Former pro hockey player and child abuse prevention advocate Sheldon Kennedy is in Goderich on Friday.
Kennedy was the keynote speaker at the Rural Response for Healthy Children forum, focusing on improving support for children who have suffered various types of abuse. He said more work can be done to bring down some alarming stats when it comes to people who have suffered child abuse.
"Most of the time, we know that kids who have been abused are 59 times more likely to be arrested as juveniles, 30 percent higher dropout rates in high school, 26 times more likely to experience youth homelessness," he said.
Kennedy, who will meet with Huron-Bruce MPP and Education Minister Lisa Thompson on Friday, says it's important to start connecting the dots between childhood trauma and those statistics, and start to find meaningful solutions to help those who need it. He said his goal was to get the message across that childhood trauma causes many issues for people later in life, and the stats are alarming, and that can later become an issue for all of society.
"When we start to connect the dots, it becomes a community issue, and that's what we're really here to talk about today is to really shift the question from 'What's wrong with you?' to 'What happened to you?'"
In a now well detailed history of his own life, Kennedy suffered traumatic events himself in his youth which he chronicled in his book "Why I Didn't Say Anything", as well as a movie called "Swift Current", which is where Sheldon, Theo Fleury, and many other young players suffered sexual abuse at the hands of now disgraced head coach Graham James. Sheldon says overall, the message to people who have suffered similar types of abuse has to be one of hope.
"At the end of the day, we need to talk about hope and solution. That is the gift we have, that we have a lot of people that are living a good life that have been through awful things in their life."
