Transcription of Stopping Sexual Abuse #244
Speaker 1: You’re listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture and brands with Maine. Show summaries are available at Lovemaineradio.com. Here’s some highlights from this week’s program.
Melissa: It’s everywhere, it’s just a matter of getting it exposed. So how do I deal with it? You have to categorize it. There’s good people and there’s bad people in everything in life.
Catherine: What I like if you will about my story is that it really shows that whole sort of timeline. The first time I was sexually abused I was 6 years old, it was the vice principal, first grade in the school. I’d happily married parents so there are myths about “it’s single family, it’s Lewistown, it’s Biddeford whatever.”
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio show number 244 ‘Stopping Sexual Abuse.’ Hearing for the first time on Sunday May 22nd 2016. There is no easy way to discuss the problem of sexual abuse and trafficking, yet these problems do exist within the state of Maine. Today we speak with Melissa Bednarowski a Stand Up 4 Me and Catherine Mossman of Stop Trafficking Me, both of whom have personal experience with these devastating situations and have chosen to go beyond their pain and become advocates so that others will not have to suffer as they have. This is a sensitive topic so younger people may not want to listen. If you’re a parent please be aware. Thank you for joining us.
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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.
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Dr. Lisa: Catherine Mossman started Stop Trafficking Me, a 501 (C) (3) nonprofit organization whose ultimate goal is to eliminate the sexual exploitation and trafficking of children in Maine. Catherine believes that most people in Maine simply do not know what is happening. Shortly after moving to Maine 12 years ago, Catherine felt a calling to show others how she survived and began volunteering at Long Creek Youth Development Center where she quickly realized that the sexual abuse and sex trafficking that claimed her life 35 years ago or at least her childhood was unbelievably still going on in Maine. You have a very interesting story and one that not a lot of people are interested in sharing, so thank you for being here today Catherine.
Catherine: It’s an honor and privilege to be here, thank you.
Dr. Lisa: It’s a tough thing what you’re talking about, as a survivor, it’s tough to have gone through it, it’s tough to talk about it afterwards and yet this has been really important to you and important enough so that you’ve started this organization, Stop Trafficking Me. Tell me about that. What was sort of the shining light one day that said, “Catherine, you need to do this, you need to start this advocacy work?”
Catherine: Menopause.
Dr. Lisa: That’s a good answer okay.
Catherine: You are 47 and you are approaching the big 50 and you are thinking about, at least for me I was thinking and had plenty of time to think as I lay awake at night with night sweats. Thinking about legacy and thinking about how I can give back and what’s really important to me. The older we get, the more people around us are suffering from cancer or death or whatever. Really makes you think about, “Okay, what’s this chapter of my life going to look like?” I was going to Women to Women in Yamouth.
I was talking to my doctor and telling her about my past and my life and we were talking about the effectiveness of being able to be helpful for trauma victims, rape victims, sexual assault victims. She was saying that really the earlier we can talk to kids the better. I had volunteered sporadically at halfway houses or wherever I thought I could speak to adults. She was suggesting maybe doing something with the kids in Maine. I thought, “Oh gosh.” I really never felt like I had a childhood so speaking particularly to teenagers was like aliens. I was so glad when my kids got through the whole teenage time.
What she said made sense to me. I was doing all the background checks and stuff to be able to work at Long Creek. I didn’t know how that was going to turn out. For instance, would they lock the door behind me and would I freak out or would the kids try to kill me or something? I didn’t know what to expect. A part of the background check was talking to the people who work there. They wanted to hear my story and find out if I was a good fit for them. Next thing you know they are having me come back to do my story all over again for the correctional officers. What they were saying is the correctional officers and the staff needed hope too because they work with all these kids and they hardly ever see a success story. That just sort of stuck in my mind.
There might be 20 girls so there‘s only 1 juvenile detention center in the state of Maine. This one has a girls unit on it. Beth Peevy is the one who runs the girls unit. Let’s say there might be 20 girls there age range from 12-19. My group has typically been a group of around 8 girls. They’re picked through various reasons. Maybe question if there’s sex trafficking in their life, maybe the girls haven’t said that they’ve been trafficked or maybe they have but they are chosen specifically for my group. I just went in and shared from my heart and it was an amazing experience. The kids really opened up to me and it was, when you are on your right purpose, the starts sort of align and everything flows. That’s what it was sort of like there. The girls really received me and I received them. We were able to talk to each other from a really authentic place. In that conversation, I started hearing about what was going on in the state of Maine. It sort of floored me that 35 years later that this almost exact sort of thing that had happened to me was happening here in Maine.
