Some recent discussions have brought to light about what it means to be a survivor. How should survivors behave? What is the role of the advocate in helping survivors heal? What things should we take into account when speaking to other survivors? Leave comments and questions when you have them.
Chris de Serres talking about My Name Is Project and how to participate:
We’ve had great interest in the My Name Is Project and are waiting with much anticipation for you to submit your survivor video stories in support of this project.
Recently I had the priviledge of participating in the Oprah two-part event on male survivors of child abuse. The first show aired last Friday and began with an emotional opening where the entire audience of 200 male survivors held up pictures of themselves at the age when they were first abused.
It was a powerful moment, standing amongst all those men, holding up a picture of who I was before my life changed so traumatically.
(Wo)Men Speak Out has an idea based on that powerful moment on Oprah. We are working on a new video montage which will hopefully include pictures of all of you. We all have our individual stories. But we have a collective story of abuse that is worth telling to everyone who has felt trauma in their lives, and to those who haven’t.
So this is a call out to ALL SURVIVORS. If you are interested in participating in this montage, send us a high resolution picture of you holding a picture of yourself at the age of your abuse under your chin. Also, include the age of abuse and you can optionally include your name as well. We will collect all of the submissions and create a video montage telling a shared story of abuse.
We need as many submissions as we can because we want this to show the magnitude of abuse and at the same time the human face of survivorship.
Also, keep your personal video submissions coming in. We need to create our video community of survivor stories to inspire all of our brothers and sisters who are right now suffering in silence. The only way we can do it is with your stories.
Thank you for participating in this project. Break the silence. To live.
Chris de Serres
christopher@womenspeakoutnow.com
WSO
So I made My Name is Chris, and I cry just a little every time I watch it. Recently I had the privilege of taking part in a two-part Oprah special on male survivors of child abuse. Oprah wanted an audience of 200 male survivors to show a face to the millions of men who are abused and never talk about it.
Shortly after the filming I received an email from Jarrod Marcum Noftsger. He was among the 200 men. He wanted to let me know that My Name is Chris helped his recovery. In fact, he made is own version of the video, called My Name is Jarrod, as a way of coming to terms with his own horrific abuse.
There are millions of survivors out there who want to tell their stories. Yet, we feel isolated and unable to express the deepest pain in our lives. The My Name Is Project is there to provide a survivor a way to express it.
So our project is simple:
1. Create your own My Name is… video. There are many programs to make nice montages. I made My Name is Chris with One True Media. If you have any production questions feel free to email me at christopher@womenspeakoutnow.com. I’m no video wizard but i’ll do my best to help. I want your video to be as representative of your voice as much as possible.
2. Post your video on Youtube as a “response” to My Name is Chris. Our video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYBkMzQrknk. This way, we stay connected and others can see all of the videos in the project stream.
Click here for a quick tutorial for those who aren’t sure how to add a video in response to ours.
3. Feel free to incorporate what elements you want from My Name is Chris, but your video should have the taste of your personal experience to it. We want to learn about your personal adversity and growth. It can be happy, it can be sad. As long as it is real we want it to be a part of this project.
4. Email Chris along the way with your thoughts, experiences, and questions and to let us know that you have contributed to the “My Name is…” project.
Our goal is to create a community of “My Name is…” videos which tell the collective stories of abuse and trauma in our communities. The short term goal is 50 before the end of 2010. 50 videos. Men and Women. Together. Starting with My Name is Chris and My Name is Jarrod. We need 48 more before January of 2011. We can only do it with your voice.
Sharing your story is the greatest gift you can give to another survivor. When I made My Name is Chris I was only trying to heal from my pain. Imagine the impact our collective montage of stories will have on survivors who need to hear that they are not alone and that their pain matters.
We can only do this with your help.
Chris de Serres
WSO
You may know Tyler Perry from many of the films he’s produced, directed, and starred in over the years. It seemed like every year I would see a new Tyler Perry movie coming out of the box office. I can’t say that I have seen any of them, though he is a clear success story being one of the highest paid men in Hollywood.
Tyler Perry - Survivor
What I did see on 60 Minutes recently was the startling admission that, like myself, he is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The reason why this is shocking isn’t that he IS a survivor of abuse. The statistics show indeed how common abuse is in our culture, with 1 in 4 women being victims of abuse before the age of 16 and 1 in 6 men.
What is of note is that Tyler Perry is a high profile black man admitting that he was abused as a child. It’s the coming out that has always been hardest for us men. One of the basic virtures of early manhood is being able to successfully defend yourself from harm. For male victims it is this perceived failure that is sometimes the hardest thing to come to terms with.
