Noelle McCarthy on abuse and survival: 'We are living in a time of secrets being brought to light'

In new podcast ‘Dear Jane’, a survivor finds the courage to tell the story of the abuse she endured at the hands of a youth group leader. At its core, says Cork writer and producer Noelle McCarthy, it’s about what happens when you start telling secrets

Sat, 07 Oct, 2023 - 18:00

Noelle McCarthy

We are living in a time of secrets being brought to light. Mostly they are about abuses, often they concern violence against women in one form or another.

Sometimes the telling of them is powerful enough to shift the ground beneath us. The New York Times reported allegations of sexual abuse against a Hollywood producer by one woman after another, stories that led to #MeToo and a call for consequences for powerful men who hurt women sexually and the institutions that protect them.

Recent allegations by survivors who say they were violated by Russell Brand at the height of his fame, show this reckoning is far from over.

Here in Ireland, the discovery of tiny skeletons in a septic tank in Tuam led to the disinterment of a national shame on the grounds of former mother and baby homes around the country.

Revelations like these, about the crimes of Harvey Weinstein, the mother and baby homes with their lethal cruelty, are matches that lit fuses, catalysts for a mighty outcry that’s gone beyond national borders.

After the sharing of grief, and rage, often comes a search for redress in one form or another. Weinstein went through the court system and was convicted — although successful prosecutions on sexual assault charges remain internationally, statistically difficult.

In Ireland, we set up a National Commission of Inquiry into mother and baby homes. It was far from perfect, and many of its processes and conclusions were challenged but it was an attempt at least to face the past and understand how such a horror was allowed to happen.

The survivors’ testimonies that came out of the inquiry were viscerally moving and a reminder of the personal cost involved in this era of uncovering secrets.

Digging up memories from the place they’ve been buried so you can survive them forces a reckoning.

And it’s very hard to know in advance how that will play out before you do it, what the effects will be, for yourself and for the people who love you.

That’s what I was thinking last year, after I got a phone call from a woman called Jane.

I was in my kitchen, baking. It was winter in New Zealand, one of those miserable dark nights when you want a bit of cake to cheer yourself up.

Jane is a mother of three young kids, the same age as me, funny, charismatic. I knew her to say hello to.

I was not prepared for the story she told me.

Award-winning Cork writer and producer Noelle McCarthy has a new podcast out called Dear Jane

'NOBODY KNEW THE EXTENT OF IT'

When she was 13, she formed a connection with her youth group leader at their local church in Auckland. He was 10 years older.

It was a sexual relationship from the time she was 14, nobody knew the extent of it, not her family, her friends, or her teachers.

At a certain point, people saw them together, but he said it was chaste. Everyone took his word for it.

The age difference was noticeable, but the man was from a respected family. He was widely trusted in the community.

Jane wanted to tell her story as a podcast, and she wanted me to help her do it. I had reservations. Trauma is complicated, it’s hard to know how it will play out, especially when you’re doing it publicly.

Also, working with secrets is heavy. I knew that from experience.

A book I wrote about my life and my mother’s life came out in Ireland last summer, Grand: Becoming My Mother’s Daughter.

There’s some weighty stuff in it — alcoholism, suicide and intergenerational trauma. For all that, writing it was a joy, I flew through it mostly.

Except for the secrets — the hidden pregnancies that became open wounds in my mother’s life, my own doomed attempts to camouflage my drinking.

There’s a bed in the room where I work, and after writing those bits, I’d throw myself down on it, dog-tired, and sleep without dreaming.

When Jane rang me, I was worried about what it would be like for her, digging around in secrets she’d buried for decades.

I was also worried about what it would be like for her family. When we started the podcast, I was already navigating the aftermath of telling private stories, the delicate dance involved in responding to the reactions of people you love, who have also lived through the painful things you’re discussing.

But Jane was clear from the start that she was ready. She was clear as well about what she wanted — a meeting from the man involved, and some accountability from the church.

She also knew she wanted to help people, and in lots of ways, that made things easier. When it got hard she was able to go back to her purpose — that young people listening who may have had a similar traumatic experience, a betrayal of trust, a loss of innocence, would hear her and know that it wasn’t their fault either.

Making the podcast was challenging for all of us — facing trauma is extremely demanding, and it was difficult going back over this painful stuff, especially with her family.

But we got through, mostly because we trusted each other, and because of Jane’s clarity.

Noelle McCarthy. Picture: Rebecca Zephyr

THE SHAME OF SECRETS

Dear Jane is a story that happened in New Zealand, in a different kind of church than the one I grew up part of in Cork City, but so many of the themes were resonant; the shame of secrets, the need to speak them, the vulnerability that comes after doing it.

I found echoes in Jane’s experience of the story I told in Grand about the women who came before me, whose lives were similarly shadowed by being part of a church community that had too much control over their lives, their choices, their sexuality.

For Jane’s mother and her sister, the decision to talk to us wasn’t easy.

In a kitchen in Auckland with a view of a perfectly symmetrical, perfectly serene dormant volcano called Rangitoto, Jane’s mum, Ann, gave us tea and scones and told us about her regret for what she didn’t see back then, or didn’t notice.

Ann is a private woman, but she let me sit at her table and point a microphone towards her. “I should have been there,” she said, “so now, if I can help her, support her, I’ll do it.”

Her voice was breaking, all I heard was the strength of a mother’s love for her daughter. Jane’s sister, Lisa, is still part of the church community but decided to help us too.

“I’m doing this,” she said, “in case someone’s listening that this is happening to. So they will find strength to talk to someone they trust, and get help and know that it’s not their fault, that there’s no shame attached, not for them.”

With those words, and with that impulse of generosity, Lisa is connecting her and me and Jane to a wider story.

The shared experience of all the women in recent decades, in Ireland, in New Zealand, the world over, who’ve contributed to this extraordinary wave of reckoning with abuses by powerful people and institutions.

All the people who are speaking out and bringing to light what’s hidden. They speak despite the shame that clings to secrets, so future generations can see they don’t have to take it. Secrets, however painful, don’t have the same weight when you’re able to share them.