I thought boy aren’t we doing something about this? I wanted to find out what was going on in Maine. What sort of organizations do we have here? I educated myself on the fact that we have 1 kind of mothership called MECASA and that’s like the information hub. Then we have several other organizations like SARSSM and SART. Various ones that started in Maine in the ‘70s as a rape crisis center that sort of evolved over time. Those are strategically placed throughout Maine based on district and population. Let’s say there’s 3 or 8 employees for a pretty large area. They are kind of like a salmon swimming upstream doing the best they can but there’s still, there is 1.3 million people in the state of Maine. I was getting inundated everywhere I would go people would say, “Is this really happening in Maine?” I was thinking, “Why don’t you know that this is happening in Maine.” Channel 6 offered to do an interview and when that went on then the US attorney’s office was working with our local law school and working with the women’s justice league who had Ruchira Gupta coming into town.
I don’t know if you remember Ruchira. She was here 2 years ago. She worked with the Clintons to get the anti sex trafficking bill passed. She had an award winning documentary on sex trafficking in India. She was here, the women’s justice league brought her here as the speaker. This year they had someone from food and security. Every year they try to bring someone globally to the state of Maine. The Us Attorney’s office and UMaine law and this women’s justice league asked if I would be on a panel to speak to about 90 law enforcement folks at the Wishcamper Campus. I was on that panel with the FBI and homeland security and Christine Teebow talking to the people in Maine who are behind the law enforcement.
I was so honored and privileged to be there. It was such an eye opening experience to see and hear these 90 people all saying, “Man this is happening in Maine and we’re trying to figure it out and we don’t know what to do.” I’m saying, “I know what to do. We need to bring Maine people in on this because if the Maine people knew what was going on, they would rally. How can we spread the word?” That was it between helping out at Long Creek and then the Ruchira Gupta event. Man that was just like okay we need to do something and I need to be the voice of these girls and let the people in Maine know what’s going on. That started it.
Dr. Lisa: Do you mind sharing your story?
Catherine: No. I don’t mind. 1 of the things that’s really important to me to share with the Maine people is that there wouldn’t be human beings for predators to manipulate into sex trafficking if we didn’t have child sexual assault. I see child sexual abuse as the genesis for so many things. As a society, we see kids dropping out of school, bullying, drug and alcohol abuse, promiscuity, incarceration, cutting, and we look at those as individual problems. When we open up each one of those issues and we look inside, we see that over 85% of them have all been sexually abused as children, 94% of the women in prison have all been sexually abused. In my mind, it is the genesis.
What I like if you will about my story is that it really shows that whole timeline. The 1st time I was sexually abused was I was 6 years old. It was the vice principle 1st grade in school. I’d happily married parents so there are myths about oh it’s single family, it’s Lewiston, it’s Biddeford or whatever. I had happily married parents, I was the eldest of 3 kids. My brother had really severe asthma. My parents were focused on him. I was the first child so they weren’t sued to the whole parenting thing.
I was bed wetting and having night terrors and stuff that we can look back and say gee that was obvious but it wasn’t obvious to them. That made me a little bit different and so now I am kind of the weirdo in school which made me perfect to be bullied at school. Then the school was telling my parents, “Why don’t you let her figure this out.” Back then, I’m 52, we didn’t know about the whole bullying thing. They thought it would build character. I was the littlest kid in school literally the shortest kid in school and they just left me alone.
The girls were awful and the boys were nice to me if I let them go too far. I became promiscuous, I started skipping school, the male baby sitter was molesting me. My uncle was molesting me, my aunt was molesting me. I would do a sleep over and somebody’s big brother or somebody’s … Harvard did a study on this trying to figure out if you take 2 women and they are running around Central Park and they are of the same body type and one of them has been abused and one of them hasn’t, the odds of the one who has been previously abused being assaulted again is so much higher than the person who has never been assaulted. Is it a fair Mon, is it neon sign over your head who knows.
There’s just something that happens in my story is very congruent with that fact. I started running away from home and I was a runaway from 12 to 17. At first I would run away to my friend’s house but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know if you’re staying with a family who’s not contacting your parents or authorities the odds are there not probably healthy themselves. I learnt that, that wasn’t a safe place for me.
I would sleep in abandoned forts in the woods. I would stay in abandoned apartment buildings or re-modeled condominiums wherever. I really didn’t do a lot of drugs and alcohol it’s just not because I didn’t want, it just my body by the grace of God couldn’t do drugs and alcohol. That wasn’t my issue like it is for so many people. At 15 I met a couple of girls, by 15 I had already been brutally raped numerous times. I had been choked to unconsciousness, I’m stealing food, I’m doing survival sex.
Survival sex is can I sleep here and will you feed me. When a couple of girls said we might as well get paid for it you could have your own apartment, you could have clothes. I’ll never forget the night that they told me about this. This was in Biddeford on Pike street. I was starving and the girls fed me Macaroni and cheese with tuna fish and peas and that was the best meal. I was so hungry and by the next morning it made sense to me. I said sure and they introduced me to 2 men, 2 pimps. What I didn’t know at the time was one of them was a well-known pimp in this area who had a, very much like we hear right now, there’s a whole underground thing with prostitution.
