Okay, so you were totally cool with Spiderman taking on the world. Still, as soon as you discover he’s seventeen, all those comments you made about his alter ego being lazy, selfish, manipulative, etc, no longer apply because hey he’s a fucking hero. Um, yeah they do, and it doesn’t change the fact that the victim of your abuse now has to live with the fact that the world still thought he was lazy, selfish, or even dare I say it, abusive.
Yeah, I’m talking to the boys again because they don’t fucking listen to me. If you want to be a hero, if you want to be seen as a hero, then you have to stop being a douchbag.
The teachers of my past (and I use this term loosely) were fucking idiots. They held themselves up to these high standards of ethics, but throughout my teen years, not a single person knew when one of the boys, or myself, was being abused.
And when we acted out we were the problem and we couldn’t say anything because our enemies, our abusers, were LITERALLY trying to kill us on some days.
All of us.
Now we’re on different sides of things. I’ve gone to the police, been called a rat, and couldn’t care less. I did my part. I did what I had to do to make sure that those same men will now be watched so that if they try it again, they will be arrested.
If people choose not to believe me when I say that Sean Garfield, Chris Tucker (local tattoo artist), and several others including Keith Rainier are guilty of rape against children, there’s 0.0% I can do anything other than tell you, I’m telling you now, these men are dangerous.
Erron Wayne Giles is in prison and so is Rainier, but the others are not. Like Robert Kelly, their crimes may not come out for years, against anyone else, but I’m here, and I told my story – repeatedly y – and now suddenly people want to cozy up to me like Flash from No Way Home. Nuh-uh. You had your chance to teach, you had years of telling me I was stupid, lazy, selfish, not good enough, and that I was weaponizing my tears when in reality I was so overwhelmed with feeling like a failure because of reasons out of my control.
Now it’s your turn to learn.
There were 15 kids in that class, out of the 15 of us, 13 were being abused in a variety of ways, one who was adopted, one who was Chinese, and one who you sent back to Juvi for no reason because you illegally looked through his bag. Now he’s homeless. It’s not hard to put two and two together and come up with ten.
At least one of those students in the other building had a father who orchestrated what happened to us and can never come forward without fear of his own children being next, and another is now dead.
This all happened because teachers who claimed to love their kids had no idea this shit was happening in Surrey BC, Or more accurately, at the North Delta Alternative program.
We were there, every day trying to learn after nights of being abused and days learning to hide the bruises or pretending to “forget” so we didn’t have to talk about it.
This is the kind of shit. that superheroes go through, but we don’t get called superheroes.
We get called lazy students. Our parents get called and then we get beatings at home, if not worse, and trust There is definitely worse than being beaten at home when your dad is the neighborhood pedophile king.
The lawsuit that I could file would be a trillion-dollar one if I could get other victims to come forward, but they are so terrified of the fact that so many are so interwoven with the abusers that we grew up with that they don’t have the privilege of saying they escaped like I do. Between ignorant teachers, stupid cops, and the fact that no one can keep a secret like a sixteen-year-old afraid to die, where were we supposed to turn?
These are all relatable issues to superhero films – take Ironman, when he finally sees how dark and scary the universes are, he has an emotional breakdown, who wouldn’t? You call him a hero, you call Robert Downey Jr a hero by extension, (now) but you didn’t always. The 90s were a mess for him, he wasn’t a hero then, and you sure as fuck didn’t give him the same kind of leeway you give to Kanye West for the shit he’s been saying recently.
In the 90s Robert Downey Jr. Wasn’t a hero, he was a drug addict and a drunk, he didn’t have mental health issues he had addiction issues, and that’s how we spoke about him in public, but today he’s a scientific marvel. Someone who comes back from the brink of death more than once, to shower the world with Ironman films and science and technology, woopie doo. What the fuck did he have to go through to get you to see him as a hero?
You’ll never know because he doesn’t fucking talk about it, and it’s not because he’s making room for those of us who are following in his footsteps, it’s because he can’t because it’s fucking hard.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to step off the mask, and say Yes, I’m Devon J Hall, but I’m also The Loud Mouth Brown Girl, and that comes with a host of mental health issues you aren’t prepared for”? Because that’s what I have to do every time I want to work with someone because this entire brand is about showing people you can have a life with mental health issues.
In America’s Sweetheart, we see Julia Roberts play Kiki, who loses weight for a guy but only really had the weight, to begin with, because of crippling mental health issues. We also see Catherine Zeta-Jones playing a heartless clueless snob who only really thinks about herself. For years this is how we saw these two women even in public. Julia’s been called every name in the book because she married her husband after he divorced his wife for her, it was love for them, but to everyone else, their relationship is just gossip fodder.
What You See On The OutSide Is Never The Reality. There are lots of people who think I should get over what was done to me, and the adults that should have protected me, but the problem is Sylvia, that many of the same kids who look up to you now, are the same kids reading this blog wondering why you didn’t protect them in North Delta when you had the chance.
Twice: The number of times I had a weapon pulled on me at school. 3 times the number of times cops were called whether I wanted them to be or not, and 420,000,000 times is the number of times that I’ve been called a rat while trying to stop child pedophiles from destroying the lives of children, whilst the adults in the lives of those kids have done nothing about the signs they see.
In short, stop calling kids lazy.
There are reasons that kids are hiding stuff from you, and more often than not it’s not that they don’t trust you it’s that they are afraid, so the next time you consider a kid who isn’t turning in homework, ask yourself…could they be tired of being abused at home? Are they safe? And then ask the kid, or at least let them know they have the option of coming to you if something is going on, WITHOUT punishing them for telling the truth.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
If you have thoughts you’d like to add about this post, please leave a message, and let’s talk about them
That would have saved a lot of us and we might have actually graduated from Highschool.
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 