Jane was 13 when a youth group leader pulled her aside at camp and told her he had feelings for her.
The woman behind the Dear Jane podcast shares her early-teen church experience, the scars it left behind - and what it was like attending a national public apology last weekend.
He’s all elbows and knees, my son.
He’s in that strange liminal place between being a little kid and being a fully-fledged teen. Sometimes I see flashes of the young man he’ll become. He’s taller than me now and rolls his eyes at my jokes. But those eyes still well up when he’s getting told off. Those long limbs still clamber into my bed on weekend mornings.
At 13 years old, my son is still just a kid.
I was a still just a kid too, at 13. That was the age I started attending a small Presbyterian church in Auckland’s leafy eastern suburbs. The youth group was vibrant, welcoming and kind. It was a place of belonging with people who cared.
Each Friday evening we gathered to learn about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The group’s leaders were our guides, teaching us how to live according to the scriptures. Mostly in their twenties, they seemed so grown up. Strong in their faith, wise and responsible.
We idolised those youth group leaders. We aspired to be like them.
I was still 13, all elbows and knees, when the main youth group leader pulled me aside at youth group camp and told me he had feelings for me.
He was 24.
I was special, he said. Mature for my age. He seemed nervous. He knew he shouldn’t feel this way, shouldn’t be telling me this, but he couldn’t help it. I probably giggled.
We started dating in secret and became fluent in our own secret language. We’d find ways to sit in each other’s eyeline or brush arms when walking in a group. He’d drive past my house and beep the horn three times, sounding out a coded “I love you.” He’d ring the landline once and then hang up, just to let me know he was thinking of me.
We’d slip each other letters spanning a dozen sheets, his on sensible paper in neat cursive, mine on refill decorated with glitter pens. He’d write that he loved me and wanted to marry me. Our relationship was special. Ordained by God.
His beliefs were black and white, and they became my beliefs too. I wasn’t to listen to secular music, I wore clothes befitting of a modest middle-aged woman, shopping on Sundays was a rejection of God’s will. There was a seemingly endless list of things to feel guilty about, and at the top of that list was premarital sex.
At youth group he preached about the depravity of what he called fornication. It wasn’t just any old sin, it symbolised the fall from innocence into uncleanliness. A shameful stain that would mark you for life.
I was 14 when lifted me onto the pool table in his family’s rumpus room and we had sex for the first time.
That’s not easy to write, but it’s even harder to forget.
He felt guilty for what happened, but it happened again. When the guilt got too much, he’d insist on taking time out from me. A sort of fasting period for us to atone for our sins. It hurt my feelings and confused me when he’d mandate a break. Was I some sort of temptress he couldn’t resist? Did the blame for his desire live in me?
Our spiritual struggles played out in secret, but our relationship eventually became public. By the time I was 15, everyone knew we were a couple. My family pushed back, as did some members of the church, but despite the hushed whispers and quiet condemnation, it didn’t cross anyone’s mind that our relationship was sexual.
So, they didn’t ask.
They didn’t ask if he secured a private room at a church camp so he could sneak me in when no one was looking. They didn’t ask if he parked up on darkened streets so we could fool around after youth group. They didn’t ask if he bought condoms from a dairy in a neighbouring suburb. They didn’t ask if he touched me under a blanket while we watched a movie with the rest of the youth group.
What they believed, or perhaps chose to believe, was a young man of God and a young woman of God had fallen in love and were destined for marriage.
I was just shy of 18 when we broke up. From the moment I ended the relationship I tried to delete my teenage years from my story, but the blueprint for my adult relationships had been set.
It haunted me from one boyfriend to the next. I couldn’t separate sex from love, and it always triggered a wave of guilt. I never felt good enough, wanting the men I dated to treat me like the centre of their universe, feeling an overwhelming worthlessness when they didn’t.
Depression took hold in my mid-20s. Twice I woke up in hospital after sinking into holes I couldn’t climb out of.
Meanwhile, children were popping up in my life. First nieces and nephews that I adored, then three kids of my own that I would die for.
For decades I’d been looking back at my teenage self through an adult lens. Judging myself for being complicit. Blaming myself for mishandling my youth. Minimising it all in an act of self-protection.
But as I watched the children I loved move through each stage of childhood, I started to wonder if maybe at age 13, 14, I wasn’t a young woman capable of making adult decisions. If maybe I wasn’t mature for my age. If maybe I was still just a child.
