After surviving childhood sexual abuse, Evans man finds strength through faith to help sex offenders, victims

Sept. 10--On a summer day decades ago, in a Midwestern town, a 9-year-old boy hid in a closet and cried.

On the other side of the closet door, throughout the rest of the house, was a group of older boys and men. They'd hunted him for four years now. They lived in his town of about 5,500 and they were looking for him again.

Since he was 5 years old, the older men had periodically found the boy when he was playing outside alone and stole him away to places like this house, where they would sexually abuse him. They would terrify the boy into silence by threatening him, his family and even his pet dog. They beat him. They told him no one would want him if they knew what had happened. Then, after a few hours, they would take him back to town and drop him off, certain he would keep their terrible secret.

The day the boy hid in the closet was the last time they'd hurt him, though. On that day, he prayed three words -- "Father help me" -- and the tears stopped.

Within a year, the boy's family had moved away from the town and its ring of child rapists.

Looking back, Sean Wheeler, who now lives in Evans, is reminded of the moment he started praying.

From the beginning, Christian faith played an important role in Wheeler's path to freedom from that childhood trauma, he said, as it has in all other areas of his life.

Gradually, after months of counseling, he started to realize by sharing his story, he might be able to help others. In the past few years, he's spoken at conferences and in churches to crowds of thousands of people, working to normalize the discussion about sexual abuse of children.

"My every wound is becoming a weapon to help other people," he said.

Wheeler also speaks to people who have abused children. He seeks them out. In no way does he condone what they did, but he wants to help them if he can. For the past year and a half, he's worked with a prison ministry to share his story with sex offenders recently released on parole. When he says he forgives them, he means it.

Today, when Wheeler remembers the long, winding path he took to freedom from the sexual abuse of his childhood, he is reminded that first prayer has been answered.

Asking for help

For decades, he'd kept what he survived as a child a secret. The group of men who abused him told him his life was pointless after he turned 18, and he believed them. He stopped celebrating his birthday. The hurt he carried with him sometimes pushed his friends away. He lost a job. He thought about killing himself.

It all came to a head one night when he was watching a movie with his wife in 2010. In the movie, a grown man was working to live with a tumultuous past marred by sexual abuse. The man in the movie was an officer in the Navy, just as Wheeler himself had been for years.

"It sent me flying out of the room," Wheeler said. "My wife found me curled up in a ball in the kitchen, crying."

That, Wheeler said, was the night he and his wife decided he should begin looking for a counselor.

When Wheeler, as a man in his 40s, started seeing the counselor he would work with for the next few years, he couldn't say the word "molestation" out loud. He called it the "m word." Verbalizing it was too painful, and he didn't like the word's connotation.

The counselor told him if he couldn't say the word, he should try to write it. That was easier for Wheeler, who had studied journalism in college. Much of his therapy focused on transcribing his memories in journals and fighting through years of pain and guilt through writing. He wrote about the abuse, but it was more than that -- he wrote about his childhood and about the sometimes-rocky relationships he had with his family. He was never abused by anyone in his family, but his home life had still been difficult. Later on in his life, he and his dad stopped talking to each other for a time. Those early journal entries were filled with anecdotes about times he felt alone as a child, which made him, in some ways, vulnerable to sexual abuse.

Gradually, Wheeler worked to hammer those painful memories into a timeline, and it allowed him to confront his story.

One in six

It's not a story everyone wants to hear, and Wheeler believes at least part of the reason for that has to do with the fact he is a man. He said in the past, when he's tried to reach out to media organizations to find an audience for his story, he's been told sexual abuse and sex trafficking is a girls-only issue.

"People don't seem to realize this happens to boys," Wheeler said. "Or, worse, they don't seem to care."

Wheeler does not want to devalue the abuse girls endure at the hands of adults. He knows it happens -- in America, one in four girls will be abused by the time they are 18, he said.

But, he said, one in six boys will also experience sexual abuse by the time they are adults. And, he said, it can be even more difficult for a boy to come forward about sexual abuse.

"Boys were expected to be tough, and manly, and (there was a belief that) if you let (sexual abuse) happen to you, somehow it's your fault," he said. "Guys don't like to talk about it."

The stigma isn't quite as bad as it was when he was growing up, he said, but it's still there. He cited studies from the 1990s and early-2000s that estimated the number of known cases of sexual abuse against boys was vastly underrepresented, because boys are so reluctant to admit victimization.

Paula Bragg agrees. She is the director of Sexual Assault Response Advocates Inc. in Fort Morgan. Her organization works to provide therapy and advocacy for children who have been sexually abused. The program serves the entire northeastern corner of Colorado, which means it provides services for about 140 kids a year. She estimates about 40 percent of those children are boys, but she said she thinks many more boys are not reporting their abuse.

Much like Wheeler, she blames a culture that emphasizes old-fashioned masculinity.

"I do think there is a stigma (for boys)," she said. "Somebody sexually assaulting them may lead them to question their sexuality."

Because abuse is so underreported, offenders often have many victims. One study found male abusers who perpetrated against girls had, on average, about 52 victims each. The same study reported male offenders who abused boys had about 150 victims each.

"We have boys that cross all ages," she said. "Many times when a boy does report, it's later on."

