Alice Munro and the Enabling of Child Sexual Abuse

By now, everyone knows about the essay Andrea Robin Skinner wrote for the Toronto Star in which she spoke about having been sexually abused by her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, and about how her mother, Alice Munro, chose to side with her husband over her daughter. This essay came just a few months after Munro’s death at age 92, and it has shaken up the Canadian literary community.

Many people have said many things since this essay was published. I want to talk specifically about enabling and about the conspiracy of silence that arose in order to protect Alice Munro from any consequences of her husband’s egregious behaviour.

As a psychotherapist for many years, I have learned that child sexual abuse doesn’t occur in a vacuum. While it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to abandon and retraumatize one.

The pedophile perpetrates the abuse but the enablers perpetuate it

When a child is being sexually abused, there is almost always at least one adult around who knows what’s happening and who can make it stop, if they choose to. There are always other adults around who could at least notice the signs of trauma in a child and step in to protect them, if they choose to. While a pedophile is responsible for perpetrating the abuse, enablers serve to perpetuate it.

Andrea Skinner was surrounded by enablers. She lived with her father and her siblings but she would go and visit her mother and stepfather periodically. After she was abused by Fremlin the first time when she was nine, she told her father what had happened. He never discussed the abuse with her again and he forbade her sisters to ever mention it to their mother.

Her father continued sending the young Andrea to visit her mother and stepfather, accompanied by one of her sisters who was supposed to act as a chaperone. Of course, the abuse continued, because a child is not in the position of protecting another child from a sexual predator. That is the responsibility of the adults around them.

There were other enablers of the abuse. It turns out that Munro’s biographers knew about it but chose not to mention it in their books. There were people in the Canadian literary community who knew what had happened and they, too, kept quiet. Margaret Atwood admitted in a recent interview that she had heard rumours, and went on to say that in small-town Ontario, these things weren’t openly discussed. I wonder how many of Munro’s friends knew more than just rumours and still did nothing.

Alice Munro was one of many enablers of her daughter’s sexual abuse

Alice Munro herself was an enabler. When Andrea was 25, she finally got up the courage to tell her mother what had happened to her. Munro got angry, accusing her daughter of having “seduced” Fremlin. She dismissed Skinner’s feelings, saying that this was between her daughter and Fremlin. According to Skinner, Munro “reacted exactly as I feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity,” and that Munro was “overwhelmed by her sense of injury to herself.”

Munro told her daughter that she had spoken up “too late,” because by then, Munro was too in love with her husband to leave him. Munro’s selfishness was in evidence here in her statement that “our misogynistic culture was to blame” if Skinner “expected [Munro] to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men.”

Although Munro did not appear to know about Skinner’s abuse while it was going on, she admitted to her daughter that she had known about Fremlin having had “friendships” with other children. Skinner noted in her essay that Munro “was emphasizing her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed.”

It seems as though Munro perceived these so-called “friendships” as acts of infidelity on Fremlin’s part and had been more concerned with her own sense of injured pride than with the safety and welfare of the many children he was abusing. It makes me wonder what Munro would have done if she had known about Skinner’s abuse while it was actually going on.

In cases of child abuse, the narcissist protects their own interests

In my many years as a psychotherapist, I have encountered a number of toxic narcissists. These are individuals who are enormously over-entitled and self-important; incapable of taking responsibility for their actions, and profoundly lacking in empathy. These negative traits tend to be magnified when such an individual achieves a position of high social status in which their grandiosity is validated.

Based on what Andrea Skinner had to say in her essay, Munro perfectly fits the profile of a toxic narcissist. With her many achievements, awards, and iconic status, it’s not difficult to understand how Munro might have evolved from a somewhat narcissistic, creative individual to a full-blown toxic narcissist.

Skinner was a goner from the start. All the enablers appeared to have one goal in mind: to protect Alice Munro. Was her ex-husband too aware of Munro’s social currency to risk upsetting her with the news that her new husband was molesting their daughter?

Were her friends in the literary community too afraid to risk being cast out of the golden inner circle for confronting Munro about the abuse? Were her biographers too reluctant to risk the disapproval of those who adored Munro, and fearing that her fans would “shoot the messenger?” We’ll never know, but it’s something to consider.

Alice Munro’s fame and narcissism created the perfect conditions to enable her daughter’s abuse

Skinner’s predicament from the start was that her mother was both world-famous and profoundly insensitive to the needs of the children around her. Munro’s narcissism made her incapable of responding with sensitivity and compassion when her daughter revealed what had happened to her, and Munro’s fame made her immune to the consequences of this cold-hearted response.

My heart breaks for Andrea Skinner. It must have been unspeakably awful for her. Not only was she being sexually abused; everyone around her was focused on her mother’s well-being and not on hers. It must have been so painful for her as well, to observe her mother being lauded as a feminist icon and genius, when her experience of her mother was so negative.

I’m sad that Skinner waited until Munro was dead to reveal in public what had happened to her. However, I understand it. She grew up surrounded by enablers and must have been conditioned to expect punishment for speaking out about her trauma. It must have taken her an enormous amount of courage to finally tell the truth, even after this many years, and even after Munro was no longer with us.

After posting her essay, Skinner has been unavailable for comment. I hope she is surrounded by people who love her and support her and see her for the valuable person that she is. Her parents and all the enablers in her life caused her enormous harm, and the fame machine did her a great disservice. It is my hope that the people around Skinner today are giving her all the compassion and care that she deserves.

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