It creeps up on you like your worst nightmare. The perpetrator makes Freddy Kruger look like Mother Theresa. It not only lives in your dreams, but it wakes up with you in the morning and follows you around all through the day.
"Even when I was five, he use to walk up behind me while I was doing the dishes and started fondling me. Sometimes he would make me go down into the basement to finish molesting me," said Sandra MacKenzie.
MacKenzie, a 42-year-old mother, endured being sexually abused from age five until she was about 14-years-old. She is a native of Ottawa, Ontario who lives alone with her son.
The perpetrator was her stepfather who also molested her and her three sisters.
"He started out abusing my oldest sister and worked his way down to me. I was the more submissive one, so he seemed to have attached to me the most," said MacKenzie.
Ron Villeneuve was also abused. "It started with him rubbing my penis, and ended up with him performing oral sex on me," says Villeneuve.
Villeneuve, a 48-year-old father, was continuously molested by his neighborhood priest for almost three years while he lived at CFB Uplands air-force base. The abuse started after he joined the church as an altar boy, and started confiding with the priest. While they were demolishing the church last year, Villeneuve managed to preserve one brick from the demolished remains.
"After the abuse started, it was like life came to a grinding halt. I remember giving up on everything from God, school and even my family," said Villeneuve.
It has only been over the last decade the issue has come to the surface. With high-profile sexual abuse cases like the Mount Cashel orphanage, the Alfred Training School and NHL hockey star Sheldon Kennedy, it is only recently the general public is realizing the kind of sickness that hovers over their own backyards.
The majority of sexual abuse survivors end up asking for help between the ages of 23 to 35, which is usually provoked by an overwhelming sense of panic and paranoia. Although it's not always evident, the symptoms are the result of the sexual abuse, and eventually it's decided that might be the underlying problem.
Survivors have other common symptoms such as social withdrawal, doubting of sexuality, irrational fears and low self esteem. They also find they have a lot problems in their jobs and relationships.
"The effects of sexual abuse are minimized by some people. They sometimes dismiss it as something in the past, and it has no effect on the present," said Stephen Arbuckle, a psychiatric social worker at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, who specializes in male sexual abuse. "The effects have an impact on a survivor's everyday life.
The core issue around sexual abuse is shame."
Rachel Maillet, a sexual abuse counsellor at the Catholic Family Services says, "There's always a lot of guilt with sexual abuse. They tend to blame themselves. That's one of the key ways the perpetrators keep their victims quiet, by making them feel like it's their fault. It's even worse for men, because men are brought up believing it's not manly to be victimized. "
Villeneuve says, "I remember him telling me you're not suppose to tell anyone, and he always enforced that. I always felt it was my fault. That I was doing something wrong ... or that I might be judged by the people who would find out."
"After my son was born, I started having a lot of anxiety attacks," said MacKenzie. "My intimacy with my husband suffered a lot. I really didn't like being touched or hugged. I was having a lot of reoccurring nightmares because of the abuse."
“It has happened to people in all walks of life. They are not alone. They find that out once they begin talking about it," said Arbuckle.
"It's a mourning process. First, you have to accept it happened, and then you have to mourn the fact you can change what happened. And then you can get on with rebuilding your life."
