Nelson Mandela said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
When I decided I was going to walk 10,000 miles around Europe
to encourage the abolition of a law that stops victims pressing charges,
it seemed impossible.
But I’ve now walked 10,000 miles.
And various governments across this continent are now in the process
of abolishing their statute of limitations on reporting child sexual abuse.
Millions of victims will soon be able to press charges
against millions of offenders.
But when I began this journey, I was just trying to stop one.
Uncle Terry sexually abused me throughout my childhood
and I never told anyone.
When I was 15 years old,
my older brother ended up in hospital suffering from stress.
I went to visit him and he told my dad, in front of me,
that he had been sexually abused by Terry, and I realized that it wasn’t just me.
Terry had sexually abused four of us, but we’d never told anyone.
Now the truth had been spoken out loud, I had no idea what was about to happen.
Would my dad go to the police?
Would I have to go to court? Would we be in the newspapers?
Would I have to change schools?
The next morning, I was standing in my uniform,
waiting for a lift to school.
Instead, my dad went into the living room and shut the door.
I pressed my ear up against it
and listened as my dad had to tell my poor mum
that her brother had sexually abused her children.
And through the door, I heard my mum’s heart break.
She said, “Don’t tell anyone. It will tear up the family.”
And she was right; this was Scotland in the mid 90s.
So like millions around the world,
we just carried on and never said anything.
Ten years later, my brothers and I were struggling.
We were depressed and suicidal, but still not telling anyone.
Terry, however, was still registered as a schoolteacher in Scotland.
He used to run football teams of young boys.
I realized that our silence was dangerous.
By saying nothing, we were allowing him to continue.
It wasn’t about revenge or compensation; it was a matter of child protection.
I needed to say something but I couldn’t.
I couldn’t speak to my brothers about sex with their uncle,
but I was a professional actor
so I wrote a play about brothers who could.
‘To Kill A Kelpie’ is a play about adult brothers abused in childhood,
speaking about it for the first time.
A kelpie is a mythological loch monster.
He would appear at the side of the loch as a charming man,
and if you got close, he would grab you and drag you into the water.
I invited my brothers to see the play, and I invited Sandra Brown, OBE.
She’s the founder of the Moira Anderson Foundation.
It’s a charity that supports survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
After the play, Sandra and I held a discussion with the audience.
After a decade of silence, within just a week of my play,
my brothers and I spoke to each other.
And then to the police.
And Terry was arrested, charged, prosecuted, and sentenced.
My play was a catalyst that ended our silence.
So other organizations began to stage the play,
and they repeated the same post-show discussion format
that Sandra and I created.
‘To Kill A Kelpie’ ran off-Broadway in New York and toured in America,
encouraging countless survivors to end their silence.
There’s currently theater companies in London and Paris
that are trying to re-stage the play.
But touring a play is really expensive.
Touring with a DVD is much easier so we made ‘To Kill a Kelpie’ the movie.
This poster is from the recent screening at the Reykjavik Film Festival in Iceland.
The film seems to have the same effect on audiences as the play,
so obviously I wanted to share it with as many people as possible,
have screenings in every country, encouraging millions to end their silence,
But there is a problem.
If millions suddenly went to the police, the vast majority would be denied justice
by the statute of limitations.
Some countries impose a legal time limit on reporting child sexual abuse.
Despite the fact that all 47 countries in Europe
are party to the European Convention of Human Rights,
in which it states:
In the determination of his civil rights,
everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing.
Also, in the UN Declaration of Justice for Victims of Crime,
which all European governments adopted in 1985, it says:
All victims shall have access to the mechanisms of justice
for the harm they have suffered.
Yet today, the police are telling some victims
that they’ve missed their chance, it’s too late.
Then of course, their offender is free and in contact with children.
When I discovered this, I wanted to change it
but I was just an actor from East Kilbride.
I couldn’t point to Estonia on a map.
How could I get their government to change a law?
Well, the answer turned out to be very simple.
I could just walk there.
(Laughter)
It took a lot of planning.
Five organizations collaborated internationally
to help me create this project.
We approached over 200 companies for official sponsorship, and we got none.
They were too scared to have their logo next to the words “child sexual abuse.”
I sensed very little confidence from the people around me
that what I was attempting to do was even possible.
But then my best friend said, “Just think, Matty.
This time next month, you’ll be lying dead in a field,
with junkies robbing your corpse.”
(Laughter)
So I Skyped Mark Beamont.
