Let me tell you a story about a little boy.
His name is David, and he’s 8. And he’s just like pretty much every little boy you’ve ever known: happy, chirpy, innocent, naive.
And after a period of what is known in the realm of sexual abuse as ‘grooming’, an 18-year-old man has taken advantage of David’s vulnerability in the worst possible way.
“It’s hard to tell my story without being explicit. I want young people to be able to hear about it too so I won’t go into details,” David says today.
“Some things happened to me as a child over and over again.”
“Everything that could happen, happened to me as a boy, everything” is all David will say on record.
Making that first sexual experience even more appalling was that while it happened, David knew that the offender’s mother was just metres away, washing the dishes.
“I know she didn’t know what was happening, but at the time I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t helping me,” David says.
Easy gratification it might have been for the young offender, but the price paid by the victims of crimes such as these is almost unimaginable.
“I didn’t really know what was happening,” David said. “I didn’t even know it was wrong and as allot of groomed victims will say, I actually enjoyed parts it! For years I didn’t know what child molestation was.”
“If you tried to describe it, put it in words, I don’t think many children would really understand.”
No, it took the wider world to educate him about what sort of devastating effect sexual abuse must have on his life.
“It was only when I found out through the parameters of our society that I started having major issues. Psychological issues. It affected my relationship with Mum. I resented her because I felt she couldn’t protect me. Like the offenders Mum. It manifested in so many ways.
“I felt like I had to prove myself. I had issues with control. I felt so stupid and gullible – really stupid. Pathetic.
“I felt like no one had protected me so I’d better protect myself.”
Indeed, David became an Australian champion in Judo, and – of all things – a real-life Jackaroo on horseback in the Northern Territory.
At the same time, he was becoming almost obsessively interested in wanting to know everything about behavioural science, communication, and body language.
“As an adult, I became very good at that stuff,” he confirms. David mastered the craft of communication and reading people. Putting gestures together to form gesture clusters and evaluating the non verbal and verbal to look for incongruencies. ”As an adult I felt I had prove to people how smart I was. That I am not stupid and gullible. I would weave into conversation the physiology of listening skills and reading people. In the process of looking smart I looked like an egotistical wanker” David expresses.
It was a long, hard, up-and-down and rewarding adventure of personal development.
And boy did it pay off.
Today, David is a multiple international award-winning professional speaker, he owns his own training business and the upper echelons of Google search pages, and he now employs staff on Adelaide’s prominent Norwood Parade. ‘Digital Media Hub’ leads the field in lead generating web sites.
He uses words like innovative, proactive and powerful to confidently describe himself, and says integrity, empowerment, and potent results run through all of his personal and business endeavours.
He also refuses to follow the mainstream media’s narrative about what happens to victims of sexual abuse. In fact, he positively rails against it.
“I am not a fucking victim, and I never have been,” said David, insisting that any and all of his expletives can be freely included in this piece.
As true as the fact that David is obviously no victim today, it is also clear that David is absolutely furious. “I’m pissed off,” he confirms.
As a friend, colleague and writer for Digital Media Hub, he phoned me with his incredibly personal story after reading the latest news about Cardinal George Pell, who has been convicted of sexually abusing two choirboys in the 90s.
But, surprisingly, he’s not leaping on the typical anti-Catholicism bandwagon that usually typifies an angry rant about Cardinal Pell, who by the way maintains his innocence and has appealed.
“I went to church every Sunday until I was 15,” David insists.
David wants the Cardinal to rot in jail. And yes, he is well aware of the grotesque spectre of child sexual abuse that now follows the Catholic institution everywhere it goes.
“For good people to do evil things, that takes religion,” David says, quoting the American Nobel laureate for physics, Steven Weinberg.
Angry and disillusioned with Pell? Sure. Aren’t we all? But David saves some stinging ire for the mainstream media as well.
When we see the news about how Pell and other sexual abuse offenders had “destroyed” their respective victims David feels offended and ropable. We see young reporters in there twenties talking about how grown men were ‘destroyed?'” David said. “Destroyed! Some victims don’t come back from that – ever. Do they not take responsibility for those words and the impact they make?”
Having told his moving, inspiring story about a sexually abused boy who crawled helplessly through a river of gruelling personal development to the heights of success, he makes a good point.
“How could I have done that?” David asks. “How does the media help with that?”
It almost certainly doesn’t. The problem, of course, is that a hopeful, empowering message about how your past does not necessarily dictate your future doesn’t make as eye-catching a headline.
As David puts it: “The problem is honesty. It’s a lot easier to say that it [sexual abuse] ‘destroys’ people.
“If you tell people that because something happens it’s all over, that just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn’t it?” he adds, rhetorically.
Don’t get him wrong: David knows all too well the life-long damage that can indubitably be done to victims of sexual abuse. But he says his own story taught him that, in spite of the past, he can still be vulnerable. Even though control was taken from him, he can still let things flow today. Even though he felt stupid and gullible he doesn’t have to prove to people how ‘smart’ he is.
Although once a ‘victim’, that isn’t something you’re stuck with forever, David insists.
But he thinks the easy, lazy media narrative means kids like himself find themselves pushing their terrible, heavy experiences up an even more mountainous gradient.
“It’s disgusting,” said David. “I just feel so much for those poor children who don’t have the parents and the skill-set to go through the kind of personal journey that I did.
“I’m a powerful, kind and self-aware man. But other people don’t necessarily have that opportunity.”
So, amid the sordid, lurid Cardinal Pell saga and the usual media narrative, and notwithstanding David’s understandable indignation, a sexual abuse to award-winning success ‘comeback’ story is refreshing.
Not often enough does the media shine a warm spotlight on the hundreds, thousands and undoubtedly millions of sexual abuse victims just like David whose stunning journey of personal development sees him, today, picking up his own beautiful, aware, happy, innocent 7-year-old from school.
How about putting that in your headline?
