I have known her for almost 12 years. But it was only weeks ago that I found out she was a victim of Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA). We had bumped into each other, at an all day conference, at New York University, hosted by the New York State Psychological Association, for professionals who specialise in Addiction Treatment. As we trekked through the Village, looking for a spot to have a quick bite, catching up on all the happenings, we couldn’t help but discuss the Sean Luke case. As we sat, two clinicians, constructing and trading psychological profiles of the teenage offenders, she made a deeply personal revelation, without shame or subterfuge. In Trinidad & Tobago, CSA is fast becoming a public health epidemic. Unspeakable things must now be spoken. Private pain is now public domain. She trusted me to tell her story. She hopes her voice will be the beginning of the end of this conspiracy of silence.

By Renee Cummings, in New York

On the edge of the pew, she sat, tears rolling down her cheeks, convinced the hour of her salvation had arrived inside a tiny Moravian church in Moriah, Tobago. “I really thought God was going to come into that church and take me from Moriah,” she tells me. For six months, she walked, from Mt. Thomas to Moriah, religiously, to attend catechism, but this Saturday, she would be confirmed: white shoes, white stockings, and a long white silk dress her mother sent from New York. If all went according to what she was taught “God is your saviour. God is your rescuer” and as processed through the mind of a thirteen year-old girl, confirmation was redemption, and she would be saved because God knew how she suffered.

Overwhelmed, she couldn’t recite the few biblical lines she had to when anointed with the touch of the pastor’s hand. “Revelation 3:20, Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If any one hears my voice, right there, I choked up,” she says. “I couldn’t continue. I was sobbing. No one knew why. They thought I was touched by the spirit.” Throughout her Confirmation she prayed for God to hear her because no one had heard her voice, the day a male relative, over 30 years older, snatched her out of the kitchen, dragged her across the living room, into his bedroom, and raped her. Gail Moore was eleven.
Almost three times her body weight he applied deadly force when he used his huge hands to stifle her terrified screams. “He takes out his penis and shoves it in me, I’m crying, wondering, oh God, is this happening to me, and as he is doing it, he’s telling me not to tell anyone because they won’t believe me and if I tell then he will do it again,” she says as her eyes swell with tears. When he was finished, he casually got off her. “Dizzy, blood running down my legs, I’m walking back home, drifting to the side of the road, hoping and praying I would fall in the bushes and disappear,” she recalls.

Before she got back to her grandmother’s house, she mustered the strength to clean herself up. But was too afraid to say anything. She just tried to look as normal as possible. She doesn’t remember much else about that day other than her grandmother fussing non-stop about what took her so long. He lived less than five minutes away. On his days off from work her grandmother would send food. He was her grandmother’s-aunt’s-son. James was family. And, James is no pseudonym. “It is his real name. He’s dead now so it doesn’t really make a difference. I wish I had done this before but it’s never too late to break the silence.”

James moved in with Gail and her grandmother after Hurricane Flora. In Tobago, you just don’t turn family away. She was a toddler and her grandmother, a young woman, then, was being sexually harassed by a neighbour’s husband. She used the damage Flora did to the house as an excuse to exit the village. Her grandmother bought a house, nearby, and could have used an extra hand around the house and a few extra dollars. “He was an older relative, a father figure, the man around the house, he was working, and would contribute financially, you know, he would bring the bread, the corn beef,” she explains. Gail’s mother lived in Trinidad where she worked as a domestic. She would visit as often as she could, and every week, she would send things back on the boat. Gail was born in Trinidad, in August ’61. She arrived in Tobago, two months later.“I can’t remember at what age the sexual abuse first started,” she says apologetically. Memory loss is not uncommon when you have suffered childhood sexual abuse. The mind tries to distance itself from the experience. “Every Sunday, after church, my grandmother would go to Scarborough Hospital to visit the sick, and I would be alone with him,” she says. She tries hard to remember the sordid sequence of the sexual and physical abuse. “I remember this one Sunday,” she says, “He took off his belt and starts beating me with the buckle. I was begging him, please stop, cousin James, please stop. But he continued beating and cursing me. I was using my hand to block the buckle from hitting me. I could barely move my hands when he was finished.”

