Survivor: Carrie Bailee hopes her story will assist others who have suffered like she has.
Canadian-born Carrie Bailee suffered so much physical and sexual abuse as a girl that she was granted a special visa to live in Australia. Carrie Bailee fled a life of sexual abuse in Canada and arrived in Australia at the age of twenty. Once here, she was assisted by a number of Australian women and was eventually encouraged to apply for refugee status to stay in that country. So began his battle to get asylum in Australia. Carrie appeared before the Refugee Review Tribunal and revealed the darkness of child sexual abuse and organized crime networks in our affluent First World neighborhoods. Like many children, Bailee did not speak, was ashamed and was manipulated to believe that the abuse was her fault. Her mother did not learn the truth until her daughter was a teenager. In early adulthood, Bailee began writing a private memoir, but only recently did she resolve to publish her story. Now she's turning her attention to helping other victims.
Flying On Broken Wings is a shattering account of the physical and sexual abuse she endured at his hands between the ages of four and 14, in a small town on an island off the Canadian eastern seaboard. Her mother had been brutally beaten by her husband from early in the marriage, and divorced him when Bailee was seven. But that made the child even more vulnerable during the access visits she made to her father's house every fortnight.
"My mother was no longer his prisoner. That became the role I took on every other weekend" Bailee writes.
Bailee has sometimes suffered from flashbacks, episodes that invade the present and sometimes bring her back so deeply into her dark past that they let her bleed on the ground as she physically reproduces and mentally re-experiences the horrors inflicted upon her. . A psychiatrist who treated her describes it as "a significant dissociative functioning in the context of severe post-traumatic stress disorder".
"I have my good days, probably better than bad, but I still have my bad days, and I will probably still be affected and affected by what has happened to me."
Bailee was four when her father first sexually abused. Four years later, the things he did to his body went from "imaginable", as she says, to "indescribable". One rainy afternoon, as he was drinking Scotch and snoozing in front of the television, eight-year-old Bailee slipped into the kitchen for fun, jumping a jump rope that she had tied around the chairs. Abruptly, he came in and dragged her into the bedroom where he used the jump rope to tie it to the headboard before violating it.
"The punishment I received that day changed my life forever. Unable to move, I stayed where he left me on the bed, lying in my own blood ... My only clear memory remains the ferocity of the pain that tears my body ".
The unspeakable became utterly depraved when he began to sell it to other men. Sometimes woke up in the middle of the night and put her in someone's car. Or she would end up in a trailer park, with a stranger. One of the most disgusting episodes in Bailee's story is her father's implicit sexual abuse of his beloved pet dog, Toby, whom she was forced to watch and support. "What my father had done to my dog, I had never imagined possible," she wrote. "As a witness to a horrendous horror crime, I knew he could not do anything and would not do me."
But worse than the fear was the shame. It's a shameful secret that you'd rather die with than have people know. Because I thought I was so bad, I couldn't let anybody know how bad I was. The paedophile is relying on that, manipulating you, threatening you, because if they get found out they are in big trouble. But they don't tell you that; they say you are in big trouble. People need to know that the first time a child is interfered with, their life is never the same again. I hated myself. Only later did I realize that my father was simply unable to love me because he hated himself so much. He was raped while he was a boy by two priests, and I often say to myself, "Well, if it had not happened to him, maybe what he did to me would not have happened. This does not justify it. We all have the power to choose at the end of the day .."
We should never be afraid to push for answers. Carrie Bailee is transforming the way the "victim story" is told. By giving voice to her lived experience of trauma and abuse, Carrie provides hope, honesty and inspiration throughout her writing, her speaking and her performing. Bailee's story seems so far off the scale of human depravity that at times it is hard to suspend disbelief. The netherworld she describes swarms with horrors: young children sold for sex, children coerced into acting out the fantasies of organised paedophile rings, bestiality, bondage and ritual humiliation. Watch the author published, Carrie Bailee, tell the dark memories, but also his escape. Carrie also wrote a revealing autobiography drawing the curtain on a world of hidden and often avoided abuse.
For more details on Carrie's work: flyingonbrokenwings.com
@AnarchoPirate