Speech before the 1997 Village Participation Conference Rural Alaska Community Anchorage Program, Inc. (RurAL CAP)

March 27, 1997

ANB Hall - Juneau, Alaska

By Representative Fred Dyson: [Note: speech is mostly verbatim, minor edits only]

Thank you. It's good to be with you. I grew up living on a boat. My father ran a tug boat company, and where I grew up there were a lot of Swedes and Norwegians. Now the Eskimo's that I fish with, they all tell stories about Athabascans and Aleuts, but I grew up with Swedes and Norwegians telling jokes about each other -- mostly Swedes telling jokes about Norwegians. But, since I've been elected to office, my staff tells me that you should never tell racial or ethnic jokes because you're going to offend somebody.

You all are here working on some issues that I wished I knew a solution for. And, I wish you well. I don't know where it's going to lead us, I hope it leads us together. That some of the animosity that's one up, goes away. If you've got a magic wand to make that happen, God bless you and I really commend you in your efforts.

I want to talk about another problem that I hope we can all work together on and I believe that some of you are. Most of the foster children my wife and I have had a part in raising, came from pretty dysfunctional homes. And, most of them had been sexually abused. And, we have much to be proud of in our state, but one thing we don't have to be proud of is the amount of abuse that goes on with children. While I'm here to serve my two years in the legislature, there's lots of things I want to work on. But the primary thing I want to work on is to make the world safer for children.

The two issues that I picked out are FAS/FAE and child abuse, particularly, child sexual abuse. My colleagues in the legislature selected me the chairman of the Children's Caucus and we've been working on some things.

Three weeks ago, we had a hearing. I had ten people call in or were there in person from all over the state to speak about their abuse and what happened to them. We had a couple people who were former abusers -- tragic stories. One woman from Southeast here said that every female child in her family had been sexually abused for four generations. This has an incredible impact. She never knew her two year old daughter was being abused until she found genital warts all over her body. She put the perpetrators in jail and suffered, as some of you have, the condemnation of some of her family for putting family members in jail.

I have a friend from Prince William Sound, Aleut guy. Now he's in Highland Mountain prison. One of nine boys, all of them were abused by their mother and their uncle. Five of them committed suicide. Three of the ones who lived to adulthood have spent half their adult life in prison for violent crimes and sexually related crimes. And that's where I've got my friend, in Highland mountain, while he was there serving 11 years for having molested 15 girls under the age of 17.

His mother, who is now 86 years old, has been a friend of mine. Certainly she's the perpetrator of those crimes against these children, but she's now in the process of dying from Alzheimer's Disease. I could hate her for what she did to her boys, but she too was a victim. And these things can go on form generation to generation.

My wife has retired as a teacher and got a degree in counseling. Fully half of her practice, her clients, are adult women who are trying, as adults, just to come to terms with what happened to them and their children. I have a friend, a young fellow about Dewey's age. During the year when his mother lay in the hospital dying of cancer, his father raped him 500 times. Sometimes he went to school so sore, he could hardly walk. Children ought not to have to live like this.

Since I got elected last fall, I have already talked with about 25 - 30 people from rural Alaska and believe this is not just a rural Alaska problem. It's an urban problem as well. But, I said, "is there a problem with child sexual abuse in your area?"

I'm sorry to say, everyone I talk to, said, "yeah."

I said, "what's going on, what are you guys doing?"

I spoke about three weeks ago to a group of school board members who were here; and this is a terrible thing to talk about at lunch. But, if we don't talk about it, we're not going to get close to stopping the problem. I asked the school boards and school administrators there if they were dealing with problems in their area. Most of them said that they were. I asked the school administrators and school board folks, "were the community leaders in your community responding in a responsible way when you found child abuse?" About three fourths of them said yes, the leadership in their village or town had stepped up to the responsibility of keeping them from being more victims dealing with perpetrators and trying to get help for the victims. I really commend that.

I suspect that many of you are leaders from where you're from and I just encourage you to be thoughtful and considerate in dealing with children who are being abused and help protect our kids. I don't know anything more precious than our kids. I sure don't. We need to act defensively and boldly with the sensitivity to protect those kids.

One village I worked in—most native villages I worked in I ended up sleeping on wrestling mats in the gym—I traded my electrical skills for meals. This was in western Alaska and I asked a teacher if there were children there that she felt were abused. "Oh yes," she replied. "See that little boy there? Five years ago, I was reporting that he was a victim. Now, he's assaulting other kids in the closet."

"So, what are you doing about it?" I responded.

"We are not doing anything. The last teacher that turned in a child abuse case was out of town in an airplane in 18 hours. We don't get any support here."

In other villages, other areas, our board, the people who I've talked to, the leadership in the community has responded and done the things that need to be done to help the victims, and deal with perpetrators and help to protect against more victims.

I hope that none of your have, know what I'm talking about. I hope you don't know anyone who is abused, including yourselves. If you are an abused victim, I'd like for all of us to make it easier to talk about it and get some help.

