A survivor of a paedophile ring tells her story

Date

September 19, 201

Survivor: Carrie Bailee hopes her story will assist others who have suffered like she has.Photo: Simon Schluter. Hair and make-up by Yvonne Borland

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. Now she's turning her attention to helping other victims. By Deborah Snow. 

There is something peculiar about the few family photos Carrie Bailee has kept from her childhood years. In all the pictures that used to feature both her adoptive parents, the image of her father has been excised - as if her mother, who wielded the scissors, wanted to erase any visual evidence that the man she married ever existed. Bailee, now 38, never reveals her father's name, but he is a huge, threatening presence in a book to be published on October 1.

Days of innocence: Carrie, aged 16 months, with her mother. Photo: courtesy of Carrie Bailee

Flying On Broken Wings (Affirm Press) 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," Bailee writes. "That became the role I took on - every other weekend."

Like many children, Bailee didn't speak up, shamed and manipulated into believing the abuse was her fault. Her mother didn't learn the truth until her daughter was well into her teens. In early adulthood, Bailee started writing a private memoir, but only recently became determined to publish her story.

That decision, she says, was sparked in part by the anger that swept over her after two notorious rape and murder cases in 2012: that of Jill Meagher, slaughtered in a Melbourne laneway, and Indian woman Jyoti Singh Pandey, violated and beaten by five men on a Delhi bus before dying an agonising death in hospital days later.

Carrie, aged four with her younger sister Jillian. Photo: courtesy of Carrie Bailee

"I was gutted. Obviously it's happened a million times, but Jill Meagher's death really affected me. And then when Jyoti Singh Pandey died from [gang rape] injuries, I got in touch with anger I didn't even know I had in me," she says.

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.

As I sit opposite her in the pale, echoing interior of the Melbourne photo studio where she has reluctantly agreed to an interview, her low voice frequently trails off when we touch on sensitive details. Bailee, a slight, olive-skinned woman with a mane of tawny hair, has brought three companions along for support: two from the office of her publisher, and one, a former counsellor of Bailee's. The women cluster protectively nearby, heading off questions they judge too intrusive. There is a reason for this. Bailee has at times suffered flashbacks, episodes that invade the present and sometimes drag her back so deeply into her dark past that they leave her bleeding on the floor as she physically re-enacts, and mentally re-experiences, the horrors inflicted on her. A psychiatrist who treated her describes it as "significant dissociative functioning as part of severe post-traumatic stress".

A better place: Bailee remains on good terms with her ex-husband Chris, seen here with their daughters Rhian and Jordan.Photo: courtesy of Carrie Bailee

There is an unspoken sense that the wrong question could cause the thin ice beneath this interview to crack. "I have my good days, probably more good than bad, but I have my bad days still," says Bailee. "And I will likely always be affected and impacted by what happened to me."

Bailee was four when her father first inflicted sexual violence on her small body. With her mother away receiving treatment for breast cancer, he caught her naked in the garden one sweltering afternoon, talking over the fence to some local boys who'd conned her into taking her swimsuit off. Convulsed with anger, he dragged her into the house, marched her to the bathroom, and plunged her into a scalding bath, using a toothbrush to scrub "in the places the soap wouldn't reach".

Four years later the things he did to her body went from the "imaginable", as she puts it, to the "unspeakable". One rainy afternoon, as he sat drinking Scotch and dozing in front of the TV, eight-year-old Bailee slipped out to the kitchen to amuse herself, jumping a skipping rope which she'd tied around the chairs.

I will survive: Bailee with Rhian. Photo: courtesy of Carrie Bailee

Abruptly, he stormed in and dragged her to the bedroom, where he used the skipping rope to tie her to the headboard before raping her for the first time. "The punishment I received that day changed my life forever," she writes. "Unable to move, I remained where he left me - on his bed, lying in my own blood ... My only crystal-clear recollection remains the ferocity of the pain ripping through my body".

