What if we want to tell a real secret?
Cultural myths surrounding the sexual abuse and assault of boys and men can be serious obstacles to understanding and healing, so it’s important to learn just how wrong they are.
Here’s an exercise which I call Jumping into the Mud although it’s sometimes called by the more prosaic name automatic writing. The exercise helps to loosen my imagination, and sometimes a decent poem results as well.
Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain.
The novel takes a hard look at how children who endure growing up in dysfunctional families, suffer dire consequences and are left to a lifetime of personal struggles.
Janette agreed to share these details publicly to help allay the stigma, shame, and secrecy inherent with being a sex abuse survivor.
In this visual poem, Markus Kempken explores specific objects — spoons, spatulas, flutes — and the way they trigger memories of his childhood abuse.
Catherine Doty’s pitiless poems beautifully show us what we don’t want to see: children’s poverty, abuse, neglect. And their meanness. Poor children living in squalor, which Doty’s language often veils in lyrical glamor.
On the other hand, the open handed
blows left scarce a mark, applied to your head or neck
We weren’t a talking family
especially when it came
to discussing why I locked myself
in the bathroom upstairs
Buskers is the story of Packo, a young Dubliner, and Milos, a Romanian immigrant, who battle to secure a space to beg at a Dublin train station. After a comical … Continue reading →
You stood, small and mute,
on the stoop where she’d left you
with a tiny, plastic suitcase,
like a bad joke, beside you.
This was our childhood.
We were all left
to scavenge the woods
Boarding school, a peculiarly British form of abuse, has devastating impacts not only on the boarders, but on those they grow up to dominate.