His mother and father – perhaps unwilling, perhaps ill-equipped as parents of that generation were to address their son's trauma – didn't look or ask or ever really see. The abuse he recalls, and the lingering questions about what the camp did and did not know, what the adults around him did and did not do, would come to define every aspect of Peter's life.Īs the abuse continued, Peter couldn't stop biting his hand. It would split Peter into the boy he deserved to be and the one he would become. Peter said the abuse occurred over multiple summers in the late 1950s at Vermont's Camp Najerog, where parents sent their sons for an education on the outdoors. He can still feel the unsettling abruptness of those moments after the counselor would stop, the unease of all that was left unsaid and unknown. Peter remembers climbing the ladder to the barn's loft where costumes were stored for shows, the ball in his throat when he realized the counselor had followed. Deeper in the forest around them, trees absorbed the dampness of shadows as confusion ballooned in Peter's belly. Peter remembers the clearing they would go to and the mossy spot where they would lie, surrounded by the furrowed bark of Sugar Maples and the elephant skin of American Beech.

He remembers the time the counselor guided him through the trees, took off both their clothes and perpetrated the abuse of which so many don't speak, the abuse we lock inside.

He doesn't remember how the abuse began, only the way it persisted – in the cabin in the afternoon, above the barn, when walking to the lake. Biting was how Peter managed what was happening at camp.

When Peter Wien was 10 years old, he started biting his hand, gnawing on it almost daily, his mouth sculpting the soft skin between his thumb and index finger into an arched callus.

Attended boys state survived