Why I Wrote The Hate Game

Not for the Faint-Hearted: When Her Story Became Mine

I didn’t set out to write The Hate Game: Screaming in the Darkness because I’d processed my past. I wrote it because, until that moment, I hadn’t.

That moment came while sitting across from a teenage girl in a child protection interview room in British Columbia. She was smart, fragile, and heartbreakingly young. She had recently lost her father—her anchor, her hero—and had tried to take her own life. She told me she was being relentlessly bullied at school, and that no one was listening. She also shared something else—something no child should have to say aloud: that an adult in authority had inappropriately touched her, and the people around her had done nothing.

As she spoke, I suddenly realised—I wasn’t just listening to her story.

I was hearing my own.

She didn’t know it, but she was sitting across from someone who had also been bullied. Also, sexually assaulted. Also ignored. I had been shoved into lockers, humiliated, dehumanised. I had survived Knoll School for Boys in 1970s Hove, where bullying was systemic and where teachers not only turned a blind eye—they sometimes encouraged it.

We were made to play something called “Holocaust Games” at recess. Let that sink in.

Older boys told us we were Jews and would be “gassed" if caught. It was terrifying, traumatising, and in hindsight—unspeakable. But I’m speaking it now because silence enables repetition.

I had an Eureka moment with that teenage girl. I realised I had made a career of protecting others while never facing the truth of my own trauma. I believe hurt people hurt people. But I also came to believe something else:

Hurt people can heal. And healed people? They free others.

That was when I knew I needed to write. To confront it all. To say the uncomfortable things—knowing full well that the bullies wouldn’t want to hear it, and the teachers wouldn’t want to remember. I reached out to others from that time, and the stories came pouring in. Many had their own tales of cruelty and survival. I wasn’t alone.

And here’s the thing: Yes, The Hate Game is dark. Yes, it’s hard to read in places. But it’s also funny. Because even in the shadow of cruelty, humour found me. It saved me. It became my armour and my escape hatch. And eventually, it became part of the way I told the truth.

I didn’t just survive. I thrived. And now, I get to help protect kids just like that girl. That’s not just a job. It’s an honour.