Give us closure!

I've finally manage to piece together a more detailed account of what happened to me at St. Joseph's and the crimes perpetrated by a pedophile teacher who currently lives in comfortable retirement.

I have just sent police a 5 page statement containing a lot more detail than the initial, shocked and weirded -out statement account I initially gave them.  I'm hoping that brings some much needed closure.  I gave the statement partly to help myself move on (because, let's be honest, the Catholic Church and De La Salle are about as interested in helping survivors move on as a fox is to chickens) and partly to aid anyone else coming forward with information about abuses at St. Joseph's Ipswich.  But survivors certainly aren't chicken.  I learned the other day there are 11 million of us survivors of CSA here in the UK.  11 MILLION!!   That's an army! We won't be silent and we sure as hell aren't going to go away any time soon so what, may I ask, are the De la Salle and others going to do to aid the closure so desperately needed by (obviously) thousands of their former pupils? De La Salle are silent. The longer they remain so, the more they show themselves complicit in covering up abuse.

But closure is so hard to find. Just when you think, 'Right, enough of that, time to focus on the here and now', another story pops up. Just a couple of weeks ago I spoke with a former pupil whose name I recognised.  He told me he'd also been abused at St Joseph's and DLS had settled out of court for less than therapy had cost him to date and that he'd received no apology.  Settling out of court is surely an admission of guilt so to then not offer an apology is beyond despicable.  He asked who my abuser was and when I told him, he said, " F****ng hell. I now feel better for hating him...He disliked me, I feel proud of that, now. Big into corporal punishment too. I recall being slippered by him multiple times..."

Anyway, I am moving forward and encouraged by such comments because they affirm it wasn't just me, as a child, imagining some awful trauma. Mine was real and I am heartened by whoever it was who recently went to St Joseph's and did this because it demonstrates a growing number of survivors are NOT going to sit meekly by, accepting their lot because all of us know from bitter experience, if we don't speak out now, future child abuse in posh schools and other places (who would rather it was swept under the carpet for the sake of their precious image) is absolutely guaranteed.

Why wouldn't we want to change that?

MAKE. CHILD. ABUSE. STOP!