In most of these cases, trauma happens inside the people who have been betrayed, particularly by people they are close to. It doesn't go away unless you get some help. Talk to the elders around who you respect. If you need professional help, get it. If you know somebody who needs help, help him or her to get help. But, make it easy for that someone to talk about it. If you know of perpetrators, people who are taking advantage of children, I would encourage you to find the courage and the heart to protect kids and get it stopped.

I've seen some situations where respected leaders have gone to a perpetrator and said, "you've got to stop doing this, you've got to get some help for your problems which are causing you to exploit children." Then you have rigorously helped the perpetrator get help and make amends for the crimes.

I believe, and I hope you do, that exploiting children is a crime and needs to stop. It's a tough deal in the family. My friend's mother is dying in the hospital. All he had was a Dad and he was determined to get to the cops and get his Dad thrown in jail. Tough choice for a little boy. So, he endured what he had to put up with. These kids are in a tough spot. They are not equipped emotionally to deal with it and we need to help them. It's tough for you; it's tough to turn in a relative. A father, a brother, an uncle, and, rarely, a woman, do it.

I know in villages around, where everybody knows what is going on, nobody talks about it, but there is a network of older women in the village that know who the perpetrators are. They have a movement going on where they are just very watchful to make sure that the perpetrators are never alone with a child. Those dear old women are doing what they can do within the context to protect against more victims. I think we may need to stand up too, and deal with it.

Tim and I were talking a few years ago and I asked, "In pre-contact times, how did you all deal with bad guys?" He said, "In the Inupiat culture, the villages are small and people are pretty closely tied together. Some are spread out some but, however you deal with a bad person, it has to be a way that doesn't build grudges between families. So, in the early days, if somebody was doing bad things, everybody would know and that person would be shunned."

That social pressure would be put on him to stop doing it. Tim was talking about someone who was trapping in someone else's creek. They were at a process of exerting social pressure to get the guy who was trapping the wrong creek to quit. But, Tim said that in pre-contact times, if a village was shunning one person or family, it kind of hurt because that person couldn't make it by himself. He needed to be part of a larger effort, and would eventually stop his bad behavior and make amends.

"Good," I said. "What are you going to do now?"

He said, "that's the process we're in. And we are learning now that we have to adopt a little bit of you white guys' tendency, when necessary, to confront the evil-doer and confront the evil conduct to do something about it.

I challenge you all. I don't know how to solve your problems. I don't know your situation and where you live. But, whatever it takes, whatever will work for you, I challenge you as leaders to make it a high priority to see that more children will not being damaged; permanently crippled by FAE; or sexually abused in their homes, schools and by their neighbors.

I hope that we can come to a day, when no kid in our state has to worry that daddy, or uncle, or mother's boyfriend is going to come home tonight drunk and come stumbling into my room and live with the terror.

The only things I know to do from my position is keep talking about it. Hopefully, this will make it easier to get other people talk about it.

One of my cohorts in the legislature who I really respect got in front of a television three weeks ago and talked about being abused as a child. What it did is tear him up enough to make him doubt his manhood and if he could ever be okay. He spent 25 years of his life wondering, "what's wrong with me. I have so much trouble trusting." He opened up with people and is dealing with it. I really respect that. I'd encourage you to be open; make it easy for people to come out of the wood work and face what happened to them and when dealing with the perpetrators; hopefully, with kindness, because maybe they too need some mercy. But, we've got to stop this from happening to our kids.

I have two little kids in my house; a four year old and six year old. Their mother, one of my former foster daughters, is in Nevada trying to beat a coke and weapons charge from California while at the same time may be dying of Hepatitis C. Her grandfather started abusing her when she was nine. She started running away at age 11. When I got her, she was 16. She had been living with a 30-year-old bank robber since she was 13. She ran away from me once. I caught her in Muldoon, on the east side of Anchorage, shacked up with a 55-year-old pimp who was prosecuted in Anchorage.

These things ought not be happening to kids. Her first child was born with a pulse of 285, a result from cocaine. I've got her two little kids and am trying to make a home for them. It's tough and they're struggling. I invited a 14-year-old kid, who had no home to speak of, to share Christmas with us. Guess what he did? Christmas eve, he molested the little girl in my house. Fun Christmas, and I was really embarrassed, uncomfortable, and ashamed that I didn't do more to protect that little girl. I had no idea that her half-brother would do this. I had to make decisions on Christmas eve—what do you do? I prayed to God and came to these conclusions. My number one priority, at all costs, was to protect that little girl from more abuse. My second priority was to make sure that there were no more victims. My third priority was to get help for the victim and the fourth, was to get help for the perpetrator because he, too, needs help. We called the cops. The kid is now in API (Alaska Psychiatric Institution) and is getting some counseling that he desperately needs. He's had a hard life; I'm not excusing what he did. The little girl seems to be doing okay. But, who knows, these wounds go on for a long time.

Sorry to speak to you about something so unpleasant. But, we really need to talk about it. I want to know if there's anything that we can do on an official or state level to make it easier for you guys to help deal with these two problems in your areas. I'll be glad to hear you comments.

Fred Dyson, a republican, represents the Chugiak/Eagle River area in the Alaska State House of Representatives.