Mark’s the Scotsman who cycled around the world,
sponsored by Radisson Hotels and Lloyds Bank and a bunch of others.
Mark said, “Just start. Then people realize that you’re serious.”
So without any official funding, I set up an online donation page
and I headed down to London.
The day before my very first mile,
I was contacted by ESPN, the American channel.
They told me that another guy was walking 10,000 miles for world hunger.
He’d started two weeks before me and he was already dead.
So, on May 31st, 2013, I left London on foot.
I set out to visit every EU capital.
I walked 30 miles every day,
and I slept at the side of the road in an old van.
Some incredible volunteers came with me.
My brother, Morris, drove the follow van for three months,
but he also created the website, printed thousands of flyers,
and a million other tasks.
Over the course of the project, there was five follow drivers
but the longest-serving was Stig, from Sweden.
He drove the van behind me for 16 months.
Then there was Amanda, who would fly ahead of me
to the next city I was walking to.
With the British Embassy’s help,
she would help me set up meetings in each city.
Apart from having to walk 12 hours every day,
this project was pretty bleak.
The van wasn’t watertight,
so rainwater dripped on your face as you tried to sleep.
In the winters, the temperature inside the van would drop below zero.
And donations weren’t guaranteed.
There were times when Stig and I
had to decide between diesel for the van or food for us.
We always chose diesel because then I could keep walking.
Stig ended up in hospital a few times
because he developed intercostal neuralgia.
It’s a really painful inflammation of the muscles of your ribs,
basically because he was a seven-foot-viking,
cramped in a tiny box for a year and a half.
Halfway round the project, Amanda started developing anemia,
just from the constant physiological stress
of moving on, all the time,
literally dragging a suitcase around Europe,
on buses, planes, and trains.
This project was brutal, but we never gave up.
And simply by walking further than the circumference of the moon,
I attracted TV, radio, and newspapers.
I was broadcast to millions in over 30 languages.
In some countries, I became the first male survivor
ever to speak publicly about having been sexually abused.
I started receiving emails from people, telling me the walk was inspiring them
to end their silence, for the first time,
speak to their families or a therapist or the police,
now that the simple act of walking was catalyzing criminal investigations.
But this was more than an awareness campaign.
I was walking for change.
I was invited to speak at the International Victims Day
in Budapest.
I was sharing the stage with their Secretary of State,
and in front of their national media, I just said,
“If my uncle sexually abused me here in Hungary,
you wouldn’t have arrested him.”
They insisted that was not true, but according to Hungarian legislation,
that the head crime prevention at Hungarian Police had given me,
my statement was accurate.
Nine months after this embarrassing argument,
Hungary’s Parliament voted in favor of abolishing their limitation.
I received kind messages from people within the judiciary and child welfare,
thanking me for throwing the cat among the pigeons that day.
Within just three days of speaking at the parliament in Bratislava,
they launched a motion to abolish their limitation.
The Ombudsmen for children recommended the abolition
be added to a new national strategy
that was being drawn up to tackle child sexual abuse in Slovakia.
I spoke to anyone who would listen.
Not every country let me speak.
But we can say that the walk catalyzed
discussion of the abolition in eight countries.
Eight is good.
But if you are walking 60 hours a week, and all of your toenails have fallen off,
and you have to carry pepper spray in both hands
for when you get surrounded by wild dogs,
eight countries doesn’t really feel like enough.
When I asked the Ombudsmen in Zagreb to abolish the limitation,
they said they couldn’t because they’d only just created it.
I was baffled why any government would bring in a law
that other countries were in the process of abolishing.
They said as Croatia ratified the Lanzarote Convention,
they were required to bring in a limitation.
The Lanzarote Convention is a treaty of the Council of Europe,
against sexual violence against children.
Article 33 says: Your country’s limitation must be sufficient to give victims time
to come to the police.
It’s quite vaguely worded and it assumes that your country has a limitation.
Croatia didn’t.
But they brought one in because of this poorly worded paragraph.
So now millions of children,
for future generations, are in a much more dangerous situation
than they were before the country ratified a treaty
that was supposed to make things better.
I took this discovery to Strasbourg,
and the Secretary General of the Council of Europe walked with me.
He’s the highest politician on our continent.
He governs a territory of 820 million people.
I asked if I could address the committee of this Lanzarote Convention.
Well, obviously gathering 47 governments in one room takes a bit of planning,
so they said I would have to come back.
(Laughter)
I kept walking, and three months later, I finally made it to Edinburgh.
