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The Camden Public Library will host the event “Men Talking: Growing up with abusive fathers and breaking the cycle” on Tuesday, November 28, at 5:30 PM with Finding Our Voices, as a part of the Fall 2023 Finding Our Voices On Tour series of events in Maine libraries. The goal of these events is to break the silence of domestic abuse, one community and conversation at a time.
This event features a panel of men survivors from Camden, Belmont, and Biddeford, who will speak on their experiences growing up with childhood domestic abuse and breaking the cycle. Finding Our Voices board member and WoodenBoat founder Jon Wilson will facilitate the discussion with and open up the conversation to the community. Refreshments will be served.
Finding Our Voices is a Maine-based nonprofit founded and led by women survivors of domestic abuse.
“We empower survivors of domestic abuse in Maine through bold educational campaigns, peer-to-peer support and services, and a platform for their voice to bring systemic change and healing.”
Finding Our Voices presents Men Talking: Growing up with abusive fathers & breaking the cycle
Panel Discussion moderated by Jon Wilson
Finding Our Voices board member, founder of JUST ALternatives and WoodenBoat
Tuesday, November 28, 6–8PM
Camden Public Library
Free & Open to the Public
Men will talk publicly about growing up with abusive fathers and breaking the cycle at the Camden Public Library on November 28 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The Finding Our Voices event is free and open to everyone.
Residents of Waldo, Knox, and York County will share some of their own stories, and then participate in a community conversation. Topics will include how their childhood experience with domestic abuse shaped their relationships with their mothers, impacted them as parents and intimate partners and also professionally, and the process of healing and breaking the cycle.
Facilitating the discussion is Jon Wilson of Brooklin, a Finding Our Voices board member, founder of WoodenBoat, and founder/president of the nonprofit Just Alternatives which supports victims of violence and violation.
The event caps the two-month “Let’s Talk About It” Finding Our Voices tour of libraries from Millinocket to York. The previous seven stops featured a panel of women survivors.
Patrisha McLean is the founder and CEO of Finding Our Voices. She said, “with more and more men confiding in me about growing up with abusive fathers, and that includes emotional as well as physical, I felt it was important to bring this topic out in the open, and get people talking about it. My hometown Camden library is where Finding Our Voices first launched four years ago as a photo exhibit of my photo portraits of survivors. So I was thrilled when the library director Nikki Maounis said YES to once again hosting a ground-breaking, survivor-powered domestic abuse-awareness event.” She said bringing light between Thanksgiving and Christmas to how domestic abuse impacts children is perfect timing, with “holidays a particularly miserable and dangerous time when you are living with an abusive family member.”
“Camden Public Library is excited to collaborate with Finding Our Voices once more to bring this important program to our community,” said the library’s Executive Director Nikki Maounis. “It’s an honor to provide a space for sharing these stories and we are proud to be a part of the movement to break the silence on domestic abuse. We hope the audience comes away feeling both empowered to share their own voices and feeling more connected to one another.”
Scott Denman, director of a national environmental phlianthropy, is one of the three panelists. “The ‘Breaking the Cycle’ part of the title is very important,” he said. “The thing that children so hate—seeing their moms hurt by the father or significant other—can be used as a catalyst to show them how they can and must break the cycle, watching for the tendencies in their own relationships to replicate what they experienced growing up.” Another panelist, inventor and retired boat captain Jory Squibb, said “So much of my own earlier behavior was a puzzle to me and others at the time. Sharing my story now has been central to understanding it at last.”
Sponsors of the Finding Our Voices library event include Gartley & Dorsky, Leslie Curtis Designs, Rickey Celentano, and Stephen and Helene Huyler.
Commissioner of Corrections Randall Liberty was the November guest of McLean’s WERU-FM radio show talking about how as a boy he felt helpless when his father, who served jail time for domestic violence, brutalized his mother.
The Free Press
Men talk About Abusive Fathers at Camden Library Event
November 9, 2023