Then voices of survivors started ringing out on blogs and social media, and I found it increasingly difficult to accept the stories I’d been telling myself. With each explanation of grooming, each account of an abuse of power, my own experience came further into focus and I could finally see it for what it was.
And then I got angry for teenage me.
This man had controlled the narrative of our relationship long after it ended. Now, I wanted to take back control. I wanted people to know the truth. I wanted to use my experience to shine a light on dark corners, to help protect other children and help other survivors realise what happened to them wasn’t their fault.
I also wanted this man, and the church, to take accountability for the harm they’d done.
This fire grew inside me for years before I contacted Noelle McCarthy, a journalist and podcast producer. I told her my story and together we began the journey of documenting it as a podcast series called Dear Jane.
It was a painful yet liberating experience that ultimately brought me face to face with my abuser. I wanted him to know the harm he had caused, and to hear it in my words, my voice.
The Presbyterian church knew about the podcast. We approached them for comment, and they emailed a statement for us to use in the series. The specific parish knew about it too, though I’ve never heard from them. Making the series helped me process the realities of my experience, but still the man involved hasn’t taken accountability, nor has the parish we attended.
My abuser is still part of that congregation. He still gets on stage as part of the music team leading worship.
Three weeks ago, I received an invitation from the Presbyterian church to one of two public apology events for survivors of abuse in its care.
The Auckland event, held at the Due Drop Events Centre in Manukau, was a relatively intimate affair. I guess it’s hard to know how many survivors are willing to put themselves in a room with the institution that harmed them. It’s hard to know how many survivors are even out there. Substantially more than were in that conference room, I would guess.
The event, like the previous one held in Dunedin, was being recorded for an online audience. Survivors would be able to watch from a safe space in their own time. This was, no doubt, one of the recommendations of the survivor advisory group that was instrumental in shaping every element of the apology.
I arrived staunch and cynical, convinced I was walking into a mandated PR exercise. I couldn’t allow myself to believe the church that hurt me could possibly help me, just in case they were about to hurt me even more.
My defences crumbled the moment I took a seat in the front row. A primal sadness welled inside me and manifest as a stream of tears that didn’t let up.
Survivor voices were front and centre. They came through the PA as heartbreaking poems. They hung on the wall as harrowing art. They echoed as challenges, laid bare by broken children, taking the stage in adult form.
The church representatives, Right Reverend Rose Luxford and Counsel of Assembly convenor Katerina Solomona, delivered the official apology in what seemed like heartfelt and genuine addresses.
They officially acknowledged the abuse that happened in the Presbyterian church’s care. They acknowledged the destruction of records. They acknowledged the church’s failure of the people it “harmed, abused, neglected and caused pain.”
They admitted that when the institution began the journey of developing a redress scheme its approach was church-led, “thinking it knew better than the people it harmed.” That’s when the established the survivor advisory group.
“The survivors in it, confronted us with the truth … they asked us the revealing question - who is this redress for? Is it for the Church to feel satisfied that it had ticked a box, or is it truly for survivors?”
I was impressed with their honesty. Their willingness to admit their failures and commit publicly to protecting those who speak out. To ensure survivors take the lead in shaping their respective redress process. To continue engaging with an independent auditor to ensure they are held accountable.
These women spoke on behalf of the Presbyterian Church as an institution, but how much of what was being promised would flow down through individual congregations?
Would that church full of people who didn’t step in to protect me own up to their failures? Would there be real consequences for the man who abused me, not just in heaven but here on earth?
Then Katerina Solomona said, “We commit to… ensuring abusers, enablers, and others who have harmed survivors are held fully accountable.”
In that moment, a covenant was made, in public and on the record. The Church that had hurt us would make those responsible answerable for their actions. Survivors seeking justice won’t have to fight alone. I won’t have to fight alone.
And I won’t have to fight quietly.
Earlier in the morning, a survivor shared an excerpt from a poem by Te Pare Meihana:
“She’ll take the opportunity laid out in front of her, to right the wrongs for all the children who lost their voices to a man who thought he had the right to take their bodies for his gratification. Yes, I’ll use that fire burning deep inside of me to speak and keep going. But it’s hard, and it is brutal. No one really wants to see you – the little girl up against the towering institution with its cross so high.”
Sharing my story is hard and brutal. Shame is not an easy stain to remove. But I will speak and keep going, for all the children who lost their voices.
For 13-year-old me, all elbows and knees.
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