Destructive Circle Sexual Abuse
Title: The destructive circle of sexual abuse
Author: Mark Hodgetts
Publisher: Independent Australia
Date: 28FEB2020
Mark Hodgetts shares his experience with the wide-reaching consequences of sexual abuse and how it doesn’t just affect those directly victimised.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE’S epic piece on Cardinal George Pell hammered home some truths that I have only dared skate across in moments of darkness. In her own surgically clean way, Caitlin has managed to put her finger on the one clear feeling that all people who know a victim of sexual abuse must feel. It is an overwhelming sense of rage. At times white-hot, at other times running deep in the subconscious, the rage never disappears.
I know that rage. I know it well.
In my teenage and young adult years, I allowed rage to define me.
I was angry at everything — at the school that I attended and at its teachers and “Christian Brothers”. I was also angry at the Catholic community at large for letting it happen and myself for being incapable of doing anything.
We told people what was going on and no one listened.
I was angry for the many boys whose lives were destroyed. I was angry for my parents who believed that they were doing the right thing sending me to that place. I was angry for me because my survival strategy involved underachieving in everything except alcohol consumption.
I was angry because I knew what happened to some and suspected what happened to others.
I started attending St Joseph’s College in grade six. I was a bright, curious kid who loved playing sport.
By year nine or ten, I was a dull, sullen, sneering wretch who liked to drink.
I can’t pinpoint a reason why, I can just point to a slow gradual decline into darkness — a decline that was hastened by fear at first and later anger.
The fear came early.
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