Boys Don't Cry: The Struggle for Justice in Canada's Largest Sex Abuse Investigation

For nearly half a century, the Christian Brothers who ran St. John’s and St. Joseph’s training schools presided over an unparalleled reign of perversion and terror. The story of how David McCann led the surviving wards on a crusade for recognition and justice is stirring and heartbreaking, a triumph of determination in the face of callous indifference.

David McCann was sent to St. Joseph’s Training School for Boys in Alfred, Ontario, in 1958. He was twelve years old. Over the course of the next four years, he was repeatedly beaten, sexually molested, and raped by the Christian Brothers who ran the school.

When the Mount Cashel scandal broke in Newfoundland, he contacted investigative reporter Darcy Henton, who filed an access to information request that triggered an Ontario Provincial Police investigation. The article Henton subsequently wrote in the Toronto Star was like the breaching of a dam: testimony from hundreds of victims soon flooded OPP offices.
Nearly two thousand former wards of the Christian Brothers came forward to tell their stories. More than thirty Brothers and former Brothers have been charged with more than two hundred crimes, ranging from assault causing bodily harm to indecent assault and buggery. Police said others would have been charged had they not died before the investigation was launched.

“ Boys Don’t Cry is worth reading ... for it’s insistence that we face a dark moment in Canadian history and learn from it.” – Tom Sandborn, The Vancouver Sun

Darcy Henton broke the story of one of Canada’s largest investigations into sexual abuse of children when he was a reporter at The Toronto Star. He is an award-winning journalist who has also worked for the Calgary Herald , Edmonton Journal , Edmonton Sun and The Canadian Press and he cowrote a book No Kill No Thrill about California serial killers Charles Ng and Leonard Lake. For his work on the Christian Brothers scandal, he received a citation from the Canadian Association of Journalists for “outstanding investigative reporting.”