There are houses all over the place, actually all over the United States like a web. He was a part of one in lower Massachusetts. The 2 men just for descriptors, one was black, one was white, they were called Salt and Peter excuse me Salt and Pepper. Salt was the white guy his name was Peter and that’s the guy that I chose. Actually that was a total gut job. I didn’t know he was the safer one at the time. I just went with my gut and approved, probably to have saved my life to pick him. As soon as you say yes well that’s it you have just made a deal with the devil in blood and there is no getting out of it.
Now they start training you. They tell you what you’re going to wear, the color of your hair what the rules are, there is a sub culture set of rules. When somebody approaches you if you don’t ask them if they’re a pimp, if you don’t ask them if they’re a cop, what will happen to you, what the punishment is if you don’t obey. You have just said I am a slave and that’s it your now a slave. You can’t go anywhere, you have no money. I get a pack of cigarettes a day, a place to live that I could not leave and was told where to go and when to go and what to do. One particular time I was sent to a P.A [inaudible 43:49] and they were five men and who were supposed to be on a hunting trip, had told their families they were on a hunting trip. They had hired a few girls to entertain them that night. I was the only one that showed up and the men didn’t care that I was the only girl there.
I was 15, I was 5 feet tall, I was size zero, had bleach blond hair who made tattoos and braces on my teeth. At that point I was, I didn’t want to live and I was afraid to die. I didn’t grow up religious but we believed in God and I had heard about hell and I had heard about re-incarnation. I went out in the backyard and I talked to God. I hoped it was God and I said, “Look, if I’m re-incarnated and I come back in a worse life than this because I killed myself that would be awful. If I went to hell because I killed myself that would be awful.” I felt like I was stuck between hell and hell. I said, “If you’re real, if you really exist then help me get out of here.”
People would say why do girls stay and there is a whole brain washing thing. When you’re young and somebody takes you for a car ride and then turns off the lights and it’s a no moon night in Maine and you can’t see the hand in front of your face. He stops the car, turns off the light and says, “I could kill you right now and no one would ever find you. I just want you to know that. I want you to know how fast you can disappear.” They also tell you they’re good friends with police and law. For instance as a runaway I would periodically call my parents and say I’m okay click just so they wouldn’t worry because I felt like it was me I was the bad one not my parents. I wanted them to not worry and know that I was safe. I hadn’t done that in some time and there was a warrant out for my arrest because people were wondering where is she.
My pimp took me to the Biddeford police department and just walked me in the door and said, “Let them know you’re okay.” The person that I talked to just sat back in his chair and put his hand behind his head, “Hey how are you doing? How is your uncle? Just wanted to make sure you’re okay.” I’m thinking, “Satan is 10 feet behind me. Why don’t you take me into a private room? Why don’t you talk to me? This is crazy,” and then the pimp walked me out and back to work we go. Anyway I’m outside, I’m having this conversation with God and I’m totally brain washed that this is Satan and he’s going to kill me or he is going to send me where Peter sent, where Pepper sent his girls to lower Massachusetts where the pornography was made. The girls who disobeyed and went there would come back with awful stories of just horrific things that were done to them for the sake of a film and punishment.
My odds of what was going to happen to me if I stepped off the grounds there weren’t great. Something inside of me said walk down the street. Every step I took away from this house, I was thinking boy if Peter drives in, I could say I saw something shiny in a robe but the further down the road I got the more terrified I was. The first house that I came to I knocked on the door a woman answered and as soon as she cracked opened the door I bolted in and I said I need help. She just happened to be going to Crossroads for women the next morning. What are the odds. She called them and said, “Hey I’ve got this crazy teenager here can I bring her?” Now crossroads is for women and it’s a 30 day program. They let me come at 17 and they let me stay 3 months.
It was just an amazing opportunity for me to have a safe place to go. Of course I didn’t sleep that night. I stayed wide awake and later on I found out someone did get shot, they did go looking for me. When people sell drugs they have to find the drug, conceal the drug, sell the drug, get more drugs. With girls you can make a pimp way more money than drugs. They can just sell you, sell you, sell you. They don’t have to conceal you. If you’re in the car and the cop pulls you over, that cop isn’t going to say, “Hey, there’s a prostitute.”
It was quite an ordeal leaving and then re-establishing a connection with my family. Then there is the surviving the surviving. When people come back from war, when you’re in the trenches you’re just surviving then when you leave that surviving environment now it’s just like fallout right. There’s post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, chronic panic attacks, anxiety attacks. People say, well why do people go back to the street again? Why do they? Because it’s easier than surviving. The whole surviving part is really huge. I use my story to show that timeline, to show that what happens to you when you’re a child being sexually assaulted and then this whole sort of fall out like nuclear radiation. When we have a nuclear radiation leak there’s this huge fall out it’s the same thing when we sexually abuse our kids. Did you see the movie spot light? That was pretty amazing thing.
