“Telling your story will be the beginning of your healing. You will see light at the end of the tunnel.”
Gail Gardner is a pastoral counselor, advocate, listener, writer, and survivor of sexual violence.
She says that she experienced child sexual abuse by a family member starting at age 5.
“The grooming was the most devastating part of it. I was so young when it started. Psychologically, it had a huge effect on my personality and how I viewed myself.”
Gail didn’t feel that she could talk about what happened to her and turned to unhealthy coping mechanisms such as drugs and alcohol.
She joined a church, which provided the support and community she was seeking, and soon started her education to become a minister. It was during this period that Gail’s home was broken into and she survived rape. “I was a single parent. My nine-year-old son and I were asleep in my bed when the perpetrator broke in.”
“I wondered—why does this keep happening to me?”
Gail called the police and was taken to the hospital to get a sexual assault forensic exam, also known as a rape kit.
“It was archaic. I was an African American woman who had been raped, which was not necessarily taken seriously at that time. I was taken to a bare hospital room that only had a tray of metal instruments in it. All of my clothes were taken away and I was only given a sheet to wear. It was freezing cold. They left me in there by myself for so long, just waiting. It was horrible. When the nurse finally came in, she started the exam without saying a word to me. The experience was awful—it was like being raped all over again.”
Gail told some members of her church community what had happened and was met with unsupportive reponses.
“People I had trusted said hurtful things to me. They told me to get over it. Told me that I wanted it. They treated me like I had a disease.”
Gail knew she needed to talk to someone, but couldn’t find any resources in her area.
“At that time, there was no way to get help. There was no RAINN, no local sexual assault service providers, no one to help me at all. I wanted to go to counseling, but as a single parent, couldn’t afford it. I just had to push my way through in order to survive.”
For decades, Gail hadn’t told her mother about the abuse, but after the second incident of sexual violence, she knew she needed to talk about the childhood abuse in order to start healing from both experiences. Her mother and the rest of her family reacted in a supportive way. Gail found that talking about her own experiences freed others to talk about abuse they had endured and led the family to have important and overdue conversations.
“People will say ‘what happens in this house, stays in this house.’ But by silencing survivors in that way, you pass the trauma on to the next generation.” For Gail, supporting and advocating for other survivors has been the most important aspect of her healing. She got her GED and undergraduate degree, then went on to receive a master’s degree in pastoral counseling as well as a master’s degree in education. Not only is she passionate about supporting survivors, but she is on a mission to educate parents, teachers, and anyone who works with children about the warning signs of child sexual abuse. “People need to be informed. They need to know how to recognize sexual abuse and how to support someone who’s gone through it.”