Tyler is coming to terms with this specter that has hovered over his life for so long. He spoke of a friends mother who molested him as a child. She locked him in their house and only provided the key to leave if he ‘had sex’ with her. Tyler later shared additional details about living with a physically abusive father. After his admission, his father passed along the message to Tyler that “…If I had beat your ass one more time you probably would have been Barack Obama.”
You may be horrified by that comment. Yet, its so telling of how parents so often confuse discipline with outright abuse. Or maybe it’s just his fathers way of rationalizing the abuse and suffering he inflicted on his defenseless children.
These admissions from public figures are inspiring and courageous but to people who want to make real change in our society we can’t leave it at that. We have to explore the questions raised by the personal accounts from survivors of abuse.
I was always a big fan of the comedian Richard Pryor growing up. He would often compare men with women, and how black culture differed from white culture. He once mentioned quite fondly about the time his father gave him an especially violent physical beating because he came home after his curfew. The audience laughed. Pryor’s genius was in being able to make his misery funny. I have all of Pryors tapes. I think he’s the most gifted comedian, yet I never laughed at those jokes. Pryor joked on how it taught him character and professed his admiration to his father for making him hard.
It made me wonder. How can any physical beating ever be a point of pride in any culture, any society? What extremes and rationalizations are parents willing to employ to make sure they have well behaved children? What should our response be when this is too often the message we are sending in our society?
I may have not known about Tyler Perry’s admission if I had not known about his work with a new movie coming out called Precious. It’s about the struggle of a 16-year-old survivor of abuse. You don’t see too many films about abuse streaming out of the Hollywood lot. This is one of them. Go see it on November 6th.
And remember, there is courage in breaking the silence, but change only comes when we decide to respond to the brave stories of those like Tyler Perry. How do you plan on responding?
The overwhelming majority of children are abused by a family member or family friend. More often than not the abuser is a parent, step-parent, or guardian. I think that’s a reality we haven’t quite come to terms with. I know we didn’t when I was growing up.
Probably the only education I ever received as a child about the danger of abuse was a 30 minute session in a 5th grade class once. I remember that it was taught by my English teacher. I could tell how uncomfortable and awkward she felt in front of the class, trying to talk about what to say if a stranger came up to us and asked us to follow ‘him’ down an alley. I was taught to say no, but I wasn’t quite sure why I was saying no. Just that it was important that I did say no. There was no context, just that this fictitious ‘bad guy’ wasn’t to be followed. I thought of some of the supervillains I read about in comic books. On the off chance that Dr. Doom showed up on my afternoon walk home from school I knew what to say.
Education hasn’t improved much since that day in grade school. We are still uncomfortably limping into inadequate conversations with our children about what to do, when, and who. Except we are so leery about the ‘who’ part because the ‘who’ may be attending PTA meetings, may be more close to us than we would like to think.
Educating our children about how to speak up for themselves is not an always popular proposition to a parent. Parents want obedient children, and it’s those same obedient children who are most vulnerable. If there is anything that is most obvious in looking at the statistics it is that children aren’t using their voices.
There are arguments that children shouldn’t know about abuse. They are too young to be exposed. Yet we already know that millions of children are already being physically and sexually abused right now. I guess the above philosophy has, in a sense, already written off those children as damaged goods.
Parents aren’t comfortable with the idea of their children telling them no, in any case. That is precisely what education provides for them, the option to say no. An option to defend themselves. This rarely comes up consciously in my discussions with parents, but it always rears it’s ugly head in the periphery. The argument against abuse education that never quite makes itself known. This is why our parents should be educated as well.
Our expressed priority is to protect our children. But there is a catch to this. We don’t want to protect them from us.
So we still ask ourselves why our children are so vulnerable. We wonder why there are millions of victims of abuse out there. It’s because the children don’t know. Organizations, like (Wo)Men Speak Out, exist to educate our men, women, boys, and girls about abuse. Boys and girls are the most vulnerable demographic to the scourge of abuse. Are they too young to know about abuse? Millions learn one way or the other. Sadly, it seems that, for most, the most harmful way is ruling out over the other.
This may make you wonder what your school is doing to educate their students. You may even ask yourself what you are doing to educate your children. It’s worth an inquiry. Talk to your kids. Check in with your school. It’s worth a call. It’s worth raising your hand at the PTA meeting and starting a discussion.
If you believe your children are ready to be given the tools that may save their life one day, then bring an organization in that knows how to talk to the kids. Not the awkward English teacher I had way back when.
Abusers rarely look like Dr. Doom. Yet, that may be all the protection we are providing our children.
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