Christian White, 43, started getting sexually abused by a family member he lived with when he was 3 years old. The abuse continued for 10 years, occurring four to five nights a week.
At the age of 11, White was sexually abused by his teacher when he was living in Lynn.
Being sexually abused was all that White knew growing up, and he didn’t realize until later in his life that this wasn’t “normal” behavior.
“I knew what my teacher was doing was wrong, but I didn’t know what my regular abuser was doing was wrong,” White said.
White told his dad about what his teacher did to him and his dad told the principal. The next day, White and his father were in the principal’s office when his teacher was called in to join them, something that White said would never happen nowadays. But this was in the 1980s.
When asked again to describe what the teacher did to him, White said as soon as he saw the teacher, he couldn’t speak and broke down into tears.
“I just started crying uncontrollably and I couldn’t stop,” he said. “So you know growing up if you cried you got hit so while crying, I knew that I was gonna get hit at any moment, but I couldn’t stop the crying.”
After about a minute or two, White’s dad grabbed him and said “this stupid motherf***er must have been lying anyway.”
White was sent back to school to the same classroom the next day.
“And the interesting part was, it put me in a weird place because the only reason that I exposed my teacher was because I was feeling guilty, as if I was cheating on my primary abuser,” he said.
After this incident at school, White “sort of built up a fortress” and told himself he would never speak up again.
“I knew how my dad handled it, so I figured, you know, when we got to school it was Jerry Springer time,” he said.
The abuse from his primary abuser stopped around the age of 12 and a half, when his abuser told him “he should be normal now,” meaning that he should be liking girls.
At the age of 13, White’s dad sat him down and told him that he couldn’t afford him anymore, so he went to live with his aunt and uncle in Roxbury, where he began selling drugs in the street.
“I was so conflicted inside because I had only known sex through men, occasionally a female… so I was very conflicted because in the streets at this time, that was looked at as gay behavior but I still had that sense of lust in me,” White said.
When he was 15 or 16 and everyone at his aunt’s and uncle’s would go to bed, White would go out to the Forest Hills neighborhood and look for “some old, white dudes” who could take advantage of him, saying at that point in his life, that’s what he needed.
“Love, respect or any little emotion could only be expressed through hypersexualization and it usually came in the form of someone having to do something to me or if I felt available for somebody,” White said.
White was arrested for the first time at the age of 17 for a homicide charge, spending 18 months in jail until he was found not guilty. During that time in jail while he was awaiting trial, he picked up an assault charge on an officer and had to get bailed out on that.
A few months later, he picked up a gun charge and went back to jail.
“I went from suicidal to just physically violent, even though I look at being in the streets as a slow suicide,” he said.
In total, he spent about 17 years in and out of prison, mental institutions and residential care.
White said he never really grew out of what the sexual abuse did to him because it’s always there, but it was more a matter of how it’s being expressed.
“Now, everything that I felt, I learned that I could express through violence, specifically gun violence because I was always too scared to be up close to somebody because they could touch me,” White said. “Being in the streets, you have the option of hurting people without getting too close to them, so it was the perfect remedy for me.”
White was released from jail for the “last and final time” about six years ago, serving nine out of the 10 years he was sentenced for illegal gun possession.
White has now been his 15-year-old son’s primary caretaker for about four-and-a-half years — having entered prison when his son’s mother was eight months pregnant, seeing his son a few times while in prison, and finally reuniting with him when he got out.
While his son was a factor in how White changed how he understands and treats people, he said dealing with the trauma over the years is what led him to change his course in life for the better.
“I just wanted better for myself and saw potential in myself,” White said. “I’ve been on a mental-health journey since I was 18, and I’m 43 now. So, I’ve always been moving slowly on my journey; it’s just that a relapse for me didn’t come in the form of a drug, it came in the form of street violence.”
When he got out of prison for the last time, White went to a mental-health step-down program. At this time, he said he had no feelings left for the street so he knew he wasn’t going back to prison.
White began sharing his story with anyone who would listen around the age of 18, but began speaking about it publicly a few years ago.
He began a poster campaign about three years ago in Boston, Lynn, Lowell, Lawrence, Brockton, Springfield and Chelsea, where he hung up thousands of posters that said: “If you go to jail, will the gang raise your child?”
White said these posters started getting a lot of attention, and they happened to coincide with the District Attorney (DA) race that was going on in Boston at that time.
White ended up connecting with Suffolk County DA Rachael Rollins, who is now a United States Attorney, and was introduced to many people, which led him to participating in community work.
He now works with a woman who does work for Boston Public Health, works with the CDC Children’s Trust, and sits on several boards.
He has held his own community meetings to share his story and started a podcast to raise awareness.
“So many people talk about the context of men and abuse, but we’re talking about boys,” White said. “And at this point, we’re talking about genderless creatures that just need protection and not violence and trauma.”
When White was 18, his female cousin was talking about a White family retreat that the females went on where his aunt spoke about how her grandfather sexually abused her and he said the other girls in the family said they had similar things done to them too.
“When I heard that, it was the first time that I thought, you know, maybe my past somehow affects how I think now… I never connected it and just looked at it like this is my normal life,” White said. “All of my aunts and uncles, including my father, went through sexual abuse.”
A big part of White’s movement now is cycle breaking, saying that he respects his father for only passing down three of the abuses — physical, mental and emotional — as he did not sexually abuse him.
White is passionate about cycle breaking things like abuse, in all forms, which is why he continues to share his story and his experience with people.
“I am a million times more evolved,” White said. “In terms of telling my story, I’ve become a master at that… I am much better with filing a feeling away and addressing it later… Now, I am aware of what I’m doing.”
White hopes that his story can help normalize the fact that boys go through sexual abuse too.
“We have such an assumption when we hear about stuff like this, ‘girl, girl, girl,’ and that’s not the case,” White said. “It’s my belief that if we had open platforms where boys now, or men now, could talk through some of those feelings, there’d be a lot less violence, a lot less arrests, a lot less assaults… I mean everything you could think of would be better if there was a platform for men to actually not be ashamed to talk about this stuff.”
White said he is not only giving people that platform, but giving them an option to manage it and show them that even with his past, he is thriving.