He has also spent most of his life wondering if he was the only boy who called Norman Kibby Nicholson his abuser.Ĭamp Najerog was perched on a hillside above Lake Raponda in Wilmington, Vermont, more than 300 acres purchased by Harold "Kid" Gore and his wife, Jane, for its splendor and possibility – secluded yet accessible, with striking summits, winding trails and a pristine lake. Peter has spent more than six decades wondering how his life might have unfolded if not for the abuse. This abuse is under-researched and underreported, affecting boys today and millions of adult men who have spent their lives trying to recover from harm that can prove interminable. Male sexual abuse is pervasive but has historically been covered up so effectively that even what we know now belies the extent of the problem. I trusted when he told me that he loved me." I was a young, innocent child, and I trusted he cared about me.
“I couldn't turn to people who could see my terror, my frustration, and do anything about it. "I belong to an era of men who were hammered into guilt and silence by our abusers and those who knew of it,” Peter said. The experiences of male survivors are also complicated by homophobia – 96% of perpetrators against boys and girls are men. Fears of being seen as gay can contribute to feelings of shame and a desire to hide the abuse, especially when their bodies have sexual responses under violence (which is physiologically normal for any survivor). Male survivors face unique challenges because of stereotypes around masculinity that suggest men are not victims, men can handle it, men always enjoy sex. The severity of trauma can vary based on existing vulnerabilities, predisposition to mental health problems and access to social supports. For many men, childhood sexual abuse distorts reality, keeps them from connecting with others – from forming the relationships crucial to healing – and leaves them perpetually questioning themselves. Researchers have found at least 1 in 6 men have experienced sexual abuse or assault, and the consequences of that abuse can ripple across a lifetime.
When the bird died, Peter thought it was probably time he did, too. His deepest relationship was with a parrot he rescued and refused to keep in a cage. Gay, straight, bisexual – nothing ever really fit. He has struggled with his sexual identity. He has had more sexual partners than he can count, but never intimacy. Peter never fell in love, was too afraid to have children, couldn't hold a job. But more than half a century after leaving the camp, those summers are still achingly present. Peter is 75 now, and if time is the measure, he has traveled far. Over 60 years of ripping away at my lip, it's kind of gone." "I stopped biting my hand and I started ripping my lip," he said. They told Peter that if he stopped biting, when he could eventually drive, they would buy him a car. His mother and father – perhaps unwilling, perhaps ill-equipped as parents of that generation were to address their son's trauma – didn't look or ask or ever really see. The abuse he recalls, and the lingering questions about what the camp did and did not know, what the adults around him did and did not do, would come to define every aspect of Peter's life.Īs the abuse continued, Peter couldn't stop biting his hand. It would split Peter into the boy he deserved to be and the one he would become. Peter said the abuse occurred over multiple summers in the late 1950s at Vermont's Camp Najerog, where parents sent their sons for an education on the outdoors. He can still feel the unsettling abruptness of those moments after the counselor would stop, the unease of all that was left unsaid and unknown.
Peter remembers climbing the ladder to the barn's loft where costumes were stored for shows, the ball in his throat when he realized the counselor had followed. Deeper in the forest around them, trees absorbed the dampness of shadows as confusion ballooned in Peter's belly.
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Peter remembers the clearing they would go to and the mossy spot where they would lie, surrounded by the furrowed bark of Sugar Maples and the elephant skin of American Beech. He remembers the time the counselor guided him through the trees, took off both their clothes and perpetrated the abuse of which so many don't speak, the abuse we lock inside. He doesn't remember how the abuse began, only the way it persisted – in the cabin in the afternoon, above the barn, when walking to the lake. Biting was how Peter managed what was happening at camp. When Peter Wien was 10 years old, he started biting his hand, gnawing on it almost daily, his mouth sculpting the soft skin between his thumb and index finger into an arched callus.