When it was over, Dorough thanked the legislators, walked into the hallway and cried.
(Story here, among other places.)
I do not know Wayne Dorough. I've never met him, I don't know what he looks like, I wouldn't know to thank him if I went up to see relatives in Virginia and saw him in the supermarket.
But I know Wayne Doroughs. I know people who would have said what Wayne Dorough said -- not the words he used, but equally effective words.
So when I read that story, saw how he acted, ...
I went to work that day knowing nothing about the Virginia House's consideration of any bill regarding child abuse or the statute of limitations of anything. Only while perusing the news wire did I come across something that ... you can't stop reading, and you feel like you'll lose part of yourself if you don't tell people about it. (Part of my job that I put pants on for is finding out what's going on in the state, nation and world and what my readers will care about)
And then, because of how the page had been designed, I had to spend another 20 minutes reading the thing over and over, looking for where I could cut words or use shorter ones so the story would end ... not perfectly, but adequately.
And after 20 minutes of reading and reading and reading about Wayne Dorough's tears and fears and whom he had told and whom he had not told, I was done.
And I got up and walked a few feet over to my page designer and started to talk about the story and couldn't say anything. The words weren't coming out right, and meanwhile, they were being redirected to my eyes anyway.
And I went to the hallway and cried.
I couldn't stay long. I had work to do, and besides, one out of 10 conversations that start with me crying about child abuse end with the other person finding out why I know Wayne Doroughs. (One of them is my father, and the list is far longer than I'd like.)
And it's not that I mind telling people. God knows I've written about this shit enough to suggest I don't mind telling people. But the average person, even in a setting in which people read child abuse stories fairly frequently, ... it still ain't fun. I've gotten used to a lot in this business, but people hurting kids ain't on that list.
Homicide stories don't bother me. We've had at least 30 homicides since I got here, and let's say five stories per, for 150 homicide stories. Reading them isn't the most fun I have, but with a homicide, the victim's dead.
Disaster stories don't do much to me anymore. Reading about 50 people being killed in a mudslide wherever used to hurt, but it's stopped having a subjective effect. The Haiti earthquake never particularly hurt to read about. It's the nature of the business -- if you tear up over every explosion that kills 10 people, you'll never get your work done. You have to be able to say, "Oh, 20 people died in a bombing in Kazakhstan. ... but I don't have anywhere to put it in the paper."
But kids are different. Adults can usually handle (or handle better) garbage kids can't handle.
With a child abuse story, you've got a kid already not ready to deal with garbage, and you're throwing a special kind of garbagy hell at them and their coping mechanisms go out the window.
Rape is a bear to handle when you're 20. Handling it when you're 8 ... people deal how they can. I just hope it becomes constructive before any other innocent people gets hurt.
Not until he had grandchildren did he decide to do something. He had heard that those who are sexually abused as children end up abusing children themselves.
After the memories of his father's abusive behavior started coming back to him, my father would occasionally privately start this conversation with me:
Him: "If Mama or I ever did anything to hurt you, please tell us so we can apologize for it profusely."
Me: "You did what you could. I have no complaints."
Him: "I can't understand how. I had a horrible role model of how to be a father."
I never knew how to approach that because from my perspective, it's very easy to not abuse your children.
You ... don't. You have to opt in to it in the first place.
But his father did just that. As some of you know much better (oh, what a word) than others, of the many ways children react to being raped or molested or otherwise assaulted, one is to act out that assault on others.
And sometimes the others are the next biological generation.
I can't imagine how horrifying that would be. But now those conversations with my father make sense. He repressed those memories for decades. He was concerned that I had done the same with something he had done to me -- perhaps something he had done and repressed because why in the world would he want to remember abusing his child?
The subcommittee’s chairman, Sen. John Edwards, then asked: “At what point would you have felt comfortable doing something — filing a suit or going to see a lawyer — in your life? At what age?”
“I’m not comfortable with that now, to be honest with you,” Dorough replied.
One of my aunts says she confronted her father about what he'd done while she was visiting from Florida (possibly with husband and small child in tow; I don't remember all of what she told me in e-mail six years ago).
When another aunt floated the idea of having her mother come live with them for several months, her husband (who saw how my father was emotionally wasting away in that house and got him the fuck out of Dodge; he was my godfather, and I didn't know why for approximately forever) suddenly got a sabbatical in Bulgaria or something.
So much immediately floods back every time I read this paragraph or that paragraph of the article, so I cannot remember this next part clearly, but if memory serves, several of my grandparents' children challenged their sainthood over the years (my father reportedly referred to his mother as "our sainted mother" to her great annoyance) and were met with less than amused responses. Further attempts to say, "Hey, you did something wrong" were met with equally stoic and insulting responses.