He would always beat her for no reason. She tried to hide her hands from her grandmother. “I had to use a mortar and pestle to pound cocoa, my grandmother kept looking at me, asking child, what wrong, why you pounding the cocoa so. Then she saw how swollen my hands were.” She was vexed, wondering “how was she going to explain this to my mother.” She asked James to leave and he moved a few houses away. Her grandmother still treated him like family. She would cook for him and it was Gail’s job to deliver it. The day she was raped, she remembers, tiptoeing up his front step, pushing the backdoor, easy, real easy, it was unlocked. She tightened her body, hoping somehow it would help her get in and out of his kitchen, undetected. As she placed the food on the kitchen counter he jumped out from behind the living room curtain where he was hiding and grabbed her.

The sexual abuse never stopped. He took every opportunity he could to visit. “You could hear him singing this stupid song as he walked down to our house.” She would try to avoid him. “But the house was so small, every where I turned, he was there, trying to snatch me as I walked past, pull me on his lap, always touching and fondling himself for me to see, and winking his eyes, making lewd gestures.” As her grandmother turned her back he would start. Those were also times she had hoped God would come and save her. Instead, a letter came from her mother and enclosed was a plane ticket. Her mother had migrated to the United States. “It came the month after my Confirmation. In a way, I still felt saved. I was leaving for New York.”

She would embark on a self-destructive journey. She entered Prospect Heights High School, Brooklyn, and for a while she was the perfect student. In 1979, she was accepted, at 18, to Stony Brook University, Long Island. Everything began to fall apart when she volunteered for an on-campus rape crisis hotline. “It was in the early 80s, I remember, during the training, they kept saying, when a woman says NO it means NO and in my mind I’m saying but where I come from no means yes.”

Her childhood soul had taken personal responsibility for the rape, sexual abuse, and anguish she suffered. Her teenage years were turbulent, a torrent of emotions, uncontrollable outbursts, repressed anger, depression, and ideations of suicide. “I was on the dorms, I picked up the phone, and called my mother. I told her.” Her mother exploded and said it all: that no good, that bastard, that son-of-a, I could kill him and the questions came flying, how did this happen, where was your grandmother, how could she let this happen to you. “The good thing was she believed me. I was so happy that she believed me.”

She didn’t have similar luck when she made her first visit back to Tobago. “Working as a counsellor on the rape crisis hotline, I felt empowered.” So she told her grandmother. “She didn’t believe me. She said, James, not James, he wouldn’t do something like that, not James, he will never do that, you know you, how you was fresh up. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.” Disclosing brings great pain. It opens a quagmire of painful accusations and counteraccusations. It is a cruel paradox that leads to psychological collusion between the abuser, the child, and the family.

It was not until her second visit that her grandmother tried to address Gail’s rape and years of abuse. Oprah Winfrey had just gone public with her own abuse at the hands of a male relative and how at 14 she gave birth to a stillborn baby. “It was only when people started to talk about Oprah that my grandmother really started to believe it happened to me,” she says with a look of disbelief. Whether or not people believe is still a recurring theme in her life. Throughout, the interview, she kept asking whether people would believe her, would they think it was her fault, would the country make an unfavorable evaluation of her. The interview reopened the floodgates of embarrassment, guilt, shame, and painful self-scrutiny. It is that perceived shame that made her rage ricochet inwards where it was concealed in self-blame, gaze aversion, and a downward head. It is that chronic feeling of shame and fear to let others know that keeps perpetrators, sexual offenders, in business.

“I took a friend from college home to Tobago and she witnessed it with her own eyes.” James was still groping and fondling himself and trying to grab and pull her. He had shown no signs of remorse or even the faintest recognition that he had harmed her. The only thing different was she was much older and he was in a wheelchair. A chronic alcoholic, obese and diabetic, his legs were surgically removed. “I tried to stay as far from him as possible. But my grandmother kept saying, come and see your cousin James, he’s sick, why are you behaving so, its your cousin, and every time she turned her head, he would start touching himself and winking at me.” He died soon after. “Thank God, he’s dead,” she said when she heard the news.

His death didn’t give her back her life as she had hoped. She was 21 and supposed to graduate that year but instead dropped out of college. She lost herself in the nightlife. She got home in the early hours of the morning and waited for night so she could slip back into the dark. “I started to fall apart. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I was losing control. I started to hate myself. I would only go out at night because I didn’t want anyone to see me.” She started to hide her body in baggy clothes and struggled with self-identity and sexual orientation issues. She felt defective, contaminated, spoiled. She tried to commit suicide. She drank a bottle of rum with a bottle of pills. “I wanted to die,” she says, “I have this death obsession that never leaves me.”

