Karen Lee

When I was eight years old, my parents bought an old farm in a rural area north-east of Oshawa, Ontario. We knew no one. I walked one mile to the two-room village school to start Grade 3. Initially, I had no reason not to trust the teacher, but the longer I was in his classroom, it was obvious something was wrong in the way he treated the girls.

When my mother found out the teacher had molested another girl in the village, she asked if this also had happened to me. She spoke with the school inspector about the teacher, though finally decided that I should go back to school with instructions not to be alone in the same room with him. My sister also attended the school. She and I each had him as our teacher for five years while he continued to molest the girls. He stalked one of the girls that he particularly was obsessed with. Though some of the other parents knew what was going on, many denied that this man, who had grown up in the area, could ever be a pedophile.

I did well in school but in high school had my first break-down, leading my parents to believe that I was just a "highly nervous" person. No one spoke of the teacher and his possible effect on my well-being - including me. I had another breakdown in university and was put on strong drugs to calm me - I discontinued their use myself and finished my Batchelor's degree. I married, did teacher training in Toronto, taught school, and then moved to Calgary where I realized I had married the wrong person. He left me with two young children and no child support. I struggled for 3 years and then married again - to another wrong person. But he encouraged me to return to university to study psychology, I became a Chartered Psychologist. But my husband was so controlling and angry I was miserable. By this time, I was living in England. I went into therapy to find out why I was so fraught with unhappiness and nervous symptoms. In the meantime, my husband got cancer and died, leaving me a widow at age fifty. 

I continued to work and live in England and published my first book, on management consulting, in 2002. 

Fate intervened and, while on vacation to Hawaii, I met my present, wonderful, husband on a beach. We were married on another beach in 2004 and moved back to Calgary, Canada, to live.

I have written two memoirs, the first, The Full Catastrophe (2016), to answer the question: How did a well-educated, intelligent woman marry, not one, but two, abusive husbands? I traced the answer back to the denial about my childhood experience with my teacher. A few years later, after both my parents had passed away, I realized I had to write the story of my school, the teacher, and what happened to me and the other children, in the school. I went back to the village many times over the next five years to interview thirty people and get statements about what had happened from their point of view and the effect it had on them. That memoir, The Village That Betrayed its Children was published in 2024. I have gone on, in the last ten years, to teach many people how to write difficult memoirs.

With the writing of this last memoir, plus the research I had to do on the legacy of child sexual abuse, and conversations with other survivors, I have finally put many of my demons to rest. Now I want to help others who have or are still suffering from sexual abuse at the hands of educators. Children should not have to deal with predators at the very place where they should be safe. I am hoping that my work with SECE (Stop Educator-Child Exploitation) will save others from what I have had to go through.