Male Survivors

Journalist Shannon Molloy is used to sharing his story. In his 2020 memoir, Fourteen (now adapted for the stage), he wrote about growing up gay in regional Queensland in the 1990s, enduring severe bullying.

He wrote in a piece that sparked the memoir:

I was bashed, ridiculed, taunted endlessly, you name it. I was almost run over. At a school camp, I was tied to a tree and beaten with an oar. Teachers seemed indifferent. Some blamed my “personality”. I lived in despair, although in hindsight, it’s clear I wasn’t really living at all.

But despite having shared his childhood despair, he’s been a man with a secret. A secret most men wouldn’t talk about: his experience of being sexually abused as a child, from the age of five.

What made it especially challenging to talk about was that it happened not at the hands of an adult, but another child, who was only three years older than him.

Not just another trauma memoir

This memoir-turned-case-study, turned-research-exploration, is a fascinating read. It’s filled with horror, secrecy and shame, but it’s also tempered with hope, insight and healing.

It stands out within the growing genre of “trauma memoirs”. Molloy uses his personal journey, peppered throughout with case-study vignettes from men he has interviewed about their own experiences of childhood sexual abuse, to illustrate what we know from research and clinical practice.

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In part two of a series on Crown Law withholding evidence from police Aaron Smale asks: how did the government and its lawyers behave when they knew the state was guilty of serious crimes against children?

Under oath in front of a Royal Commission the Crown’s top lawyer had nowhere to go. Solicitor General Una Jagose had to admit what had been clear for nearly 50 years – that what happened to children in the Lake Alice psychiatric hospital in the 1970s was criminal.

It was a conclusion that was impossible to escape. As Jagose admitted in convoluted legalese, it was written and recorded by the state’s own employees in its own documents. The perpetrators had recorded their own crimes in documents held by the state.

In her evidence Jagose stated: “The record itself showed that Dr Leeks and other staff were using ECT [electroconvulsive therapy] and other forms of things that are treatment as behavioural modification and/or punishment for those purposes and not for treatment.”

Speaking of the litigation that started in the 1990s – which included Leoni McInroe, who was the first to file a civil case – Jagose acknowledged that the Crown knew from its own files that Dr Leeks’ methods were unacceptable as medical treatment.

“Dr Leeks, was using treatment methods to punish and attempt to modify behaviour in a way that the Crown then, and still, thought was unacceptable, an unacceptable way to treat those children, and didn’t put any of them to proof over that because the proof was right there in the file, in the very systems that the hospital and Dr Leeks ran,” she said.

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On Christmas Day last year, men’s welfare worker Philip Chapman decided he had had enough dealing with police safety orders.

The director of Nelson’s Male Room had spent six years sorting out a place to live and counselling for men who had been told to leave the family household because of incidents of family violence.

“After six years of working weekends, I decided I was done”, Chapman said.

When Nelson Women’s Refuge manager Diane Strong (Ngāti Tama, Te Ātiawa) caught wind of this, she immediately “just picked up my handbag, and walked over to the Male Room”, and offered Chapman around $15,000 in funding for a year’s contract.

Chapman said police safety orders were the “perfect opportunity” for some early intervention.

He said the Women’s Refuge funds were not just dealing with the orders but also provided a room at Franklyn Village as well.

“It really should be coming out of the government coffers for early intervention into family violence. The justice system should be paying for it but they’re not.”

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