Hippotherapy for Victims of Child Sex Abuse

Two recent articles explain how hippotherapy has helped children heal.

Hours from Penn State, children’s charity shows new way to heal [Yahoo Sports 9/2/12 by Eric Adelson] and Children At Risk: A survivor’s story [The Times-Tribune 9/18/12 by Denis J O’Malley] both discuss Marleys’ Mission in Pennsylvania.

The first article explains how Marley’s Mission began. Both explain different aspects of one 15-year-old boy’s story.

Yahoo said “In July 2009, a 5-year-old girl was brutally attacked in her home by a complete stranger. The man had attended a family picnic, introducing himself as the friend of a family friend, and he entered the girl’s room after she had gone to sleep. Then he savagely raped the little girl, leaving her with her severe injuries. Her parents, completely distraught, took their daughter, left their home and never came back. The rapist, named Felix Montoya, was eventually sent to prison. But the girl’s fate was potentially much worse.

Her parents tried intensive therapy of all kinds – talk therapy, art therapy, everything. Nothing worked. Even the best psychologists have trouble getting children to describe their feelings, especially when those feelings are so unbearable. So the therapist of this little girl, a woman named Ann Cook, began to think of other ways to get her to share her feelings. The girl loved a guinea pig, named Marley. And that led to another idea that changed not only the girl’s life, but the lives of more than 160 other victims.

Press coverage of the assault and conviction drew an outpouring of sympathy and money. The family moved into a new house and bought their daughter a present: a horse named Strawberry. And soon something changed in the girl. She spent hours around the horse, petting him, feeding him and just walking around with him. The horse became a companion. And then a minor miracle took place.”

“Slowly, the girl began to speak. She talked about what she thought was going on in the horse’s mind. And in doing so, the girl began to share what was buried inside her heart.

That proved to be the seed of a cause, started by the girl’s mother, April Loposky. She teamed up with Gene Talerico, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Montoya, and Cook, the therapist, to start a horse farm dedicated to helping victims of child abuse.

“You get to have a conversation about the horse with the child,” Talerico says. “Instead of talking in first person, now we’re saying, well, the horse is behaving this way because of this. The [children] superimpose their struggles on the horse. The horse’s struggle becomes their struggles.”

One year to the day after the rape, Marley’s Mission opened. “We wanted it to go from a day of hurt to a day of hope,” Talerico says.

That is what’s happened. Marley’s Mission was named “Best New Charity” in 2011. And that was before the awful news of the Sandusky scandal broke. Referrals increased sizably as Sandusky’s victims came forward and bravely testified this summer.

“The strength of survivors was crucial,” says Talerico. “It allows people to be buoyed by the courage of others. There are more people inquiring as to what we do and how we do it. When this was on the forefront and people were saying, ‘No more, this is no longer a secret,’ the ripple effect of that is incredible.”

Marley’s Mission now has six therapists, 10 horses and four equine specialists. It serves approximately 80 children, at no cost to their families. On a typical Saturday morning, there are up to a dozen kids at the farm. There is no riding for the children, who are ages 5 to 18. Instead, they walk with the horse and care for the animal while both the therapist and an ever-present equine expert look on.”

Poignant Story of 15-year-old

Times-Tribune explains that “His family called him “Seething Sean.”

“He was very quiet and an undercurrent of anger was (in him) all the time. He was belligerent,” his mother said. “We had no idea.”

His family knew there had been some “inappropriateness” in Sean’s past, his mother said, but even the Pike County authorities who facilitated his adoption were unaware of the details.

Like many victims of child sexual abuse, it wasn’t something he spoke about. But then again he didn’t talk much at all.

The Times-Tribune does not identify victims of sexual abuse.

His family could see that Sean had an eating problem – rejecting food, sometimes starting his day on nothing more than a slice of toast and burning out within hours.

“I remember being tired all the time. I would be exhausted by 11 o’clock,” Sean, now 15 years old, said in an interview with the newspaper. “I’d be like sitting on the couch and falling asleep.”

By early 2011 it had been somewhere between six and eight years since he lived in a foster home in Greeley Twp.

The dates are hard to remember – the details harder to share – but it was in that home where Sean’s then-foster parents’ 14-year-old grandson began to “groom” Sean in the bedroom they shared.

It started with the boy asking Sean, then between 6 and 8 years old, to sit on his lap while he played video games.

Later, the boy began baiting him with twisted quid-pro-quo offers.

“He kind of eased into it,” Sean said. “He said stuff like, ‘If you do this, I’ll let you play on my guitar or play video games.’ ”

Over the course of months, how many he could not say, the abuse escalated into repeated instances of rape.

But the 14-year-old grandson wasn’t the only one – he had a friend.

One day, as Sean walked to a chicken coop on his foster parents’ property to gather eggs, the teenager followed him.

“He just came out of nowhere,” Sean’s mother said, aiding her son in the difficult recollection. “He was gathering eggs and all of a sudden this guy raped him.”

The grandson’s “grooming” would signal the imminent abuse, at least enough for Sean to brace himself, Sean’s mother explained.

But after the shock of the second abuser’s attack, he was left stunned, scolded for breaking a few eggs and asking himself unanswerable questions.

