Showing titles in Child Abuse

An urgent and timely memoir exploring the reality of childhood sexual abuse, a scourge on too many neighborhoods, often hiding in plain sight. Millions of victims remain silent, buried under the weight of their own guilt, shame, and addiction. Breaking the Ruhls will resonate deeply with many who have experienced similar trauma, boundary violations, and abuse within the family, and struggle with the emotional and psychological effect.

The acclaimed and ground breaking collection of short stories, poetry, and allegory by Andrew Vachss, one of the most powerful voices in the field of child protection. This work is an illumination of the realities of child abuse, juvenile violence...and tribute to the power of imagination. People Magazine says, "Another Chance is Dr. Seuss dressed up as a Scorsese movie, another on-target hit by an author who has made children his primary concern."

Raining Pitchforks is dedicated To All Children Who Go To Bed Tonight Afraid. This is a book about my experience growing up in an erratic, dangerous and unstable world. It begins when I was seven and ends at age 17; a time frame that encompasses a 10 year span of events with a disastrous ending. Along the way I encounter several important relatives and friends who help and hurt. This remarkable, fast moving story is about courage, optimism and loss. Our American family was changed for generations by World War II. What is now called PTSD took a toll on all of us. It is a true story but some ...

By the time Barbara was four years old, she already knew what she would have to do: get tough or die. Before DVDs existed, Barbara's childhood trauma was permanently recorded and embedded in her head. Long before "surround sound" technologies were available, she captured all of the sights and sounds of her childhood in vivid detail. To author this book, all she had to do was press “play,” and that scared her because many of those details were not a pretty picture. Some looked more like an old Alfred Hitchcock horror movie.

To everyone else, Terri White appeared to be living the dream, named one of Folio's Top Women in US Media and accruing further awards for the magazines she was editing. In reality, she was rapidly skidding towards a mental health crisis that would land her in a locked psychiatric ward as her past caught up with her. As well as growing up in a household in poverty, Terri endured sexual and physical abuse at the hands of a number of her mother's partners.

The moving true story of a little girl with Asperger syndrome, controlled and abused by the one person she called her friend. Taylor had always struggled to make friends - she felt 'different'. Taylor never knew her father, and her mother wasn't around much. She just didn't understand people and was alone and scared most of the time. That was until, aged just 11, an older married man called Tom befriended her. She loved having someone who would talk to her, listen to her - a protector. But when he moved away a few months later, she was easy prey.

Así comiensa Víctor Rivas Rivela esta magnífica crónica en que narra su fuga desde la zona de guerra de la violencia doméstica - considerda con demasiada frecuencia como «un asunto de familia» - y su trayectoria hacia la independencia, la recuperación y la renovación. En Asunto de familia, Víctor recuerda su época de joveniracundo que vivía bajo la tiranía y la cólera de su padre.

When 16-year-old Jess arrives on foster carer Maggie Hartley's doorstep with her newborn son, Jimmy, she has nowhere else to go. Arriving straight from the hospital, having just given birth, Jess is like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Scared, alone, and practically a child herself, she is overwhelmed with the responsibility of caring for a newborn without the support of a loving family or her beloved boyfriend. With social services threatening to take baby Jimmy into care, Jess knows that Maggie is her only chance.

Never fast enough, never smart enough, never pretty enough - just never enough. I was conditioned from a young age to firmly believe that I would never be enough of anything to attain the unconditional love I craved so deeply from my bipolar, narcissistic mother and the safety and protection I craved from my loving but terrified father. My life truly started the day I woke up and realized that the emotional abuse of my childhood had distorted the lens through which I see myself and the world around me.

In tears as he sat on the witness stand at 16 testifying against his father, one of his many abusers that stole his childhood, Walt McKinley found the strength to fight for himself for the first time. In that life-changing moment, he made a promise to himself he would do whatever it took to take his power back, become a warrior of his abuse, and break the generational cycle. Monsters in My House is a true story of extremely shocking abuse and a child’s fight to stay alive. Walt’s grit and compassion shine through as he shows us the unbreakable nature of the human spirit.

There really is a monster in the hallway. Be careful. Your bedroom door will open, throwing light on your face. You'll feign sleep. The door will close behind your father, and darkness will descend.

To the outside world, she was a bright, popular, all-American adolescent. But at home, behind closed doors, lived another Katherine - shamed, isolated, afraid - locked in a forbidden embrace from which there was no escape. It was a secret too terrible to silence. It had to surface, shattering her life, changing it radically - but with its release, bringing at last a new hope, not just to Katherine and her family, but to all the Katherine Bradys everywhere who will recognize themselves as they hear her story.

Born into the slums of Glasgow in the late '70s, a 4-year-old John's life is filled with the debris of alcoholism and poverty. Soon after witnessing a drowning, his mother's addictions take over their lives, leaving him starving in their flat, awaiting her return. A concerned neighbor reports her, and he is forcibly taken away from his mother and placed into the care system. There, he dreams of being reunited with her.

Her mother was raped. This is how Melanie was born. For years, the sight of Melanie's face reminded her mother of the sexual assault, so Melanie herself was verbally and physically abused through childhood. But Melanie's obligation was to love and honor her mother, she told herself. This is what Melanie believed as a Christian, and it's what she believed even more so after converting to Islam. In the Qur'an, God commanded, "Reverence the wombs that bore you." But what if those wombs broke you, and incited deep emotional trauma? What then? In this groundbreaking book about healing from ...

Material things are given aplenty. Money is no problem. Faith is survival. Safety and protection is lacking. For Amber Wallace, the only child of a well-to-do family, it seems as if she has it all. People from the outside envy her and want what she has. As the onlookers wish for her greener pastures, she craves for the normalcy. She might be spoiled, but it comes with a heavy price and plenty of secrets.

As a young child, the first complete sentence Kate Price ever uttered was “Where’s Daddy?” Not because she wanted to find her father—but because she didn’t want her father to find her. As a little girl growing up in Appalachia, her father was the hunter and she and her sister were the prey. Price knew he was a violent threat to her very existence, but she could not fully grasp the extent of his abuse.

The devil whispers in my ear, “Your mother can never know about this… it will kill her if she ever finds out.” Fear quakes in my six-year-old body. Shame saturates me like a soggy mist. I draw an X across my heart, cup my hand around his ear and whisper, “Cross my heart and hope to die! I promise I will never tell!” I am VOICELESS.

At the age of 16, Jeneen Miller was prosecuted without a fair trial for telling a family-kept secret about a wrongdoing perpetrated at the hands of her uncle. After bravely coming forth to her family, they were not open to the truth. In 1988, Jeneen's parents used trickery to achieve the ultimate betrayal. Instead of the therapy they promised Jeneen, they turned her over to a prison camp in Ramona, California, without any communication. This is an account of Jeneen's battle to redeem herself after being abused by her family and Victory Christian Academy.

Stop the Silence is a department in the Institute on Violence, Abuse, and Trauma (IVAT) and has a mission to prevent, expose, and stop child sexual abuse (CSA) and help survivors worldwide. Thanks to the efforts of experts, healers, and survivors and their supporters around the globe, we’re preventing CSA and promoting healing of victims and survivors, celebrating the lives of those healed, and underscoring CSA as social justice and civil rights issues.

The third of a nonfiction trilogy, this intrepid memoir tracks sexual harassment and sexual abuse in the life of a veteran American journalist. It also describes the long and ultimately successful psychotherapy the author undertook to heal.