Breaking Her Silence

Survivor endures a healing journey to educate others on child sexual abuse

Looking at pictures of Donna Bulatowicz as a young girl, you see pure joy. There’s the photo of her on her 11th birthday, all smiles, ready to blow out the candles on her cake. Another photo shows her and her brother riding horseback together in a rugged Montana field, and in yet another, the two of them are holding the cherished family dogs.

It wouldn’t be long after, Donna says, that she’d meet the woman who would snatch that idyllic childhood away from her.

“It was devastating,” she says, as she starts to tell the story of that period of her life.

Just a few days before the first day of school, Donna remembers going up to Newman School to check out the class list for the upcoming school year. Her brother was with her, and they were on the playground when a woman who was going to be a new teacher that year walked up to meet them. She had her hands full of cardboard boxes and asked Donna to help her take them to the trash.

“As we were walking over, I noticed her eyes looking my body up and down. I had never seen an adult do that before and it made me really uncomfortable,” Donna says. She was reaching over to dump the boxes, she says, and “when I looked over at her, she was licking her lips and said, ‘You are the most beautiful little girl I’ve ever seen.’”

Donna dismissed it and remembers her brother later telling her, “Your teacher is weird.”

That day foreshadowed a year of sexual abuse at the hands of her teacher. Donna says it started with the teacher rubbing her back or pulling her onto her lap, and quickly escalated from there. Before long, Donna was missing recess or physical education class to “help” her teacher. Her desk was moved to the back of the room behind a bookcase, to hide the abuse from view, Donna says.

“The first day after school when my parents asked what I thought of her, I said she was too pushy. Well, they didn’t understand what I meant,” Donna says. “If a child says something that seems a little off, ask them to tell you more. If that happened, I might have been able to describe a little more about what was going on.”

Years later, in counseling, Donna’s therapist would classify the abuse as one of the most extreme cases she’d heard. Every bit of it happened inside the school’s walls.

“After the first time she stripped me, stole my childhood and shattered me into a million pieces, she told me that if I told, no one would believe me,” Donna says. “She said my parents would abandon me and not love me anymore. No one in my family would love me anymore because of what I did with her. She said I seduced her. I didn’t even know what that word meant.” Donna says the woman threatened to kill her pets multiple times. She also threatened to kidnap on several occasions.

“I believed her,” Donna says.

The next school year, she says, a fear washed over her. It started to sink in that her former teacher might choose another little girl to target.

“She wasn’t my teacher anymore, so she lost some of that power that she had over me,” Donna says. She went to her school counselor and broke out in tears as she started to relay the details of the past school year. “I was so scared that everything this person threatened would come crashing down on me.” The counselor called not only her parents, but the police.

“I was very lucky because both of my parents immediately believed me and apologized for not having known what was going on the year before,” she says.

Renee Bulatowicz, Donna’s mom, admits she saw a change in her daughter’s behavior that year but chalked it up to those moody pre-teen years.

“Everything fell into place for them and started to make sense,” Donna says.

What’s surprising is, Donna’s father George was a social worker who handled child abuse and neglect cases. In the mid-1980s, he helped start the Sexual Abuse Response Team in Yellowstone County. It joined law enforcement, social workers, psychologists and physicians together for child sexual assault investigations.

After George got the news, he took his daughter to the police station.

“The officer told me a woman wouldn’t molest a girl, especially her,” Donna says. “She was a pillar in the community who had a husband and sons. I was just stunned.” She says they had a stereotype of what an abuser looked like and her former teacher didn’t fit it.

“They also didn’t ask me the basic question you ask a child. Does the abuser have any identifying marks?” Donna says. “If they did, I could have described them and it would have been clear I had seen her without any clothes on.”

Police closed the investigation, and the woman would go on to teach in School District 2 for at least 10 more years.

“I was told that she left School District 2 because some little girls girl complained about her being inappropriate,” Donna says.

During that time, Donna says, the abuse took a different twist with retaliation.

“It started with her telling each one of my teachers that I was crazy and a liar and that they better watch out for me because I made up crazy claims when I got mad at people,” Donna says. “She had a paper that she passed to all of my teachers at the beginning of each school year.” Donna says that continued all the way through high school and through the woman’s connections, even reached some of her college professors at MSU Billings.

“She was a socially skilled child molester,” Donna says. “Socially skilled child molesters are often seen as the pillars of the community because they make sure they are. They volunteer everywhere. They get to know people in power.”

When you ask about specific details of her abuse timeline, Donna refuses to share.

“I don’t want people trying to figure out who my abuser was,” she says. The woman died unexpectedly a little more than 10 years ago, and she says, “I don’t want her family to get any backlash because they are not responsible for what she did.”

The whole experience forced Donna, many times, to reconsider her dream of being a teacher. When she got to college, however, that changed.

“I didn’t want her to take anything else from me,” she says. “I realized through therapy that I had let myself be silenced again.” Donna ended up teaching elementary school for 12 years and spent close to 10 years teaching at the collegiate level at both Montana State University and MSU Billings.

It was in the classroom that she started to realize how ill-prepared a lot of teachers were in spotting potential abuse.

“Teachers are considered mandatory reporters,” Donna says, which made her shake her head at the lack of training.

She dove into the research and found that female predators make up to 20 percent of all sex abuse cases. She looked at her own experiences to identify grooming behaviors and started to compile information she could share. She ultimately used her research to create training for pre-service teachers, those studying to be educators.

“I was scared because it was the first time I had shared my story publicly,” Donna says.

But with each opportunity, she became more emboldened. Last October, she presented her training at the Montana Teachers Conference put on by the Montana Federation of Public Employees. Her in-person class was near standing room only. Her streaming class had so many people trying to log in, it crashed the system.

“I was told by one of the organizers that they never had that many people try to get into a session before,” Donna says. “That proved to me there is a need for it.” This year, she was invited back and will not only talk about ways to identify those who prey on children but on the effects of trauma on the brain.

Since beginning her healing journey two years ago, she’s been a guest on several podcasts, written articles for survivor publications, even appeared on radio talk shows. The next step, she says, is a big one — trying to lobby lawmakers to make sexual abuse training mandatory for teachers.

“If teachers aren’t sure what to look for, that makes it hard,” she says. She’d also like teachers to help create plans to reduce opportunities for abuse.

“For a lot of elementary schools, teachers use the bathroom with kids. Because of what my teacher did to me in the bathroom, I have a huge problem with that,” she says.

At 46 years old, it’s taken more than 30 years to get to this point in her life and her career. Her mother, who was by her side in all of it, is amazed at the woman who has emerged.

“I think as she got older and didn’t see improvements in training and requirements, it started to really impact her more,” Renee says. “A lot of people might want to hide what took place because there is a shame that comes with it. Hers has been a remarkable journey of courage.”

Surprisingly, Donna finds purpose in the pain.

“If I could go back in time and save little me, I wouldn’t because I wouldn’t have done this work,” Donna says. “I can save children this way.”