The following year, the unspeakable became the utterly depraved when he started selling her to other men. Sometimes he would wake her in the middle of the night and put her in someone's car. Or she would find herself in a trailer park, with a stranger.

I ask if he was literally taking money from these men, and she replies, "Yes, sometimes, sometimes." But it's obvious this line of questioning is causing significant unease. One of the guardian angels tells her, "You don't have to talk about this", and asks if she wants water, or a walk outside. After a moment she collects herself. Gingerly, we press on.

Bailee had a younger sister, Jillian, who was spared most of the abuse because she learnt to feign sickness to avoid access visits. That left the older sister to bear the brunt of her father's increasingly sadistic demands. One recurring motif in the book is a basement with 12 steps leading down to it. It's a walk, Bailee writes, that "I will remember for the rest of my life".

"I knew that once I got to the 12th step, it would be too late. Then my pants were being forcefully ripped down. I tried my hardest to keep them on. But being nine years old, the battle wasn't mine to win."

There were other children in the basement on occasion, she says, "more men than children", and each child had a script they would be forced to act out. There were cameras. To this day she cannot stand the smell of a polaroid.

She writes of having little memory of the years between nine and 11. But there are vignettes of chilling clarity. "I shook with terror and tried to prepare myself for the pain I was about to receive" she writes of one occasion. "As with the children I saw in the pictures on the back of the room's door, their terror and mine would be remembered for years to come."

She tells me she learnt to absent herself in spirit from what was happening to her body. "In the basement it was horrible, because there was nothing, and it was terrifying, there was nowhere to go," she says. "But in another room down there, there was a window. You couldn't see much, but you could see sky. I had to practise appreciating one thing, a point of light. If I didn't have it, I created it. That got my mind away from what was happening; my body had to stay, but my mind sure didn't."

One of the most sickening episodes in Bailee's account is her father's implied sexual abuse of her beloved pet dog, Toby, which she was forced to watch, and abet. "What my father had done to my dog I had never imagined possible," she writes. "As the witness to a crime of such appalling horror, I knew there was nothing he could not, and would not, do to me."

Throughout the book, Bailee walks a carefully drawn line between allusion and description. "The world doesn't have to know everything" she says. "I don't want it to be voyeuristic. People say, 'oh my god, this was horrific' or whatever, and I'm like, "Im so sorry that my lived experience was so traumatiising for you to read about', but I was very careful how I wrote it... Its like witnessing a train wreck, but you can turn away at the moment of impact. Where I am explicit is where I describe what the abuse did to the child. Because people have to know that, the first time a child is interfered with, their life is never the same again."

When Bailee was 14, two events finally pulled her free from her father. He shocked her out of years of silence by branding the underside of her left breast with a curling iron. And she finally began to open up to Sheila, a counsellor in Canada.  Sheila informed the police and also Bailee's mother, who could no longer avoid seeing the horror that had been under her nose for years.

Her mother died a few years ago and Bailee is very protective of her memory, describing her "dignity and integrity". Nonetheless, she found it hard to forgive what seems to have been the older woman's almost wilful blindness: "I hated her for a long time, probably till I was about 25 [after Bailee's two daughters were born]. I realised she just did the best she could. I think she wasn't able to see because she was so damaged herself."

Her feelings about her father - the man she describes as a monster - are much more profoundly conflicted. After hearing of his death a decade ago, she felt a burden lift, but was shocked to find herself mourning the father-daughter relationship she never had. "I don't know if I ever hated him, you know. I hated me, and that I was so unlovable. It was only later I realised ... he was just incapable of loving me because he hated himself so much. He was raped when he was a boy by two priests, and I often think, 'Well, had that not happened to him, maybe what he did to me wouldn't have happened.' It doesn't justify it. We all have the power to choose at the end of the day ... and he didn't exercise that."

How was it that no one outside the family saw, for years, any evidence of what was going on? "I was physically showing signs where you couldn't see it," she replies. "If he hit me, it was always in the back of my head, where it was not going to leave a mark."

