Tessie Brooks wonders how society can gasp at the thought of children being abused at the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, but fail to honour her story now that she's an adult.

Nova Scotia, Canada The inner child still weeps Accounts of sexual abuse at the Home for Colored Children echo with the sting of anguish by EVA HOARE . Tessie Brooks is 14. She's just run away from home, and been lured into sleeping with an older man. Soon, the authorities come calling and she lands in the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children on the outskirts of Dartmouth. In the two years that follow, she'll become a “lover” of a worker there, having sex with him up to five times a week in the back of his car, or in the locked third-floor “sick room” at the home, or behind Graham Creighton Junior High School just down the road.

She'll be coached how to tell other staffers at the home that she's going to a friend's house or to see another worker at her place.

But really she's meeting the man, who is in his mid- to late 20s, to have sex.

She'll learn to lie for him, and for herself, and to pick on another girl who said he'd raped her.

And when the time comes, he'll drive her to the nearby gas station, where she'll just happen to run into her previous boyfriend, who has since become a pimp.

Not long after, at 16, she's told she has to leave the orphanage. With no skills or education, there's nowhere to go but back to the boyfriend, to work for him as a prostitute in Montreal.

Ten years pass. She runs drugs for dealers, and sells them. On the streets, she asks men if they want “some company.”

Her pimp butts out his cigarettes on her chest. In a small Montreal apartment, she watches as he takes a searing hot coat hanger to another one of his “girls,” and listens to her screams.

Now 45 and living in Ottawa, Brooks wonders how society can gasp at the thought of children being abused but fail to honour her story now that she's an adult — a story that is hauntingly similar to those told by scores of young people who have passed through the doors of the Dartmouth orphanage.

Brooks says she'll have no peace until someone believes her. She's been praying for a public inquiry so she and all the others who allege they've been assaulted at the home can have their say.

But that's not going to happen. The Nova Scotia government is instead forming an independent panel to look into the claims of former residents. The province recently appointed a social worker to come up with the terms of reference for the panel.

That's not what Brooks and other former residents have been fighting for, they say. They fear their stories of what happened to them won't ever make it into Nova Scotia's public fabric.

Brooks trusts few people and has been feeling tortured since learning that the RCMP decided not to charge the home staffer she claims destroyed her childhood. (The Mounties have said they didn't have enough evidence to lay charges in her case and more than 40 others involving alleged abuse at the home.)

“I'm mad at the home, I'm mad at Children's Aid,” she says of the organization that was supposed to help protect her.

Brooks is doing this interview at a Halifax hotel, having travelled here to tell her story. Her voice often trembles, and tears sporadically stream down her face.

She can't understand why other orphanage staffers who knew about her abuse — and she can name names — didn't tell the authorities.

And last year when it looked like the home worker who raped her might face criminal charges, he phoned her, threatening suicide.

His crimes had now somehow become her problem, Brooks remembers.

“He called me. He said he's choosing clothes for his funeral. I could hear the trembling in his voice. It's a tremble of guilt.”

Brooks says she struggles to be a good mother to her three children because she's had no role models.

“How the hell can I teach my children? My life is shattered,” she says.

“I want my kids to live a normal life. I want to be at the table with them and have ice cream.”

And when it looked like her story would finally come to light, she sat her teenagers down and told them the truth.

“My kids didn't want me to expose that I'd been a prostitute,” she says. “(But) they believe in me.”

And then it was time to tell her grandmother, who is in her 90s. It was a disturbing conversation, as Brooks had always been the sun in her grandmother's eyes.

Roselyn Borden thinks she knows why some people won't believe Brooks or other child survivors of sexual abuse.

“It doesn't surprise me at all,” says Borden, a counsellor at the Gatehouse, a Toronto non-profit for adult victims of child abuse.

Borden, too, suffered because no one would believe that her foster father had molested her.

“You can tell the world your story, and people just won't believe,” says Borden, a black woman originally from New Glasgow who was brought up in a white foster home in Peggys Cove.

She has worked at the Gatehouse on contract since November.

Borden says her foster mother didn't take her seriously when she revealed that her foster father had been raping her for five years, starting when she was about eight.

Both her foster parents are now dead.

“The ones close to you don't believe you,” she says during a telephone interview from Toronto. “I think that's their own guilt.

“As survivors, you look for belief from our families. You're not going to get that. In order for them to believe you, they're going to have to admit they did something wrong.”

Society appears more than willing to believe that a child relating such a story is telling the truth, Borden says.

“I think it's because adults think (adults) have had time to … make up stories. Kids can't make this up. There are certain things that they can't make up because of their innocence.”

Adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse may have had their innocence torn from them, but they're still children underneath.

“They're robbed,” Borden says.

She tells those she counsels to write a letter to their “inner child.”

She was surprised at what she wrote herself, learning that her own childhood lay just beneath the surface.

“I could actually see my little … head, walking around happy,” she remembers, reflecting on days before she was abused.

“It's amazing that little child is still in there.”

But that's not what society sees when it hears adult survivors of childhood abuse reveal their truth, Borden says.

