Knowing is half the battle

Argh - if only I had known! If only as kids when we had sex ed. class it included sexual and intimate boundaries, how to tell and who to tell, what happens if you disclosed etc etc. This never happened at my school and I'm not going to say how much I wish they had. I think we can empower children and adolescents by letting them know, I think survivors look back with a great loss and a feeling of regret. How things could have been, if circumstance were different, if i had had different information maybe I could have felt empowered to make change.

In 1991, Oprah Winfrey, a sexual abuse survivor initiated a campaign to establish a US-based national database of convicted child abusers. Then-President Clinton signed the "Oprah Bill" into law in 1993. In the aforementioned interview, Oprah stated:

“A part of my mission in life now is to encourage every other child who has been abused to tell. You tell, and if they don't believe you, you keep telling. You tell everybody until somebody listens to you…I don't want another child to be afraid of saying, ‘This is what happened to me’.”

It's odd to realise that my sexual abuse began around 1991ish, I didn't hear Oprah though. If only.