Yet she now finds it extraordinary that no one during her primary or junior high school years got anywhere near the truth. One of two teachers twigged something might be amiss - then put it down to the emotional effects of her parents' divorce.

"I would sit there in class and pull my eyelashes out," she recalls. "You know, that's weird. I'd walk along this chicken-wire fence at school, with my shoulder pressed on it. I would walk really slowly all the way up and turn and go all the way back ... If I saw a kid doing stuff like that, not engaging, not playing with anybody, I would think, 'What's going on with you?' "

We should never be afraid to push for answers, she says. "Don't be scared to ask why. Why did this little happy kid go from that, to withdrawn and angry."

As for the silence of the victim, she talks of fear, and also of the desperate misplaced loyalty of a child who did not want to hurt anyone's feelings. She was afraid, too, for her sister and her mother. In the storage area below her father's house was a mound of earth. "That's where the last little girl who told is buried," he would say to her.

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."

Bailee's confessions to the Canadian counsellor triggered a chaotic series of events. She suffered a breakdown and was briefly locked in a psychiatric ward. At 15, she ran away, attempted suicide more than once, and spent time in a shelter for homeless teens. It was there that a 17-year-old prostitute introduced her to Terrence, a smooth-talking West Indian 10 years her senior.

At first, he showered her with attention and compliments. "I thought, 'He is going to protect me, he is gonna make me safe,' " Bailee recalls. But the careful grooming soon gave way to brutality and she was recruited into his stable of teen prostitutes, even after she'd witnessed him raping and beating another of the girls.

How could she not have run at that point, after all her father had inflicted on her? "I think because" - she pauses, trying to make sense of it - "it just validated my worst fear that this is all you are good for. That this is what men do."

It's a pattern that would not surprise many of those who've worked with survivors of child sexual abuse. Bessel van der Kolk, an American psychiatrist who specialises in trauma, observes that "many traumatised people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma".

By the time she'd turned 16, Bailee had moved from the shelter into the home of a friend of a friend, a single mother she names only as Tami, who was the first person to openly show her affection. (Her adoptive mother had been almost pathologically undemonstrative.) Yet despite this safe haven, Bailee took years to fully escape Terrence's clutches. She says he pimped her from 16 to 17, 'then tried again from 18 to 19. "Shame disconnects you from love," she says. "From giving it and receiving it ... my trust was shattered. I hated myself. I viewed myself as unworthy, unlovable and undeserving of connection and belonging."

Tami finally wrenched her away after seeing burns on Bailee's body. Whether Terrence couldn't spell or just ran out of room, Bailee doesn't know, but his parting gift was the letters WHOR branded by cigarettes across her chest. Bailee tried to attend college but had trouble coping because of flashbacks. In September 1996, one month shy of her 21st birthday, she fled to Australia, picking it as "the furthest place I could possibly get to".

In Canada, Bailee felt that she'd been hiding from two different circles: her father's and Terrence's. In Australia, she felt the freedom of not knowing anyone, not fearing recognition by nameless men who'd once forced themselves on her body. "It was amazing. Because I wasn't looking over my shoulder."

Yet grim fortune followed her here, too. Within a few weeks of landing in Australia she was raped on board a ship in Sydney Harbour. Her attacker was charged, but found not guilty. The police who had helped prosecute that case encouraged her to co-operate with Canadian authorities to try to bring her father and his collaborators to justice, but she couldn't face the prospect of returning.

She moved to Melbourne, but eventually faced the risk of deportation because she'd overstayed her visa. Then, in September 1998, workers at the women's refuge where she was staying put her in touch with psychiatrist Helen Driscoll, one of Australia's leading trauma experts. Driscoll came up with a plan to have Bailee seek refugee status based on her fear of being tracked down by her abusers if she returned to Canada.

Driscoll gave powerful evidence to the Refugee Review Tribunal, as did Bailee herself, and her mother, who wrote a brave letter in which she finally divulged her former husband's background as an abused child himself. Driscoll told the tribunal that staff at the centre where Bailee had been staying had witnessed her "extreme" flashbacks. "They have described to me that Carrie is like a terrorised young child being orally raped and sexually assaulted in a basement by men," the psychiatrist said.

