When I returned to Toronto and started a women's group in my local community literacy program, the theme I chose for one class was childhood. One day we read Rose Doiron's story about her abusive childhood (Doiron, 1987). In spite of my new questions about the impact of childhood violence on adult "illiteracy," I thought little about the impact of reading this book. I did not stop to wonder how many women in the group might have experienced violence as children and might find reading about Rose's experience too painful a reminder of their own lives. The next day, one member of the group called me to apologize for what she had said. I couldn't remember what she'd said, but told her she could speak about anything in the group. Later, she told me her comment had been "things happen to children that shouldn't." Even saying those few words, this woman felt she had revealed far too much about her own painful childhood and she was terrified because she had broken a long-held silence.

My acceptance opened within her a floodgate of her experience with violence. I was at sea—I wanted to help, but I was in over my head and didn't know how to respond. My solution was to find a way to be a support within the expertise of literacy work. I offered to tutor her. I suggested we use reading materials about women's and girls' experiences of violence, and that she could write whatever she chose. That suggestion launched us on a challenging eight-year tutoring relationship, and an intense, ongoing friendship. It also led her eventually to therapy, and to increased comfort with reading and writing to express herself. She faces her ongoing challenges with more choices and possibilities, though these "choices" are still relentlessly limited by poverty, poor health and the inadequacy of legal and social support systems.

Early in the tutoring process I found the material we read together disturbing, and I sought the help of a therapist myself to begin to explore whether I had personal issues with violence. I also found a counsellor in the local community health centre who was willing to support me and give me wise advice on how to work responsibly with this student. This tutoring led me to more and more questions about connections between violence and particular reading difficulties. It also led me to believe that literacy programs must make space for tutoring of the sort we were doing together. I wrote often about this work (e.g. Horsman, 1996, 1994), but I began to want to learn much more about how violence affects learning and about how to support learning.