“That's why we need more awareness and education,” she says. “Back in the day, (abuse) was so hidden.” You're a “liar or a mental case” if you allege abuse.

“(Victims) need a voice. If they don't have that same voice that was taken from them as a kid, and it's been taken from them as an adult, they're not going to really heal.”

If no one listens, survivors question themselves, Borden says.

“They start thinking, was it a dream? That's when you have your mental health issues.”

Sybil Power is chairwoman of the Nova Scotia group Survivors of Abuse Recovering.

“There is a disconnect for society when they see an adult who is speaking of the abuse they suffered as a child,” Power says.

“Because what they see is the adult, not the child, in front of them.

“That makes it more difficult to access that compassion they might otherwise have if they were looking at a child.”

Power, whose group has been counselling adult victims of child abuse for 20 years and now helps 40 to 50 people a year, thinks the public doesn't want to address “the enormity of the issue.”

“If society were to have to process the scope of this epidemic, that (roughly) one in three girls and about one in six boys will be sexually abused before the age of 18, then we would have to look at our neighbours, friends, organizations, and within our own homes, for the perpetrators.”

Research suggests that up to 60 per cent of victims repress or have a “delayed recall of abuse,” Power says.

Dr. Vicky Wolfe, psychologist in the child welfare mental health clinic at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax, says that when children or adults finally tell their story, it can be very damaging if the people they confide in don't believe them.

“That belief is so important for children,” Wolfe says.

Often, they are already experiencing other problems as a result, and therefore their loved ones might be reticent to acknowledge it actually happened, she says.

“Perhaps when they tell when they're teenagers, they may have already started with some emotional reactions that are troublesome, and people might think this person is not trustworthy because they have a number of emotional problems,” she says.

“Sometimes in that situation, you will have people question (the victim).”

Wolfe says predators can be very convincing, so a parent or caregiver might have trouble believing a child or teenager's claims.

The perpetrator has usually taken his or her time “grooming” the child for future abuse, she says, so a parent only sees a caring coach, teacher, friend or relative who's just helping out.

The victim may then be seen as having a “character flaw,” says Power, who agrees with Wolfe.

With no support or acknowledgement, adult victims of child abuse almost always turn to self-medication to dull the pain, experts say.

They have trouble sustaining intimate and/or close relationships and turn to alcohol or substance abuse to quell their troubled minds and retreat, Power says.

They become drug addicts, alcoholics or, like Brooks, walk the streets because that's all they know.

The latter is the route Harriet Johnson took for a time, after being raped twice at the home by the same staffer who'd assaulted Brooks.

Johnson's allegations, contained in affidavits that are part of a proposed class action against the province that goes to court next month for certification, accuse that same staffer of luring her into prostitution for him.

She still shudders at the memory of her early days at the orphanage.

“I do go back to that child. I still shake, I'm scared,” she says in an interview from her home in Montreal.

“Harriet is that same scared little girl,” she says, reading from a letter she wrote to herself. “Harriet feels no one's going to believe her. Harriet is just one black child that lived in misery, filth and hell.”

Like Brooks, Johnson suffered when she learned that police wouldn't be laying charges of abuse against her attacker or other former staffers at the home.

Some forward steps were taken when the home settled its part of the class action with the former residents, but that's not enough, Brooks and Johnson contend.

They're seeking vindication in order to move on.

Some have tried reinventing themselves.

“I decided to change the spelling of my name, but I never, ever knew why until I was almost 40,” Borden says.

Formerly Rosalind, she became Roselyn.

“I started fresh with a new one, with a name for a child that wasn't abused,” she says. “To step away from that person … to a new person.”

Johnson's path is under construction, but her quest for people to believe her builds with every day.

The apparent lack of belief “makes us look like lying black children,” she says, adding that she has felt “useless” for most of her life because no one would take her stories seriously.

Her “inner child” is still suffering. “Harriet is only 44,” she says, again reading from her letter. “But Harriet is only eight. Harriet will never grow up.”

A fear that no one will ever believe them keeps many victims from ever telling their story, Borden says.

Statistics show that only about 30 per cent of abused children ever come forward, Wolfe says. But even that percentage is a vast improvement over the past, she says.

“Even today, with all the work that's been done, still kids don't disclose.”

And that means little chance of healing and moving on, Wolfe says.

Brooks, Borden and Johnson can attest to the fallout. Only now they're raising themselves up.

Johnson is still reeling from her past. Many days, the sorrow in her voice is marked, and she also took her pain out on herself. She once poured bleach in her bath to wash the “black” off her skin.

“That's how scarred I am,” she says.

Borden, now steaming ahead, still has flashbacks and trust issues. Helping others who've gone through similar troubles is cathartic, she says.

Brooks laments the loss of her childhood. She never got to further her education. Even today, she still struggles, having only recently attained papers to become a health-care worker.

“That's what upsets me the most,” she says, her voice quavering. “I know I could do much better.”

She is out to erase the “raw reality” of her former life.

Brooks hopes for a good future for that 14-year-old little girl she once knew — and atonement for her perceived sins.

“The road is so shattered.”