She added that if Bailee was returned to her country of birth, she would never heal. "Like other young adults who have survived sadistic abuses involving a perpetrator group engaged in the making of depraved child pornography, the global fear is all-encompassing. Carrie cannot know who all the perpetrators are. She fears coming into contact with an abuser through any male in her country of origin."

Bailee used simpler words in her plea to the panel: "I know that Canada is not looked upon as a war-torn country. But I've been at war since the day I was born."

The ruling, when it came, was not favourable. Tribunal members said they accepted her evidence "in its entirety", but that there was no recognised refugee category that would cover her case. In desperation, Driscoll contacted the office of then independent senator Brian Harradine, whose staff at that time included Melinda Tankard Reist, later a prominent anti-pornography campaigner and advocate for girls' welfare.

Between them, Tankard Reist and Harradine pushed the case before then immigration minister Philip Ruddock who, after several agonising months, gave Bailee (then pregnant with her first child) a special humanitarian visa to live in Australia permanently.

These days, Bailee is experimenting with spoken- word poetry as a way of sharing her experiences, and sometimes joins Tankard Reist in talks to schoolgirls, urging them to speak up if they know or suspect something is amiss.

"What excites me, more than the book, more than anything else, is just seeking how these girls respond to my courage and then realising how contagious that is" she says.

She does not want to be seen as a victim. She feels she has found her strength, and her voice.

I raise with Driscoll and Tankard Reist - and with Bailee herself - some elements of her story that have troubled me. Bailee will not entrust me with her father's name, her true surname (Bailee is a pseudonym) or the name of the town she grew up in, even though I promise not to publish these. "I don't know you," she says. "I don't want to be tracked. I'm just protecting myself ... It is not something I have made up."

I confess struggling to understand how, as a nine-year-old, she could have - as described in her book - knifed a German shepherd dog lunging at her in a basement, using a steak knife she had concealed in her clothing. I mention this story to several medical people including my GP, who does not dismiss it. The GP has worked with troubled adolescent girls for years and tells me, "Imagine what you think is the worst going on out there - and you haven't even got near the bottom of the pit."

Tankard Reist says what happened to Bailee is "far beyond the realm of ordinary human experience, most of us would have no idea. I find her story compelling - and consistent with what has happened to other survivors of child sex abuse around the world."

Driscoll, who worked with Bailee intensively, says everything in the book is consistent with what she told her in treatment over the years. "Sadly" she tells me in an email, "Carrie's personal abuse history is not new. What is different is her ability and courage to write this account, with the purpose of adding to social awareness, enable change, and to encourage others who are suffering; that a life of purpose and meaning with positive human connectedness can be made."

Bailee says she's now in a better place than she's ever been. She remains on amicable terms with Chris, the man she married once she settled in Australia but from whom she is now separated. Her oldest daughter, aged 15, has encouraged her to publish her story. "I want survivors to connect with me, have compassion for themselves and see it wasn't their shame," she says. "You step out of that victim mentality and you can go on to flourish."

Bailee has become an ambassador for the Gatehouse Young Women's Project in Melbourne, which works with girls and young women at high risk of sexual exploitation. Some, says project director Sally Tonkin, have histories not dissimilar to Carrie's, having been passed around circles of men from early in their teens. Many young women traumatised in this way do not survive, she adds, describing Bailee as "quite unique".

"To have someone like Carrie come along, and for her to so bravely share her story, it just gives so much hope to the women who we work with and it gives hope to us workers," Tonkin says. "They look to someone who has walked that path ahead of them. Her lived experience and her bravery is invaluable to us."

Bailee has a term to describe the people who picked her up over the years when she fell - people like Sheila, Tami, Helen Driscoll, Natasha and others who became "points of light" for her. "I just want to be that point of light for people, too," she says.

Lifeline: 13 11 14.

For Carrie's website, visit: www.cjbailee.com