By the time he turned 14 his parents learned what Sean hid beneath the long sleeves he always wore.

“The first thing he disclosed to us was that he’d been cutting. He had around 200 scars on his forearm,” his mother said.

They sent Sean to an adolescent medical specialist to seek treatment.

Asked about his eating disorder and the cutting, Sean simply answered the specialist’s question.

“I think I told him because I thought that the eating disorder and the cutting could have branched off from that – the abuse. I think because it was relevant,” he said.

The admission did not offer the instant relief one might expect. It instilled in Sean a new fear: tomorrow.

“I knew what I said was a big deal. … I remember being very scared of what was going to happen next after telling somebody,” he said.

Faced with her family’s new reality, Sean’s mother saw in her son a change that put him not on the road to recovery but on the precipice of disaster.

“I think in the disclosure, he finally felt it. Now it wasn’t covered up any more,” she said. “If you can think of it as water – he just started to sink into it.”

The family’s reaction was immediate and all-consuming.

Scissors, staples, razors, “you name it,” every possible cutting implement had to be locked away, his mother said.

Bedroom doors were locked, where his siblings and parents would leave their shaving razors to keep them out of the bathroom.

The doctors wanted him in a residential treatment program, but there wasn’t a local option.

So they started searching for an alternative.

“When they tell you your kid’s going to commit suicide you try to get help as soon as possible,” his mother said. “You fly.”

Before they found the answer, there were “many nights” she spent awake, “waiting until he went to sleep before I went to sleep and getting up before he did because I wasn’t sure he’d be alive when I woke up,” his mother said.

Among his symptoms, Sean had selective mutism that all but ruled out one-on-one counseling as a solution.

“So we were looking for therapies where he didn’t have to sit and talk, where he could work,” his mother said.

A few weeks after Sean’s disclosure in February 2011, a friend and fellow foster parent told his mother about Marley’s Mission, an equine-assisted psychotherapy program in Wayne County for survivors of childhood trauma.

“His affect was always very flat. He was very depressed. He was suicidal,” his mother said. “And the first day he left Marley’s Mission he said, ‘This was fantastic, Mom. I love it. And, by the way, I’m hungry. Can we get something to eat?'”

For some other family, one not sharing the collective effect of a son’s sexual abuse, a trip to McDonald’s would hardly seem notable.

But for Sean, the young teen who went a year without gaining a pound, “to admit that he was hungry was monumental,” his mother said.

“He had a 20-piece chicken McNuggets all by himself,” his mother said. “I remember exactly what he ate. This is a kid who had a hard time choking down a piece of toast ,so it was a very big deal.”

It’s hard for him to remember his mindset when he began visiting Marley’s Mission or how he reacted at first – the 18 months that have passed seem a lifetime.

“I liked that I didn’t really have to talk a lot,” he offered.

In time, that comfort fell in line behind the healing his family hoped for.

His therapy with Lacey, a horse who also self-injured – chewing wooden rails, a possibly life-threatening habit for horses – proved successful.

But a less obvious benefit came just being there, where people like Gene Talerico, Lackawanna County first assistant district attorney and president of the Marley’s Mission board of directors, would “put a hammer in his hand and they’d go and fix fences,” his mother said.

“You have men who, they know his story and he knows that they know his story and they do not care. They’re men working,” his mother said. “When you’re in a therapy session you know you’re in a therapy session. Well, that was also a therapy session but it didn’t feel like one.”

Little more than a year later, Sean is no longer receiving treatment at Marley’s Mission, though he does continue his biblical counseling.

Now, Sean is the one helping others – serving as a junior counselor for a summer camp held at Marley’s Mission for children who have suffered trauma.

His abusers never saw criminal charges – his family brought his disclosure to state police, but after so long and without any physical evidence or other victims to speak of, his family knew there was little chance of that.

But recovery far outweighs retribution in Sean’s mind.

He recently began speaking to the media on occasion, telling his story, and is also a speaker for RAINN – Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.

He tells his story not for himself, but for the others. For the kids at Marley’s Mission. For the friend he’s helping recover from his own trauma.

“I think a big part in my recovery is going to help other people with theirs,” he said. “Like helping with the camp – I think that’s going to be a big deal, and I’m going to be happy knowing that I helped other people with it.””

Expanding the Farm

Yahoo says “The hard work of therapy shouldn’t be diminished here; survivors of these heinous crimes will work to overcome their pasts as long as they live. But for victims and families, the idea that there is something that can be done to make a child feel better is the most reassuring feeling imaginable. When asked if equine therapy really works, Talerico is almost gleeful. “I’ve spend two decades doing this stuff,” he says. “The successes of this kind of therapy are remarkable.”

Marley’s Mission is moving to a newer, bigger farm. Plans are to open it on the fourth anniversary of that unspeakable 2009 crime. The new land will be closer to the center of the state, to help children from a wider span of Pennsylvania.

And most importantly, the little girl who was raped that night is still healing. Talerico remembers seeing her in the hospital after the attack, desperately wondering what could possibly be done for a child so young and so hurt.

He remembers the look on her face, but also the design on her hospital gown. It had unicorns and horses.

“I guess it was fate,” he says.”

REFORM Puzzle Piece