But she had only self-medicated a dangerously deep sleep. She had not slept for over 10 years. The nightmares kept her up. The pain doesn’t end when the abuse stops or the abuser dies. The pain lives forever. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The confusion and intense feelings of betrayal, on all levels, familial, societal, judicial, give an emotional wound lasting effect. She explained that something as routine as a gynecological exam can trigger an anxiety attack.

She was raped again while in college but wasn’t expecting the rapist to be her boyfriend. “Until we get help we revictimise ourselves, putting ourselves in abusive situations, still looking for the ending we want, telling ourselves that this time is not going to be like the last time,” she says tearfully as she explained how the abuse continued to happen, always involving a trusted someone but in a situation where she feared for her.

The inner struggle of an abuse survivor can have an isolating effect. Presidential poet Maya Angelou, who wrote the Grammy-award winning poem “On The Pulse of Morning” which she read at the White House for the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton, was raped at the age of 8 by her mother’s boyfriend. The perpetrator was brutally murdered by Angelou’s no-nonsense-uncles. So traumatised by the rape and the subsequent violence that she imposed a one-year silence. She stopped speaking completely and had to relearn the English language.

The recounting of a traumatic episode is like reliving it with every word. As she grew older, there was a growing sense of helplessness and hopelessness. The memories of the brutality of the rape and years of abuse became intrusive and difficult to dispel even when she tried her best not to think of them. The inability to trust and form lasting and satisfying relationships, the lack of intimacy, poor judgment and a desperate search for a redeeming relationship created a state of total psychological disequilibria.

She needed an anchor in her life so she returned to college. At Medgar Evers, in Brooklyn, she met Gwendolyn Rogers a black psychology professor and therapist who introduced her to Beverly Green another black therapist. It was Green who took her off the road of death. “She really helped me with the suicide issues and the whole idea of feeling dirty,” says Gail. She also began a new spiritual journey with the help of a then unknown Iyanla Vazant. It was at Vazant’s Brooklyn home that she literally came to terms with her demons. She graduated with a BA in Psychology by default. “I never set out to be a Psych major, but I just kept taking Psych course after Psych course, trying to find out why people were so cold and unfeeling.”

Her academic accomplishment didn’t change anything. “I was still depressed, unhappy, and troubled. I was angry all the time,” she says. It was on the subway where she saw and memorised the telephone number for Victim Services. She decided to use it and her healing began. She called crying and got an immediate appointment. Within days, she was in therapy and also working as a crisis counsellor. She stayed for ten years, five of which she spent in group therapy. It was a safe and supportive environment of women, incest survivors, from all over the world.

Gail is a story of survival and recovery. But she says survival is not enough. “There must be intervention, treatment and therapy,” she adds. She had thought she was the only one this ever happened to. After finding a collective voice, in personal and group therapy, she has renewed strength and uses her courage to help others heal. Three years ago, she received her MA in Applied Psychology from NYU. She has studied Anthropology, at the Catholic University, in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Feminism and Women Studies at the University of London. She has traveled to Senegal where she has studied and worked. A nationally certified counselor, substance abuse and addiction professional, she works as a Clinician at King’s County Hospital, in Brooklyn. She recently started doctoral studies in Clinical Psychology. She also provides a different kind of learning experience for master’s level social work students at NYU where she is often invited to speak.
“It is sadistic, grotesque, and ritualised sexual torture,” she says, detailing how abusers take certain rites of passage away from those they victimise.

In college, she would cringe when girlfriends asked about her first kiss, her first boyfriend, or at what age she lost her virginity. “Those are experiences I never had. I tell parents listen to your children and believe what your child is telling you. I tell children to tell someone they trust, the police, a teacher, someone in authority,” she says. Although he is dead, I knew Gail had something to say to James. “Yes. I would tell him, you tried to take my life from me. You robbed me of my childhood. You robbed me of my innocence. You robbed me of my trust for men. Because of you I have never been able to experience intimacy with a man. You brutalised me. You tried to kill me. But you didn’t. I’m here. I’m a survivor.”

With the help of web designer Daniel Smith, Renee Cummings and Gail Moore so affected by the murder of Amy Emily Annamunthodo, has started a blog www.csasurvivor.net for victims and survivors of childhood sexual abuse. She hopes to create an open dialogue for men and women to step out of the shadows, share their stories, and end the conspiracy of silence. Cummings and Moore, both clinicians, will offer free online counseling. They hope this site will be a safe and supportive forum to talk and a place to come to for those who feel vulnerable, alone, and as though they have nowhere to turn.