The Item‘s six-story, multi-page deep-dive on abuse (April 28) boiled down to equating one word with the hundreds of words written by the newspaper’s reporters to chronicle abuse:
Evil.
Abuse survivors Jennifer Falcone and Christian White told survival tales almost too horrific to read and nearly impossible to comprehend. Parents told Gov. Charlie Baker about abuse inflicted by Wayne Chapman and Christopher Prew.
Experts like Ross Steinborn and Ted Delano talked about the misconceptions surrounding students’ comprehension of sexual violence.
There are horror stories aplenty surrounding the wide spectrum of abuse ranging from dating violence, to child-sexual abuse and cyberbullying. The statistics documenting abuse are daunting: 29 percent of women and 23 percent of men in the United States experience physical, sexual, or psychological intimate-partner violence during their lifetime, according to a National Library of Medicine study.
The U.S. Department of Education reports that 10 percent of students in public schools have experienced inappropriate sexual conduct from adults.
The National Sexual Assault Hotline reported in March 2020 that half of its calls were from minors.
That is a horrific statistic to contemplate. It is brought home in graphic detail through White’s lengthy account of the abuse he sustained and how, as a teenager, he was arrested and jailed, ultimately enduring a “mental-health journey” from the age of 18 to 43.
Falcone was 11 when a male administrator in her school began abusing her. She recounted how the man pulled her out of classes and sold her to other men.
“I didn’t keep quiet because he was being nice to me,” said Falcone. “I kept quiet because I was terrified of him.”
Again, those words speak to abuse almost too horrific to contemplate. We hope readers will take away from Falcone and White’s words an acknowledgement of a reality that cannot be ignored.
But we also hope “The evil that is abuse” series also underscores observations by Delano, a Swampscott Police detective, who finds that students “are at least grasping the concept of consent” as part of broader conversations and communication around sexual violence.
Education is key, said Delano and Steinborn, but outreach is also critical to addressing abuse and resources include the Healing Abuse Working for Change (HAWC) hotline, 1-800-547-1649, and MassGeneral’s HAVEN program at www.massgeneral.org/social-service/HAVEN/learn-more.
