Assemblywoman Markey brings the Child Victims Act to Albany once again

From the Legislative Gazette :

Chris Gavagan, a filmmaker and documentarian, spoke of the abuse he experienced as a child from his roller hockey coach. "I was here last year … The fact that we're having this conversation again is a catastrophic failure," Gavagan said. "If your child had a one in five chance of getting hit by a car today, you'd be spending every moment of every legislative session fighting for stop signs, for speed bumps, for lower speed limits, for traffic lights. Yet when the odds are exactly the same of your child falling victim to a sexual predator, your inaction gives nothing but green lights to those who seek to prey on children."

Brooklyn filmmaker Chris Gavagan, Queens Assemblywoman Margaret Markey support Child Victims Act

Coached into Silence director Chris Gavagan featured in this New York Daily News article, covering his support for statute of limitation reform. ————————————————————————————————————

A Brooklyn filmmaker who is making a documentary about sexual abuse in youth sports says the statute of limitations that limits prosecution of sexual abuse encourages offenders to prey on children.

Chris Gavagan, whose still-in-production “Coached into Silence” includes an interview with a coach he says abused him when he was a teenager, spoke at a press conference in Albany on Tuesday to promote the Child Victims Act. The bill, sponsored by Queens Assemblywoman Margaret Markey, would extend the civil and criminal limitations for sexual abuse and give previous victims a window to bring civil suits against sexual offenders.

“The reality is that these predators will feed for a lifetime on our children,” Gavagan said. “And the short statute of limitations in our state guarantees 30, 40, 50 more years of children - our children, your children - as prey. A generation of children that could so easily have been spared.

“I have been forced to watch as my own abuser, a coach with direct and easy access to a hundred children a year for decades, found his next victim, and his next victim,” Gavagan added.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/i-team/brooklyn-filmmaker-chris-gavagan-queens-assemblywoman-margaret-markey-support-child-victims-act-article-1.147614#ixzz1xLO61lqB

Mr. Gavagan goes to Albany

What follows is a transcript of my statement in support of the Child Victims Act to members of the New York State Assembly, press, advocates & survivors of childhood sexual abuse. “I’d like to say that I’m making this film from some pure journalistic curiosity.

As you know, that’s not the case.

I am making this film because at fourteen years old,  when all I wanted in the world was to be a better hockey player, I skated down the wrong block. Five blocks from my home in Brooklyn, a trap had been laid. This was a trap perfected by a man who by that point had coached a thousand young boys over twenty years. He made himself a master of manipulating both adults and children.

When I decided to move forward with this project, I sent this man, my abuser of 4 years a letter asking him to be involved in this documentary about “the men who made us what we are today.” He jumped at the opportunity, saying it would be the honor of his life.

I’d like to show you a few moments from these interviews now.

(I then played four minutes of interviews with my own abuser. Admitting and justifying sexual abuse as a “lesson”. Raising the concern that doing this interview could put him in jail. Laughing with relief when the issue of New York’s statute of limitations—age 23—is raised. And then this man walking away, fading back in to his neighborhood.)

When people see this man walking back into his neighborhood, they all ask the same question: “What neighborhood is this guy walking back into?”

Your neighborhood. That’s the answer to that question.

All of our neighborhoods.

Those who have suffered sexual abuse as children have become tragic experts in a field that the rest of the world wants to pretend does not exist.  Yet survivors can be society’s lifeguards. While millions of children splash about in the surf right now, there are sharks circling. Survivors bear the scars of these sharks. We are the ones who can say “There. There is the predator that attacked me.”

Give the people who know, the chance to say what they know.

The statute of limitations have taken the whistles from the lifeguards. Victims are forced to watch; helpless, mute—as predators sink their teeth into the next victim, and the next victim. While we scream on the sand, child after child is snatched from the sunlight and dragged to the darkness below. Not every child will survive to see the surface again. None will emerge from this fully intact.

There is blood on somebody’s hands here…

The statute of limitations by it’s very existence in cases of child sex abuse—create more victims. Many lawmakers seem to cast their vote as if they believe a shark, once fed, will never eat again. The reality is that these predators will feed for a lifetime on our children. And the short statute of limitations in our state guarantees 30, 40, 50 more years of children—-our children—your children—-as prey. A generation of children that could so easily have been spared.

I have been forced to watch—helpless— as my own abuser, a coach with direct easy & access to a hundred children a year for decades, found his next victim, and his next victim. I reported him at twenty-four years old. So close…

In my case, the criminally short statute of limitations has created a video vigilante. In my darkest years, this story could have had other endings. I would have killed myself to end the pain. I would have very easily killed my abuser to end the threat to other children. To make the shame go away. I could have made the only person who knew my secret go away just like that. What are your options when your ability just to tell the truth has been taken away by law?

But I but I didn’t drive the three hours from New York City to impugn the good name of this esteemed body by implying that the majority don’t care about safety at all.

In fact the majority have voted to make the great state of New York a safe haven. Let it be known to molesters, pedophiles and child sex predators that this state has chosen to protect you. You are safe here. With each failure to pass the Child Victims Act we are saying to these criminals: Welcome to New York.

When we have to rely on other states such as Massachusetts to enforce our laws, to arrest & try our criminals what we are telling those who rape and  molest children is this: New York is the path of least resistance. Stay within our borders, and you are unprosecutable.

