Thread by @usatodaylife

‘He took my ability to love’: Abuse at a Vermont summer camp stayed quiet for more than half a century. One boy never recovered.

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When Peter Wien was 10 years old, he started biting his hand, gnawing on it almost daily. Biting was how Peter managed what was happening at camp.

He doesn't remember how the abuse began, only the way it persisted – in the cabin in the afternoon, above the barn, walking to the lake.

Peter said the abuse occurred over the course of multiple summers in the late 1950s at Vermont's Camp Najerog, where many parents sent their sons for an education on the outdoors.

The abuse would split Peter into the boy he deserved to be and the one he would become. The abuse he recalls, and the lingering questions about what the camp did and did not know, what the adults around him did and did not do, would come to define every aspect of Peter's life.

Peter is 75 years old, and if time is the measure, he has traveled far. But more than half a century after leaving the camp, the impacts of those summers are still achingly present.

Researchers have found at least one in six men have experienced sexual abuse or assault, and the impact of that abuse can ripple across a lifetime.

Peter has spent over six decades wondering how his life may have unfolded if not for the abuse. That answer is painfully unknowable.

He has also spent most of his life wondering if he was the only boy who said he was abused at camp. That answer we found.

usatoday.com/in-depth/life/…