Sometimes they wait even longer. Bragg said sometimes she's had grown men tell her, for the first time in their lives, they were sexually abused as children. Until that point, they carried that trauma with them and did their best to live around it.

Wheeler did, too. Once the sexual abuse started, he said, friends and family described him as going from being a sweet little boy to an angry, distant child. The anger followed him for years, and by the time he was an adult, he'd developed a tremor in his hands, a nervous tick resulting from the mental trauma of his youth.

TESTIFYING

The first time Wheeler spoke publicly about his abuse and his path to freedom was five years ago. His counselor, also a Christian, invited him to speak at one of her friend's churches.

At first he told her he couldn't do it. He didn't know what he would say. He was terrified. But he felt called to speak. So he did his best to have faith, as he had with every other step in his healing process, and soon found himself in front of a crowd of about 40 people.

"I was about to say the word 'molested' out loud to a room full of people," he later wrote.

Unsure of what to say, he simply told his story. It was exhausting, and parts of it brought him to tears, but the words gained momentum as he went on.

"Once you start talking, it starts coming out, and it's hard to stop," he said.

Afterward, several people told him they were moved by his words. It was a pivotal moment for Wheeler, who hadn't thought much about speaking publicly before that day.

Earlier in his therapy, Wheeler's counselor urged him to come with her to a service at Rez.Church in Loveland, which has a congregation of about 5,000 people. Wheeler still attends services there.

Rez.Church emphasizes a four-step process to faith, the last of which is "make a difference." Wheeler has adopted that phrase as something of a motto.

"As I worked through counseling I realized my purpose was to help the other me's out there," he said.

It took time to reconcile himself with the reality strangers were going to hear the jagged story of his abuse, survival and freedom. For most of his life, even his friends and family didn't know that story.

In the end, though, that decades-long silence is part of why he chose to keep speaking. He knows people don't talk about sexual abuse of children. He wants to change that.

"I speak because if I don't, who will?" He said. "I'm not that strong or that brave, I just got tired of feeling like I was fighting alone."

He started out small -- he spoke at four churches and at two Christian conferences. He recorded a video for Rez.Church's 2015 Easter service, and on that day spoke to all 5,000 of the church's members. He's landing speaking gigs outside the state too -- this past month, he estimated about 3,000 people heard him speak at a Bible college in Dallas.

'It gives you compassion'

For much of his adult life, Wheeler hated having his picture taken. The sound of a camera's shutter reminded him of the times his abusers forced him into child pornography. Through his faith and his counseling, Wheeler said he's been set free from the fear and anger the experience ignited within him, but he'll never forget the abuse he survived.

"There are very few days those memories don't run through my head now," he said.

But they don't control him. He uses them as a tool.

A year and a half ago, Wheeler said one of the people at the Rez.Church introduced him to a prison ministry program aimed at working with sex offenders who have abused children. The program's goal is to help sex offenders find faith and to keep from reoffending after they are out of prison. The sex offenders in the program have already become Christians, Wheeler said, and are trying to start a new life outside of prison. He's not a member of the clergy, but he is in a unique position to speak to them.

Wheeler remembers a time a sex offender, wracked with guilt, confessed he'd gone to prison for possessing child pornography. Even after prison, Wheeler said, the man could not deal with his past.

"I said to him, 'as somebody who was on the other side of that camera, I release you from that,'" Wheeler said. "And you could see this weight just lifted off him. Then he cried a lot, and I cried a lot ... but I can say that to them and it means something more. You can tell it makes a difference in their life."

Often, he said, offenders are nonplussed when confronted with Wheeler's brand of matter-of-fact forgiveness. They ask him how he, a survivor of such abuse, could ever work with child rapists and people who have possessed child pornography. Wheeler's answer is simple. God forgives everyone, so Wheeler himself needs to forgive people, too.

Most of the people he works with are eager about getting better, but once, he said, a sex offender tried to defend his actions by telling Wheeler child pornography is a victimless crime and he wasn't hurting anyone by watching it.

"I said, 'Tell that to a 7-year-old me,'" Wheeler said.

Still, he said he's able to form honest relationships with most of the sex offenders he meets. He knows sex offenders can't necessarily change their sexual urges, but they can choose not to reoffend. He compares it to the way an alcoholic can choose not to drink.

"When you start to see them as humans who had a terrible past themselves, it gives you compassion," he said. "I have a great deal of affection for the guys I work with."

One of the things that frustrates Wheeler is many people's inability to forgive sex offenders. The prison ministry he works with has been forced to keep a low profile, he said, because once people know where to find sex offenders, they often want to hurt them or force them to move. Even the people who operate the ministry are hesitant to say who they are or what they do, he said, because of the stigma attached to it.

Once, after speaking to a crowd, Wheeler said an audience member came up to him and said he wanted to commit a crime in order to get into prison and hurt sex offenders.

"(It's) sad, really, that some people want to hurt others who are only trying to find healing," he said in an email. "(It) makes me want to corner such people and say, 'Hey, if I can forgive, what's your problem?'"

Wheeler wants to speak to as many people as possible. He wants to help both victims and sex offenders, and he believes God is using his story to do that. It's difficult, but it's getting easier.

Often, after he's done speaking, audience members will come up to him and tell him they are also abuse survivors, and they also kept it a secret. Those are the moments that really matter.

"When people realize they're not alone, that's huge," he said.

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