#swift current

Swift Current follows former NHL player Sheldon Kennedy, who was sexually abused by his Major Junior hockey coach. In 1996, as an adult, he went to the police and had charges pressed against his abuser. His abuser went to jail; Sheldon bravely told the world about his abuse.

Then, he thought, he was going to be all better now! And he was going to be a crusader for other victims of abuse! and life was going to be great! and he was definitely not going to have to deal with any long-term psychological consequences! After all, they’d made a Lifetime movie about him with a very inspiring ending!

In reality, it’s so much more complicated than that.

Swift Current isn’t so much about the abuse (it is, but it isn’t); it’s about how you live after. It’s about how Kennedy and two other abuse survivors who come forward because of his advocacy deal with their abuse, about the symptoms they have, and about the danger that ignorance and willful blindness to the realities of PTSD cause. 

I saw the movie last summer at a conference where Mr. Kennedy spoke. During his talk he said that when his allegations came forward, he has a conversation with the head of Hockey Canada, an absolutely massive organization that runs multiple semi-professional hockey leagues. He’d just revealed that he’d been abused, and knew other people who had been abused, on a massive scale by one of their coaches while playing for one of their teams. He could have sued their pants off.

And instead he said: “I want you to fix it so this doesn’t happen to anybody else again.”

And he’s been working with them ever since to make that happen all across Canada. (As well as being director of the Child Advocacy Centre through which all child abuse cases in the city of Calgary are handled, and all the PR work he does, not to mention talking about his abuse all the time. This guy is a mensch.)