Silenced Lives was hard for me to write but it taught me so much about myself and how it was that the cycle of child sexual abuse harmed so many in my family. Please read Silenced Lives and join me in speaking out in order to protect the next generation of children. join me in vowing No More Victims.

 Silenced Lives:

The Sex Offender’s Legacy

By Janet Mackie

Book Summary                                                                         

Silenced Liives is a  memoir that takes courage to write. Author Janet Mackie shares family stories exposing a pattern of child sexual abuse that surfaced over a hundred years ago on a Nebraska farm, when Mackie’s bullied and abused Great Uncle Andrew was “disappeared” by his brother Paw Paw. The incident is silenced but Andrew’s grieving mother banishes Paw Paw and his devout wife to Black Tower. Once there, Paw Paw bullies and abuses their children, Mackie’s 5-year-old father among them.  Mackie’s angry and resentful father survives to marry, then abuses Mackie and her brothers. 

Powerless to protect, Mackie’s grandmother advises, “Just don’t think about ‘it.’” Mackie, called her mother’s “most stubborn little girl,” blots out her experience and manages to survive childhood only to marry a man “strangely like her father.”

In turn, Mackie’s daughter survives her father’s sexual abuse but also marries a controlling man “strangely like her father.”

Finally freed by her father’s death, Mackie sets out to discover “Why me? Why my family?” Her deftly written, engaging stories illustrate how, over time, abuse can create abuse that cycles forth to harm generations as yet unborn unless we, too, gather courage and speak out. 

Praise for Silenced Lives 

“Janet Mackie has indeed crafted a most compelling read. Her book is, in essence, a family saga, replete with abuse, horror, love, secrecy and regret. She convincingly argues that child sexual abuse can pervade ongoing generations with its destruction unless it is brought out of secrecy, acknowledged and addressed. In a most unique way, she is able to weave the stories of those who have endured sexual abuse at the hands of a family member with those who perpetrated the abuse. In so doing she is able to impart to the reader both understanding and compassion for all involved. This is a profoundly personal and intimate look at a family who has been affected by the cycle of abuse. However, in telling these stories she has provided the reader with a clear picture of what is at stake and how we might move forward so that future generations will not continue to suffer.”

-- Kate Thomas, Ph.D., Director of Clinical Services, The Johns Hopkins Sex and Gender Clinic

More Praise for Silenced Lives 

“Reading like a novel, this book shines a bright light deep into the dark recesses of child sexual exploitation. It also starts to unravel the bewildering inter-generational aspects of this phenomenon.” 

-- Charles M. McGee, Sr. District Judge; Second Judicial District Court, State of Nevada, Washoe County

“Silenced Lives is a beautifully written, raw personal account of the transgenerational effects of sexual abuse. Thank you, Janet Mackie, for your courage in sharing your voice to make a difference for others.”

-- Dr. Nancy B. Irwin, PsyD, C.Ht.  

A book like Silenced Lives,...by veteran social worker Janet Mackie, is long overdue. Until now, the public has never had concrete proof that the silent-shame cycle of sexual abuse is responsible for churning out victims, offenders, and enablers generation after generation. Now there can be no doubt. Many “experts” on sexual abuse deny that abuse causes abuse. Perhaps they want to reassure survivors that we are not in danger of becoming “monsters.” And they are right that most survivors do not go on to abuse. Still, a disproportionate number of sex offenders were sexually abused as children. Mackie doesn’t let this seeming paradox distract her from writing about the actual dynamics and facts of inherited abuse. In Silenced Lives, Mackie puts a human face on sex offenders, survivors, and enablers by inviting us into her family’s legacy of “hand-me-down” pain. Mackie was intimately violated by people who were violated by people who were violated by ... and so on. Mackie proves that one generation’s abuse caused the next generation’s abuse when she depicts idiosyncratic similarities of the abuse rituals that were handed down from one perpetrator to the next. Silenced Lives shows sex offenders hiding away in shame—the very shame they act out during their crimes. If they dared seek help, no one would help them anyway since conventional wisdom is, “Once a sex offender, always a sex offender.” They are considered monsters beyond redemption. Meanwhile, the survivors in Silenced Lives get the message that if they were abused, something must be wrong with them. They are told, “We don’t talk about such things.” So, they don’t get the help they need either. Those who suspect or know of abuse don’t want to get tainted by the shame associated with it, so they remain silent. And the secret abuse continues. 

Like Mackie, I was sexually abused as a child. Unlike Mackie, however, I chose to act out the secret shame by perpetrating a sex crime of my own. I don’t blame what I did on what happened to me. I made a choice. However, if I had been able to read Silenced Lives before I let my life get totally out of control, I would have understood the cause of my rape fantasies. Both I and the person I harmed might have escaped the cycle. Better late than never. That’s not what you’ll be saying about the ending of “Silenced Lives,” though. Painful as the family legacy is, Mackie writes so well you’ll want to keep reading even after “the end.” And that’s as it should be, because, as Silenced Lives makes clear, we are a long way from “the end” of the cycle of abuse. 
– Paul Hanley, author of Roller Coaster to Hell and Back: A True Story of Sexual Abuse and New Hope.

Available now on Amazon.com.   


Until I inherited the dusty box of family letters, photos, and memories that form the basis of my memoir Silenced Lives: The Sex Offender’s Legacy, I too thought child molestation was a  personal family tragedy to be quarantined by silence  and shame. I didn't realize that the child sexual abuse that so grievously affected my own family, the abuse that made me angrily assert "This is not the Life I Chose" (and it wasn't) however abuse is not a historic just appearing out of nowhere but can be traced, at least in my family, down 4 generations. Only by speaking out can any of us break the pattern and ensure the safety of generations to come.