MATT Brown delivered a powerful message to those who attended the She’s Not Your Rehab breakfast recently. FILE PHOTO
MATT Brown held those who attended the recent She’s Not Your Rehab breakfast in Te Kūiti spellbound. The engaging barber with the neatly-made braids pulled no punches about his time as a child, from watching his mother’s blood decorate the walls, ceilings and floors of bathrooms, bedrooms, lounges, kitchens, hallways to driveways and sheds, to being sexually abused for the first time when he was just 10-years-old by someone who was revered in his South Auckland community.
UNSAFE TO BE ME “My childhood,” he said, “It was unsafe. Unsafe to think, to do, to be me. To be Matthew Brown.” He recalled a time during a game of rugby when his father annoyed the ref so much, the ref threatened to call the game off if he didn’t leave the field. His father, Matt said, went to the car boot, pulled out a machete and started chasing the ref around the field. “We started giggling. We didn’t know what else to do. Here was our private life being played out in public.” The police were at his home so often that he told his mates a family member was a cop who stopped in to visit a lot. He remembered, at 15, telling a large group in a school setting about being sexually abused. “What happened from that was a teacher who had no idea what to do next, to so many of my people saying ‘You have shamed us – that should never be told. It is private. It brings shame on us.’
YOU WILL TRANSMIT “The thing is, this plays out all the time as part of everyday life in our communities in South Auckland where I grew up. Mangere. It happens so often, all of these things. Yet no one wants to step up and stop it, fix it. “And what happens then is the intergenerational abuse continues on. What you don’t transform, you will transmit.” The family moved to Christchurch while Matt was young and he remembers sleeping in cars, being hungry, the foodbanks, and he and his siblings asking his mother often why she didn’t just leave her husband. The answer was always the same. “She told me, ‘because I want you children to have a father. Because I don’t think I can do it without him.’” Some years later, Matt and his now wife Sarah, set up a barber shop in a tin shed in their backyard. It is a service that creates an atmosphere of close personal space being shared by two people. And over time, Matt began to find his clients were confiding their stories, and in turn, he was sharing his.
COMMUNITY CONCERN It came to a head when his community asked him why he was allowing a person who was known to be putting drugs into the community and causing a lot of havoc and heartbreak by doing so, to be a customer of his every Friday morning at 9am. “I saw what no one else did. That little boy who lay on the bedsprings at night because his father didn’t think he deserved a mattress. The same father who dropped him off at a boys’ home because he didn’t want him at 10. Who had every foster parent he had for the next few years sexually abuse him. Who had such disgusting things happen as being hung naked on a clothes line and other boys encouraged to piss on him.” As so many before him did, fighting back was a retaliation mechanism that escalated to crime. He told Matt once he was too afraid to trust him with the knowledge of the things he had done because he was afraid Matt too would be like everyone else and just walk away in disgust.
BELIEF Matt however, wrote a letter to the man when he had Stage 4 cancer who had become as loved as a brother to him, telling him exactly what he saw; that wee boy who thought no one loved him, that he could see, feel, hear and smell what had happened to him. Because like so many others, abuse of every description, had been his life too. As time when by, Matt found that his barber shop (by now out of the tin shed) was always full of men from every walk of life, criminal and not, gangsters to judges as word got around that this self-effacing young man had the rare gift of being able to connect on a basic level. The work he and Sarah now do is based on community healing. Encouraging men to speak up, to enable their emotions to find their voice, and to understand that surviving their atrociously abusive childhood environments does not mean they have to pass it on to the families they are creating for themselves. “It takes a village to raise our children well. And that means we really need to stop enabling our people who do this by standing there and putting up our hands and saying, ‘hey bro, you need to sort yourself out.’” To do that, he said, means men particularly have to understand they can heal themselves, there is information out there to start them on their journey of self-healing.
BIRTH OF A BOOK “When my son was born seven years ago, I looked at this tiny bundle and just fell in love – even if all it could do was shit and scream. “And I thought to myself, how could anyone ever hurt this?” Both he and Sarah are impatient with the current systems in place, saying the mental health sector simply cannot cope and it was a no-brainer that men couldn’t afford what help there was generally. “If you say to a man, it will cost you $180 for a therapist, he’s gonna think ‘$180 for that, or $180 to feed my kids.’ Whanau will win and he’ll just stuff his emotions, his anger, his angst to one side – again – and carry on.” So concerned were the pair with this, that the She’s not Your Rehab in book form became something they thought they could offer. So, it was written and they set about raising funds to ensure it got into every prison in the country. The idea of something being completely free was a bit hard for prisons to take on board, Sarah said, but eventually, they all did bar one. And it’s paid off. In the years since, Matt says said he received hundreds of letters from men who are coming off their lag, some who have been in and out of prison for many years and who, after reading his book, have begun work on the process of healing themselves and their relationships. They are now working with organisations such as It’s Not Ok and others in providing new models with which to work facilitating men to the many services that so often fly under the radar – but are there. And this is important. “Everybody’s story is different. You can’t stick it all in one basket and say ‘that’s how we are going to fix it’, which is how so often it has been done. Or tried to be done,” Matt said.
NOT JUST MEN And it’s not just the men. At a recent wedding, Sarah was approached by a Corrections officer working at a women’s prison who told her that in the sweeps she would do (going through women’s rooms looking for contraband) that she would see well-thumbed copies of this book, many of them with highlighted parts that had resonated with its reader. While the movement has gone around the world – even to Dwayne Johnson, the Polynesian actor known as ‘The Rock’ wearing one of their now trade-marked tee shirts – Matt says said the basis of healing begins at home, within each person, with the help of his whanau and the support of the wider community. “We need to remember we all, as a village, have to raise our children. Every child. Saying nothing isn’t an option.” The shame is in the saying, and doing, nothing.