Passing the Child Victims Act can change that. A vote for the Cild Victims Act can put you on the right side of history. You can let the true experts, the survivors, have their day in court, to say what they know. You can give the lifeguards  back their whistles, you can play your part in looking an a pandemic, a shark-infested sea, and saying: “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”.

You must extend the statute of limitations by passing the Child Victims Act and giving the victims back their voice…otherwise I’m afraid that this legislative body will go down in history as an assembly of accomplices.”

A public step for a private person

I am a writer, first and foremost. Mine is not an an instinct for exhibitionism. I can be intensely private. These days, that seems to render one an anachronism. I do not tweet what I had for breakfast. I do not ‘check in’ online to let an imagined audience know that I just bought a half gallon of milk at the local bodega. I do not vent my grievances as status updates. I try to avoid airing dirty laundry, and even the clean linens are kept in their place, folded; not flaunted. I am not judging a single person who has embraced these ways.

Yet through my creative writing, every hope, fear, strength and weakness has always—will always—be laid bare. Scattered across a dozen screenplays, one would find the unvarnished truth of an emotional life lived. Nearly none of those stories are strictly autobiographical, yet they are all me. And if I am writing these with an eventual audience to receive them in mind…then I have already tweeted my breakfast, so to speak. And my ‘modest’ ego deems that worthy of 120 pages at a time, rather than 140 characters. So again, I am not judging those who partake in the technological party. Only the chosen medium distinguishes the forms of sharing ourselves. One of many ways that I am old fashioned.

My training and experience in the independent film world, fifteen years of honing my craft as a writer, a dozen years as a meditator facing ‘what is’…and my entire biography have all merged within Coached into Silence. If you sought out this page today, you’ll know the line is blurred beyond recognition.

Beyond just including my personal story among the others in Coached into Silence, never was this me/movie muddiness more obvious than September 25th. It sank in as I was being wired by our sound mixer Bret, preparing to step in front of the camera for the first time since we were all required to do so in film school a dozen or so years prior. The mere moments from having a microphone taped to my skin, to the beginning of the interview left little time for mental luxuries such as self-consciousness. If I had thought about a ‘Big Screen Debut’ prior to that, myriad considerations; my clothes, my hair, my crooked teeth, my voice, my poor posture…all would have had their moment to annoy and undermine. Without a second’s thought given to these considerations, I had once choice, which was hardly a choice at all. Just be me. This was not a role to be played, this was not a character that I had written to safely hide behind and speak through. For better or worse, my entire directive was; Be Me. That was my intention on that day and with this documentary: Serve the truth as I know it.

If the golden rule of writing is to ‘write what you know’, it is trumped only by it’s prerequisite; the commandment to be that which you truly are. And so here I am, having  just been asked to speak at as press conference at the New York State Capitol in Albany on Tuesday about Coached into Silence and the experiences that inspired it. This is uncharted territory for me. Also speaking will be two of the heroes of this movement for justice, Assemblywoman Margaret Markey & Professor Marci Hamilton. They are among the giants upon whose shoulders we stand every day. It has been an honor to have them associated with Coached into Silence, to have them speak in our film. Now Assemblywoman Markey will be introducing me to the world, and it is my turn to speak. Be careful what you wish for…this genie will not go back in the bottle. That rounded glass refuge has shattered to shards.

What happens next?

I have been warned that I may lose the respect of many who are close to me, and possibly gain the respect of a stranger. I will quite certainly cause pain for those who love me. I’d rather those wounds scab instead of scar, so new healthier skin can grow. I want those who love me to know exactly who it is they are loving, with masks torn away and walls torn down. What I gain by taking this public step is not theoretical or down the road. In taking this step, I give myself the gift of integration and of wholeness. I am taking down the lone barrier in my life which has separated the world into ‘those who know’ & ’ those who do not know.’  I might also, as is my hope, provide some small measure of comfort for a number of people whom I will never meet. Those who are living in shadow may learn a simple single fact that makes this worthwhile: You are not and have never been alone.

More optimistically still, I daydream that someone—years down the line—may never need to take my film down off some dusty shelf in order to have benefitted from it. I retain the human right to dream, and so I dream that this project will have an impact. It has already had an impact on me, one thousand times daily. So if I lose the eye contact of those whom I call neighbor, perhaps I may gain the handshake of one who I would have labeled ‘stranger’, prior to this public step forward. Both definitions are relative, reductive, ephemeral and diminishing, as all labels are.

I am laying all that I have and all that I am on the line, personally & professionally. In our society, labels stick, merely for convenience; ease of reference. In my business, ‘typecasting’ is so prevalent because it allows a judgement, once passed, to replace any further complex consideration in the future. We put each other—and ourselves—in boxes, in closets, in drawers. These roles rarely fit, yet we play our parts. No wall can ever hold what a human being truly is, or more importantly what they can become. Evolution laughs at every fence that has ever been built. A natural world that created something called wings scoffs at all efforts at sequestration. Evolutionary means of overcoming may be a wee bit long-term, still, I understand the possibilities…and the risks.

My name is Chris Gavagan and the label that likely brought you here today reads thusly: I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of my hockey coach. My story was the genesis for Coached into Silence, and forms it’s spine…but better men than I provide it’s limbs, it’s lungs, it’s eyes, it’s brain and it’s heart. I hope to have the honor of introducing you to those courageous men in the coming months.

Every voice raised fights the silent injustices of this most silent of epidemics. If I began by self-applying the label of writer, I must now earn it. It is time for me to give voice to the many thousands of words typed.

It’s time to write the speech of my life.