Criticism, fiction and other writing
Alice Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, began to abuse his stepdaughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s daughter by her first marriage, when Ms Skinner was nine years old. The abuse continued until she became a teenager, a period of about 4 years. Ms Skinner told her mother about the abuse in a letter she sent in 1992, when Ms Skinner was in her 20s. Munro left her husband for a short time but returned to him and remained with him until his death.
Fremlin admitted the facts in letters but denied culpability, in effect blaming the child for having seduced him when she was just nine years old. In 2005, Ms Skinner took Fremlin’s letters to the police. He was charged with indecent assault to which he pleaded guilty. The court imposed a suspended sentence and two years’ probation on the 80-year-old.
Ms Skinner wrote about the abuse and its aftermath in the Toronto Star earlier this year. I haven’t got a subscription to the Toronto Star and I’ve relied on this report in The Guardian for the facts summarized above.
I first heard the term “child sexual abuse” on International Women’s Day, 8 March 1987, when I attended a public meeting in Trinity College Dublin at which Dr Moira Woods and another speaker told their audience that the abuse of children was a widespread and largely concealed problem in Ireland, causing extreme suffering to large numbers of children across the country. That there was in effect a conspiracy to keep the problem hidden.
This revelation profoundly changed my fundamental beliefs about the world, and particularly about the nature and causes of human evil. I was then coming up to my 30th birthday and had strong views about the functioning of society and human nature which I’d worked out, with some difficulty, a few years earlier. The last thing I wanted was for those views to be challenged. They were hard won and I didn’t want to let them go. Moira Woods’s revelations didn’t just challenge them, they undermined them completely.
Completely, but not immediately. People don’t — well, I didn’t — change what they see as their fundamental beliefs just like that, merely because they’ve been presented with evidence that contradicts them. In my case the change took at least a decade, probably longer. I don’t remember exactly when it was that I noticed that I’d come to accept that child sexual abuse was not just real but widespread, commonplace. I do remember clearly that in 1992, the year that Alice Munro was told about her husband’s abuse of her daughter, and five years after I’d first heard about the topic, I was still in denial.
Part of my difficulty was that my legal training had made me suspicious of many of the evidentiary tools being used by child welfare specialists and other investigators of the abuse of children. I didn’t believe that recovered memories, hearsay evidence, “anatomically correct” dolls or the presence of anal dilation could produce results that could be relied on in taking children away from their parents. I was concerned that children were being asked questions framed in such a way as to suggest the answers the investigators wanted. My scepticism was wholly in line with what I’d been taught. I was far from being alone in this.
So, if somebody had come to me in 1992 and said that she or he had been sexually abused, I’d have been sceptical at best. 1992 was only 32 years ago. It’s easy for us to forget just how different the world seemed then. I was convinced at the time that the major threat to the wellbeing of children and other vulnerable people was emanating from political, social and economic institutions and forces — from “the system”, if you like — not from apparently unremarkable individual men living in ordinary families. In short, I’m inclined to be understanding, if not forgiving, of Munro’s refusal to support her daughter after she’d been told about the abuse. If Munro had known about the abuse while it was still going on I might well take a different view, but according to Ms Skinner’s account, she first told her mother about it about twelve years after the abuse had ended.
You may well object that Munro’s situation in 1992 was different from mine. She knew that the abuse had taken place, because Fremlin confirmed it. With that knowledge, she had no excuse for taking her husband’s side against her daughter. But, while he admitted the facts, he did not accept any blame for them. As The Guardian story quotes Ms Skinner:
“He described my nine-year-old self as a ‘homewrecker,’” she wrote, adding that he accused her of invading his bedroom “for sexual adventure”.
It was common in those days for child sex abusers to blame their young victims for their own abuse: that’s something else that I learned from Dr Woods’s 1987 lecture. Presumably many abusers convince themselves that they are, in fact, relatively blameless. That’s part of how congnitive dissonance works: most people need to believe that we are the good guys, however strong the evidence to the contrary. If Fremlin was able to believe that he had been seduced by a wanton 9-year-old, mightn’t he have convinced Munro, too, that this was the case?
Parents can often take a very distorted view of their own children’s behaviour and motivations. I’ve come across a few loving mothers who have believed their young (preteen) children capable of implacable malevolence.
None of this is meant to minimize Andrea Skinner’s distress or suffering, or to excuse Alice Munro’s treatment of her daughter. There can be no doubt that Munro failed badly in her duty to her youngest child. My purpose in writing this post is not to excuse Munro’s. I have read several posts and articles whose authors say that, because of her unconscionable behaviour, they can no longer read her stories. I don’t intend to stop reading them. In fact — and I accept that I risk causing additional distress to Ms Skinner by saying so — I might be more inclined to read these stories now that I know their author was not some all-wise, impeccable moral authority.
Some links: Here is my post about the short story collection, Runaway, the only work of Munro’s that I’ve written about so far.
And this is Laura Miller’s recent Slate piece, following the revelations about Munro’s callousness towards her daughter.
Posted by Art on 18-Aug-2024.