the last 15 years has been jaded over the last 6 months or so and people associating me with sex abuse, no longer want me to work on other missions. That makes me a stronger person. I think their efforts are to bring me down but in essence it’s making me stand stronger knowing that10-20
Melissa: That somebody wants to bring that to me is showing me that there is something to fight and there is no reason to back down from that. If somebody doesn’t want me associated with them that’s fine. That’s their choice and that’s what their mission is. This is something I strongly believe in. Something I strongly believe that my energy is worth spending on. I’ll just continue to move forward.
Dr. Lisa: When I think about this, for me I was raised catholic and I found out that a priest that had been in my church in Yameth as a, I think he was a fill in priest but he was a priest. He was a teacher at Cheverus That he had been abusing young men who were my age at Cheverus. To know that every Sunday he stood up in front of the church and gave a sermon and then had such darkness in his heart, it really caused me to … Really was a turning point for me and my ability to go to mass and feel okay about it. I guess what I wonder is if other people feel similarly about some of these other institutions. You are saying in Biddeford that police were involved. I think we know that in other places doctors and teachers, attorneys … This really goes across all levels of society.
Melissa: Specifically professions with authority.
Dr. Lisa: For me it really changed my relationship with the catholic church. It must cause other people to feel the same way with these institutions, this complete breaking of trust.
Melissa: It sure does.
Dr. Lisa: How, as someone who works with this everyday, how do you deal with this? How do you separate the acts of a few from the good that many other have done?
Melissa: We have to remember that it is a few. What they did is spoken loudly when it is finally revealed. I was also raised catholic in Manchester New Hampshire where several of those priests were revealed as well. The Boston Globe did a fantastic job bringing that story to light. What we need to realize is like you said, it’s not just the catholic church. It’s teachers, it’s coaches like the Sundasky issues in Pen states. It’s everywhere and it is just a matter of just getting it exposed.
How do I deal with it? You have to categorize it. There’s good people and bad people in everything in life. There’s good people and bad people at the grocery store, good people and bad people in my neighborhood, good people and bad people at my job. To say that all policemen are bad or all priests are bad, to me is being untruthful and not okay. I look at the person for who that person is. I will trust you until you give me a reason to not trust you. Unfortunately, that put me in a situation to be assaulted the time I was. It was a city official who assaulted me and through the investigation over the last year I realized that he too was a victim of one of the police officers as a child. It’s a perpetual motion and to identify … Now I’ve grown, I’ve learned, I’ve educated myself to see the warning signs. I missed them then. I think to continually educate yourself to continually be comfortable with who you are and you start to see those identifying characteristics.
To judge somebody by their position because someone else in that position did harm, I can’t go there. I know there’s plenty of people in the world that do. That’s like saying any TV personality who cooks is going to be like Martha Stewart and going to end up in jail. It’s just too broad for me and so I try to categorize and look at somebody as a person and not as a profession or what they do. Long winded answer.
Dr. Lisa: I think it’s very thoughtful. I think that one of our inclinations as humans often is to retreat from things that hurt us. What you are saying is that on a daily basis you keep showing up and in fact standing up, Stand Up 4 Me which is the opposite. You didn’t go to a corner to lick your wounds. You came out and you said this is what happened to me and we need to talk about this. This has happened to a lot of people and we need to talk about that for them as well.
This is such a sensitive subject for me because I deal with, when I worked as the medical director at the Cumberland County Jail for a few years. The number of people that came through as inmates that had been molested as children or abused in other ways was so high. It was such a cycle. They had this done to them and some of them had gone on and done it to other people. I see this in my practice even now. I am in a suburban practice and I see patients that were molested decades and decades before It still impacts them.
Melissa: Of course, especially as a child it’s formed in their being. They’ll never get rid of that stamped in their body forever. Whether they turn to drug abuse or alcohol abuse or violence, or they retreat and how many suicides have we seen from that. It’s something that will never go away.
Dr. Lisa: Then if there are people that do stand up, I have seen people be, especially when it comes to let’s just say the catholic church. I’ve seen people who have tried to say this happened to me, this was wrong. Then they become ostracized. There’s something that just seems very, it doesn’t seem right. It seems very deeply wrong.
Melissa: I agree.
Dr. Lisa: I guess it’s an obvious thing that I am saying but I just have such a hard time wrapping my head around this.
Melissa: Right then when the people in authority tell that victim that they’re wrong, the other people in that community or in that parish have the respect for the authority figure so who are they going to side with? They are going to say that priest is right. That child’s lying. As a community we need to make a paradigm shift. Not every child is going to be telling the truth and not every adult is going to be telling the truth. The harder they push to convince you that that victim is lying, in my mind that’s telling me they’re hiding something even stronger than we think. Why are they pushing so hard to get me or somebody else to stop talking? What are they hiding? The more the resistance, there’s got to be something behind that wall.
Dr. Lisa: Working with Stand Up 4 Me, you’ve been able to, it sounds like have an outlet for dealing with your own situation , the assault that you underwent. Which I’m sure it’s not a strong enough word. That gives you a place to put your energy, that’s a positive thing. I’m sure there’s a lot of intellectual things that you’ve done that have helped you heal. Then there are some very deeply personal ways that you’ve been harmed that I’m sure you’ve had to work on completely separate from the Stand Up 4 Me process. Its how have you dealt with your own situation emotionally really?