It is hard enough to confront someone who did something bad to you.
It is hard enough when that bad thing consisted of the person touching you sexually without your permission. Harder still if it's rape.
I've said before and will say here again that how people deal with that is theirs to decide. For one reason or another, I don't plan to confront the two girls who punched me in the testicles and called me a pecker when I was 6. One of them is in California, a safe distance from me, and the other has a name sufficiently common that there are however many hundreds of her.
But my grandfather is a different story. He would be 101 in about a month had he not died in 1995 of cancer. (No apologies needed on that one.) My father is still coming to terms with what happened to him. I don't know if he would be ready to confront his father, let alone in court. And toward what end? I wouldn't counsel anyone against confronting someone who wronged them, but 10 years' limitation -- assuming my father even knew about the limit -- might have pushed him to recover more quickly than would have been useful, perhaps.
(I don't think any of them would have taken their father to court. Why bother? They know what he did. I can't imagine any of them wanting to expend that emotional energy only to have him just do more of the same denials.)
He told the legislators about how windshield wipers moving back and forth in the rain remind him of a sheet being flung back and his alleged abuser jumping in bed beside him. The man was a close friend of Dorough’s family.
But somewhere in Virginia, my father, and Wayne Dorough, is 35, with three children, and the way his oldest daughter, who is 9, recoils when he reaches to tickle her triggers a memory of something someone did to him when he was 9 (and 6, and 7, and 4, and 11), and suddenly he can't stop crying, and she thinks she's done something wrong, so she's crying, and his sons are crying, and his wife is distraught because now her kids and husband are crying and she has to go to work, and he doesn't want to make her late, and the kids need to get ready for school.
How long will it will take that man before he's ready to confront the person who did a lot more than tickle?
His first concern is probably going to be (from his perspective) figuring out what the hell happened that he went from playing with his kids to remembering being abused. He wasn't ... oh my god.
oh CHRIST.
(And the therapist then quickly and gently guides him back to something comforting before leading him back far more gently to the abuse memory so he can confront it and understand it and generally get back to functioning.)
Now, let's say that after a month of therapy, this man figures out that starting when he was 4, his uncle visited the family every other month and always found a way to get the boy in his room and started a tickle fight that became oral sex.
Sometimes I invite y'all to consider how your life would be different if something or other had happened to you.
When I ask that, it is because it is possible to consider that. But the totality of the life-changing nature of "A relative molested me" ... it's hard to understand how world-breaking that is unless you understand. And there's only one way to understand, and imagining a hypothetical ain't a big part of it.
So don't. Imagine confronting someone with no reason to admit they've done something horrible. (I have no idea what former politician some of you may pick ...) They've got a pretty good reason to stonewall you and generally make life twice as painful as it was. So if you're going to confront them in court, you really need to have your stuff together, and you need to be ready for a terror of an experience.
It generally takes more than the two years Virginia law currently allows.
"To have to think about defending a case that involves facts that occurred 20, 30 years ago, maybe even 40 years ago is truly mind-boggling," said Obenshain, R-Harrisonburg. "There is no possible way that a defendant in a suit like that can possibly get a fair trial."
(From this story update)
Someone on trial for abusing a child is already unlikely to get a fair trial simply because most people A) feel for the survivor, not the accused and B) generally feel that if the person felt strongly enough about bringing the case, there's more'n a little to it.
That's true if it happens four days after or four decades after.
If the facts are on your side, you push them, and if you abused the child, you can either resume being a human or fight to falsely restore your good name.
But people have been tried and convicted of crimes that happened more than 20 years before. A Nazi war crimes probe was launched weeks ago. Byron de la Beckwith was convicted of assassinating Medgar Evers 31 years after the fact. Similarly, people have been set free after spending decades in jail. A man was set to be released from a Texas prison a week or so ago after a DNA test showed what he'd said all along: He wasn't there, and he didn't do it.
Wayne Dorough isn't likely to take his alleged abuser to court. My father and his siblings can't take a dead man to court (and suing the estate would be a great way to ensure that whatever existed of the estate dried up quickly in attorney's fees).
But for people who want the option, it should be there. And therapy should include seeking compensation for wrongdoing when the survivor chooses to pursue it.
And for Virginians who aren't ready to confront their molesters in civil court after that whopping two years of therapy (or no therapy at all), Dorough's efforts have at least helped the chances that the statute of limitations will be extended and more Virginians will get the justice they deserve.