Institutions like to plead ignorance whenever allegations of sex abuse become public, but they’re often complicit.
Sexual Abuse
Posted inEditor's Pick
What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About
A personal essay in which Michele Filgate looks back at her life as a teen living with an abusive stepfather, and considers her mother’s reluctance to protect her daughter, or even speak about it.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story, Unapologetic Women
What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About
Michele Filgate reflects on her teen years with an abusive stepfather and a mother whose silence protected him.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Unapologetic Women
What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About
Michele Filgate reflects on her teen years with an abusive stepfather and a mother whose silence protected him.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
Writing the Monsignor
Mary O’Connell recalls her college efforts to write about a scandalized priest from her youth.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction
Writing the Monsignor
Mary O’Connell recalls her college efforts to write about a scandalized priest from her youth.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Read and Destroy
Karen Durrie was ten years old when her mother’s boyfriend began to molest her. At the Globe and Mail, Durrie examines the years of abuse and the fear, shame, and feelings of complicity that not only kept her silent, but encouraged her to correspond with her attacker.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Weight Loss Does Not Cure Depression: How the World’s Heaviest Man Lost it All
Paul Mason lost 700 lbs. after bariatric surgery and finds happiness elusive; dramatic weight loss does nothing to treat the underlying depression and emotional trauma that caused him to eat to excess in the first place.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Eve Ensler on Abusive Fathers and the Culture That Protects Them
In a short essay for Time, playwright and activist Eve Ensler writes about simultaneously understanding many women’s difficulty calling out abusive fathers—like her own and alleged rapist Bill Cosby—and being frustrated with a culture that protects beloved, powerful patriarchs while vilifying and portraying as liars the women who speak out against them: I think of […]
Posted inUncategorized
The secret history of sexual abuse inside New York’s Horace Mann School: Speaking calmly and staring into the flames, he told us that when he was in eighth grade, Wright sexually assaulted him. ‘And not just me,’ he added. ‘There were others.’ First Wright befriended him, he said. Then he molested him. Then he pretended […]