It had been 20 years since mom said,
“Don’t tell anyone. it will tear up the family.”
In that time, I’d told the Moira Anderson Foundation,
I’d told the police, I’d told the Pope,
I’d told hundreds of millions of people in 30 languages.
And yet after all that, waiting for me at the finish line was my entire family,
more together than we’d ever truly been.
The kids in our family know there is nothing they can’t talk about.
Except birthday surprises.
(Laughter)
My nephew, Caleb, really struggles with that one.
(Laughter)
My family walked with me for my last mile
from Edinburgh Castle down to the Scottish Parliament,
joined by over 1,000 people, from across Europe and across the world.
That was the end of my ‘walk project.’
Thank God.
A week later, I collapsed from exhaustion.
But having engaged with all those other countries,
I could now look at Scotland and understand how advanced we are
in some areas compared to Eastern Europe,
but also how far behind we are compared to Scandinavia.
See, I’d met survivors in many countries and I always asked them the same question:
“Why didn’t you tell someone?”
They always gave me the same answer: shame.
But I began to discover something about shame:
Shame is literally geographical.
See, you can have an ear infection and a broken wrist
and in both cases, you’ll feel pain.
But it’s a different kind of pain.
And in order to heal these, they require a very different course of treatment.
Well, there are different kinds of shame.
And the particular nature of a victim’s shame
depends on things like: Which religion surrounds them?
Has there been any recent political unrest or Soviet occupation?
How progressive is your community on LGBT issues or gender equality?
Because the exact combination of all these external factors,
which are completely outwith the victim’s control,
directly influence whether or not that victim will report the abuse or not.
So I wrote a paper on this phenomenon called “The Quality of Silence.”
It would kind of be a whole other TEDx talk,
but basically, if you imagine three kids in Scotland right now,
imagine an eight-year-old boy in a poor Catholic family in Edinburgh,
and imagine a 12-year-old girl in a wealthy Muslim family in Glasgow,
then a trans child growing up on the island of Tiree.
These three kids live in Scotland.
The same country.
But they occupy very different worlds.
In order to liberate them from silence, our authorities first have to comprehend
the unique obstacles from that child’s perspective.
So, over the past year, I’ve been invited to advise the Scottish Government,
the Scottish Police, the Scottish Crown Office, and Procurator Fiscal,
on various reforms.
But as promised, I also returned to Strasbourg.
I asked 47 governments to uphold the rights of their own citizens,
by abolishing any limitation on reporting abuse.
Apparently it caused quite a stir.
Russia left the room,
and I nearly got into an argument with the Czech Republic
for pointing out that their legislation was the worst I’d seen.
But it was.
It was quite intense but a lot of wheels were set in motion.
In the corridor afterwards,
I met the delegate from the Justice Ministry of Estonia.
She said they were about to begin
the process of addressing their limitation.
I said, “That’s awesome. What prompted your government to take action?”
And she said, “You did.”
The United Nations heard me speaking in Strasbourg
and they invited me to chair a debate.
Suddenly I was steering the discussion, with delegates
representing entire continents: South America, Asia, Africa.
While I was working at the UN,
the director of the largest organization in the world,
fighting sexual violation of children, ECPAT International,
invited me to Bangkok to advise on their new global initiative.
So just a few months ago, I chaired the world’s first global survivor forum,
where ECPAT gathered survivor activists from as many countries as possible,
and together we discussed recommendations for global change.
I found myself involved in conversations,
the outcome of which will eventually help billions
in future generations.
As the theme for today is ‘Our Transgenerational World,’
I wanted to leave you with this image.
Because as my godfather sat in prison for destroying my childhood,
my godson walked with me on an adventure to protect millions of kids.
TED is about ideas worth sharing so to take everything that I learned
and distill it down to a single concept that you can take away
and apply in your own life,
it would be this:
[You actually can…]
Whatever the thing is in your life that you tell yourself you can’t do,
the truth is, you can.
Whether it’s to have a difficult conversation with a loved one,
or maybe you want to walk 10,000 miles,
or maybe you want to change the world,
I promise you, you actually can.
The news bombards us with frightening images
of terrible things happening in our world.
It’s trying to convince us that there’s nothing we can do about it,
but that is not true.
We are infinitely more capable and powerful
than most of us ever allow ourselves to imagine.
So decide.
What do you want to change in your life, or in our world?
Then do it.
And don’t worry; it always seems impossible until it’s done.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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