Grooming is what hurt me…The Cover Up is hurting everyone.
These are some powerful and validating realizations that I am just understanding as a survivor of CSA – Childhood Sexual Abuse. I’m hoping this may be clarifying for anyone trying to understand their own abuse and/or support survivors.
I’m 57 years old and the pieces just fell into place. I now know and have the words to explain what damaged me most. I go back in time and feel again how the grooming changed me. How my extremely sheltered and naive 12 year old mind learned to be a certain way, learned to want and need unnatural attention from older men. It’s no longer a mystery to me why I became an easy target for 3 men.
The first lightbulb moment was that the damage and change to my personality, the forming of my desires around emotional intimacy, my understanding of what was wanted from me to be loved, started long before the sexual acts that were DONE TO ME. The eventual trajectory of my life was forever changed by the grooming.
I was 12 yrs old when the intense grooming began by my first abuser from the meeting that gathered in our home. He was 33 yrs old, new to town with a wife and 5 kids. Of course I followed him around like a puppy. I had never before been shown so much positive and special attention. I hadn’t been touched on the back of the neck or ears and cheeks while having compliments whispered to me before. At 13 yrs old the whispers became risque, questions about had I been kissed at Grayling convention. Then the private invitations to go swimming. I can now forgive myself for going.
There was another 30+ yr old man from our mtg with a wife and 4 kids who was at the pool on THE fateful night and witnessed a whole lot of inappropriate touching in the pool. I can see in my mind’s eye him standing and watching. I don’t know if he was in the parking lot watching what happened to me before I was taken home? I don’t know if a wink and nod was exchanged between the two men? I’ll never know but whatever he saw encouraged him to invite me to walk his dog alone with him at night. He had a creepy manner and one walk wasn’t enough grooming for him to get anywhere. I have no doubt of his intention as he ended up in jail for abusing his own daughter.
Still at 13 yrs old, a third man 28 yrs old and his wife decided to make sport of our family. They had favoured access to my bro and me as they were not only professing and in our mtg but also family. Game nights and fondues turned into manipulated opportunities for alone time and heart to heart talks. Tell me a 13 yr old girl who wouldn’t be enamoured of a trusted confidant bearing gifts and attention? How is a child to fend off the urges of a grown man?
The 2nd realization was that even if it had stopped with the grooming the damage was already done. I had been changed. While there is different treatment needed, there is no distinction to be made from children groomed and touched or children raped. Adults who are inappropriate with their attention towards a minor are JUST AS dangerous a predator as the rapist.
I can now forgive myself for the physical acts that followed my grooming. I didn’t stand a chance to defend my honour, my purity, my holiness…. I had been changed. The follow on abuse of my body that ended at 15 yrs old just sank me into a deeper hole.
There’s a third lesson from this that survivors and advocates have been trying to tell… The damage was permanently stamped on me by the 2×2 system. I now CAN condemn the workers that split up and moved people to a different meeting rather than kick the pedos out and call the cops. I knew at the time it was not about my well being but about preserving the image of The Way.
I still have a hard time with the loving “friends” who viewed me and treated me as a “bad child”, an adulterer. The gossiping that took place was more than I could handle. At 17 years old, a younger girl told me that she didn’t understand why her Mom had told her I was trouble, but she wasn’t allowed to hang around with me. I knew what she was talking about, and the shame was unbearable as I grasped the way I was being discussed in the fellowship. I didn’t go to the next Massey union mtg or to any other mtg again as a professing member.
When the friends found out what was happening, they took it to the workers (I’ve no objection to that). However, the workers as we’ve discovered, have from The Way’s inception at the turn of the 1900s covered up rapes and sexual abuse amongst themselves and then when the movement morphed into creating home churches with lay members, the privilege of escaping accountability was extended to the friends, especially elders and former workers.
Just before my Mother died, she told me about all that had been happening in 2023 after the Overseer Dean Bruer’s crimes were revealed. She was devastated and processing 40 years later that what had happened to her family was so common in this “perfect Way”. I often wonder if still alive, where she would be? Would she have stuck by her daughter this time? Or would she have gone back, as so many have, to pretending that it isn’t happening to preserve “The Way”?
Actually … I’m glad I don’t have to find out. So much healing happened in the 5 minutes where she acknowledged my “Truth”, my experience…
By Kari McElrea
Chatham-Kent, Canada
March 28, 2025