What stood out for me was how the, not only the church but how the community and even the families wanted to keep the victims quiet. People really didn’t understand why did they do that because the priests were like family. How much more so do we want to keep things quiet when it comes to our own families? When our own families, when our own family unit that’s where not only the victim comes from but also the perpetrator comes out of that too. People in Maine are wonderful about saving animals. Last winter we had that kennel burned down to the ground, there truckloads of dog food, cat food, crates and all these stuff for the animals but when it comes to child sexual abuse, man that’s a sticky topic. That’s really taboo. We really don’t want to talk about that. We don’t want to think it’s happening here. I think that’s because it’s so close to home and instead of demonizing, we really need to have compassion for the family unit. Have compassion for the victims, have compassion for the family where not only the victim but the predators reside and look at it in more of a compassionate point of view around it.
We need to let the people in Maine know what’s going on because they’re just blown away by the numbers. I try to keep it very Maine centric. I’m not bringing in New Hampshire or New England. I’m just saying let’s just look at Maine. Not Biddeford or Lewiston but let’s look at the whole state and see that 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys are being sexually molested in these state of Maine. That the average assault for predator is 150 assaults in the career of that predator. It’s 150 assaults in their lifetime, we’re not going to feel safe by knowing where if we use the sex registry for the state of Maine, those are the dumb ones, those are the ones that got caught. The smart ones are still out there and it’s not a curable thing. Back in the 40s we were looking at depression and homosexuality as something that we would send our family members to the sanitarium to get electric shock treatments to cure them. You can’t cure what peoples innate desire is but there is something that we can do.
There’s 2 kinds of predators. There’s one that is passing on what was done to them and the other one that is just sexually attracted to a child. We can’t cure that but there lots of things out there that we can lessen the cravings and have 0 tolerance. We can have 0 tolerance and compassion at the same time. I think if we hold that space, that families will be more open to talking about it and saying my uncle , my brother, the people who are being victimized are being victimized by the people that they love and trust. The odds of a stranger abducting and raping your child is like winning the mega box but the odds of it happening from someone that they know and love that’s more probable. We have to in my mind create a place of compassion so people are willing to talk about it.
It’s in the talking about it that we can really heal what’s going on and make that cultural shift. I went to this sex trafficking training last year and they said what was domestic violence called 40 years ago and everybody was quiet. She said marriage. She said 40 years ago if your husband was beating the crap out of you and you called the police, the police would say,”What are you doing to piss him off knock it off.” If you went to your church and said my husband is beating me up the church would say, “We’re not really into that, into divorce. How about a marriage enrichment weekend seminar?” Then off course the black and white issue, when women’s right issues, 40 years later we have a semi-black president, we have a gay pride parade, we’re no longer sending people to the sanitarium for electric shock.
What happened between 40 years ago and today? A cultural shift. How do we create a cultural shift? Create a safe space and talk about it and have these conversations. That is going to hopefully make people say okay it’s time for me to do my own work, time for me to out my family in a really compassion loving way and let the healing begin.
Dr. Lisa: Catherine how can people find out more about the sex trafficking that’s going on or how to stop this sex trafficking or more about Stop Trafficking Me.
Catherine: www.stoptraffickingme.org again stoptraffickingme.org and they can email me [email protected].
Dr. Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Catherine Mossman who started Stop Trafficking Me as a result of her own personal experiences. I give you so much credit for the work that you’re doing and I appreciate your coming in today and I wish you all the best in the reaching all the 1.3 Million people in Maine. I hope we can get the word out there.
Catherine: We will and thank you for this opportunity, this is such an important piece of the conversation using our media and spreading the word. My hats off to you I really appreciate it, I’m really grateful to be here thank you.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio show number 244, stopping sexual abuse. Our guests have included Melissa Bednarowski and Catherine Mossman. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on ITunes. For a preview of next week’s show, sign up for our e newsletter and like Love Maine Radio on our Facebook page. Follow me on twitter @Dr.Lisa wellness and see my running travel food and photos [inaudible 56:29] We’d love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows and also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring you Love Maine Radio to you each new week. This is Doctor Lisa Belisle. Thank you for listening to our Stopping Sexual Abuse Show and thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of Berlin City Honda, The Rooms by Harding Lee Smith, Maine Magazine, Portland Art Gallery and Art collect in Maine. Audio production and original music have been provided by Spencer Roberts. Our editorial producer is Kelly Chase. Our Assistant Producer is Shelby Lawson, Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy and our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisante and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our host production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at Lovemaineradio.com.