Abuse, final update
I recently concluded my part in exposing sexual abuse that took place 60+ years ago at the boarding school I attended for five years. There was a football coach who came into my room late one night and begin rubbing my back and only through some unknown sense of self-protection, I told him to leave, and he did. I wrote about this, and about how vulnerable I was at the time, and published the piece, called “Becoming Pete Dawkins.”
The title refers to a famous West Point football hero who went to my prep school, Cranbrook, before I did. The football coach, a man named Fred Campbell, used this god-like figure as bait for me — and I would bet others — to submit. “You can be another Pete Dawkins,” he told me, a boy of fourteen, “if you do what the coaches tell you.” He proceeded to slide his hand under my pajama top. “Always do what the coaches say,” he said, his hand gliding across my back. It turns out I wasn’t the only one.
I sent Cranbrook the essay, and they instigated an investigation by an outside firm. It took over a year and a half to complete. The investigation found that Campbell “engaged in sexual misconduct with at least 11 male students during his time at Cranbrook.” The school reported the findings in a letter they made public.
While Cranbrook revealed much of what the firm discovered, they didn’t, and won’t, release the entire report. Questions remain — did the school report the abuse to the police at the time? Did they tell the parents? Campbell got another job at another prep school after we was fired from Cranbrook. How? Did Cranbrook provide him with a recommendation? Still, the report is something.
In April, the Detroit News reported the investigator’s findings. One of the two people the journalist quoted, a 1960 graduate of Cranbrook, said that “he does believe ‘something happened,’ but also said a person’s memories from 50 years can get distorted and change over time.”
I spoke to this reporter about the investigation’s findings while she was researching her piece. I got the impression she was my ally. You can see with that quote that she chose to include that I was mistaken. She quoted just one other person, briefly and innocuously. But hear this: my memories did not get distorted over time. Neither, I would suspect, did those of the other 10 boys the investigator determined were abused. By spotlighting this one person’s view, the newspaper gives the impression that the boys in question might have made up or altered their stories. Lesson learned about journalists — or at least about this one.
In any case, the story has concluded for me. I wrote my article. It was published. Cranbrook read it. They commissioned an investigation. They released a partial report of the findings. At least others who were abused by Campbell now know they were not the only ones.
I was teaching a writing workshop the other day here in Louisiana where I live. I read, at a writer’s request, a harrowing piece about her being bullied during middle school. The students in her school were especially cruel, picking on the young girl’s bad eyesight, calling her Helen Keller, pushing her food tray off the table, mocking her, with seemingly no end of torture. It was hard to read.
After I read the piece, I asked the workshop what they thought. One man responded that he liked the piece very much and that it probably helped the writer heal, but, just as important, it would give others the courage to speak up about their own pain, about their own experiences being bullied.
So maybe, with the release of this report, the other Cranbrook victims might feel emboldened and inspired to speak about their own experience and so help others in turn. It can never stop Fred Campbell from entering their room in the middle of the night years ago, but it at least turns the light on and proves, with undistorted clarity, that he was there.