Melissa: It’s a continual process. I’m not sure that I will ever fully heal from it. Like I said, as a child, it marks you for life. Intimacy is one of the now most difficult things because I was in a situation where I was taken advantage of. There are times where I don’t feel comfortable in an intimate setting. I’ve not been in a relationship since that assault 3 years ago and no interest to be right now. That’s still part of my healing and trust factor. I was not in a relationship with that person that assaulted me but from a relationship comes intimacy. When those issues get shattered for you, they take some time to rebuild. It’s a self-reflection. I started with my own personal guilt of what did I do wrong, how did I end up in that situation. As I started attempting to tell the people close to me, I didn’t report it immediately for multiple reasons. When I started to tell the people close to me and their response to me, I think it’s taking me longer to heal from their response than it has the actual assault. It’s the people around you and how they handle it.
My own sister looked at me and said, “No sister of mine would get assaulted and not go to the police,” and I said, “You know what, I would have said the same thing. 24 hours ago I would have said the same thing.” I’m a very strong person. If something is wrong, I’m going to talk about it but I was in the situation that day and the only thing I can correlate it to was the day my father died. He was 58 years old, he had an aortic aneurysm, they operated on him for 7 hours trying to save his life and when they came to tell us that he was gone, I fell to the floor and I froze. I had not felt that again until that day, I froze. It was an outer body experience, there’s nothing I could do to get out of that of that frozen feeling just as there wasn’t that day I sat on the cold hospital floor waiting for my dad to come back. Waiting for someone to tell me that was a lie. That day, very important person in my life was taken from me and that day I was assaulted, a huge part of myself was taken from me. Trust was violated, respect was violated, my knowledge of friendship was violated and it takes time to heal from that.
It’s been almost 15 years since my dad passed and I continually everyday grieve, I continually everyday try to heal. When you lose something like that, that’s that important to you, it takes time and I think that’s really important to respect the time that’s needed for yourself. To understand that you need that time and give it to yourself, and just be with the pain and just be with what you need to feel better and feel secure. One of the gentlemen that came forward this past year that started the whole Stand Up 4 Me movement, originally from Biddeford and moved to Boston, and then came forward after many years of fighting the same things that I fought in a different level obviously, but he and I became very close friends and we helped each other through a lot of this and it’s been nice to gain the friendships and to learn to trust people again. We were able to give that to each other. From bad comes good. We were healing, we’re moving forward, and we’ll hopefully going to help a lot of other people in the state. The state we love.
Dr. Lisa: You mentioned that one of the things you’re trying to do with Stand Up 4 Me is give the people the tools to recognize perpetrators essentially. Talk to me a little bit about that.
Melissa: We’re not looking to reinvent the wheel by any means and there’s 2 organizations in the state that are currently offering these programs, one is MECASA and the other is SARSSM, and we’re working with them to identify locations where the classes can be offered and then help with funding where needed. We’re not looking to become educators or looking to become counselors, we’re looking to connect the resources. There’s signs, there’s red hot buttons that if your child comes home and says certain phrases or looks a different way or stops acting in a normal way, what do we do about it. Those classes are being offered around the state currently, we’re just looking to expand that and then the child advocacy center, there’s a few across the state and I’m on the steering committee to bring one to your county where there isn’t one now. We also work to bring the first ever support group for male victims of sexual assault to your county. There hadn’t been one there ever just for men, there are for females. There was in Cambridge County but obviously with everything that’s happened in the last year in your county there’s been a great need for that.
SARSSM is now offering that in Biddeford and then the Child Advocacy Center, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with how they work, but it’s a multi disciplinary approach to reporting a crime for a child. Once the child has come forward and the authorities are involved, the center allows the child to explain their situation in one room with one trained person. Outside that room is every other legal person that needs to hear the information. The child only has to speak once. They’re not really being re-victimized over and over again with the DA or the other lawyer or whoever else might need to be involved for the court case. Also at many of the centers there’s a physician ready to do an exam. All in one area as comfortable as possible for the child in order to eliminate the re-victimization and we feel and all these organizations that are working towards it feel that this will help reporting. If it’s an easier reporting process more families will come forward, more families will be able to stop doing the trials at the kitchen table if you will and come forward, and the more they come forward, the less perpetrators on the street and then hopefully bring awareness that it’s happening and less people will perpetrate. A lot of different facets.
As we grow as an organization it’s continually flowing and needs may arise that we don’t initially think would be necessary. We’ve worked on everything from education to free move of information acts to try to get to the root of some of the issues and we just continually flow with where the need is and move our energy as need be.
Dr. Lisa: For people who are listening who may have been assaulted themselves or maybe suspect that a loved one has been assaulted, do you have any suggestions?
Melissa: Talk, help, support and know that there’s resources there for you. You can reach us at contact.standup4me.org. If you don’t want to talk live, you can email us and we’ll connect you with the resource that is best for your situation. A lot of times people have a hard time calling the state hotline or calling the services hotline because of different associations and that’s what we want to offer you. Give us the call or give us the email and we will help identify the best resource for you to move forward.
Dr. Lisa: Melissa I appreciate your coming in and talking with me today. I feel very … It’s such a weedy topic and it can feel really overwhelming but I really appreciate your honesty and your courage and your willingness to work through the pain that you’ve personally dealt with but also help others work through their pain. We’ve been speaking with Melissa Bednarowski who is the co-founder and President of Stand up 4 me. I really thank you very much for coming in.
Melissa: Thank you for giving me the opportunity and allowing it to be heard.