Showing titles in Child Abuse

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.

"I’m going to be so happy now, just wait and see.” But I left the altar where I met Jesus and walked back into the same patterns of behavior in my life. Indeed he set me free, but it took a long journey down a lighted path before freedom became my reality. Born into abject poverty then adopted into an alcoholic family, by the time she reached 33 her life was shattered. She was alone, broke, rejected again, desperate, out of hope and done with life.

Tommy Belanger had been born into a dysfunctional family - fed by alcohol abuse, abject poverty, and the trials and tribulations associated with living in isolation. His was a life filled with child abuse, incest, bestiality, and zoophilia. Tommy hated how those things affected him and his siblings. And he detested his father.

Home Is Us tells the story of my mother’s struggle to protect herself, and her daughters from harm. Our story moves from the shared trauma of violence, through our fight for education, safety, and independence. My family’s songs, prayers, and spoken word have given me a greater awareness of myself, how we survived, and continue to thrive. Shared here now, for you to listen.

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.

What would you do if you knew a child who was being abused? If that child was a member of your family? Would you call the authorities and have the child taken away, or would you turn a blind eye? These are the kind of questions that Lost in Thought provokes. The author, who lived through the atrocities mentioned in this audiobook, paints a vivid if disturbing image of child abuse and how it affects the psyche as one grows older. What begins as abuse leads quickly to suicidal thoughts and loss of control.

In this richly depicted story, told in vignettes relative to markers of age and experience, Patricia Eagle reveals the heartbreak and destruction of her sexual abuse, from age four to 13, by her father. A victim of her father’s anger and her mother’s complacency with his abusive behavior, Eagle uses dissociation and numbing in response to the abuse, and as a way to block her own sense of self. How does a child confused by episodes of abuse come to know what is safe or unsafe, right or wrong, normal or abnormal?

Ruth was a ghost of a girl when she arrived into foster mother Maggie Hartley's care. Pale, frail and withdrawn, it was clear to Maggie that Ruth had seen and experienced things that no 11-year-old should have to, that she had been conditioned to 'see no evil, speak no evil'. Ruth is in desperate need of help, but can Maggie get through to her and unlock the harrowing secret she carries? Through love, reassurance and patience, Maggie starts to unravel Ruth's painful past.

Evie and Elliot are scrawny, filthy and scared when they turn up on foster carer Maggie Hartley's doorstep. Aged just two and three years old, this brother and sister have hardly set foot outside their own home. They have been prisoners, locked in a world of abuse, violence and neglect. Maggie soon realises that Evie and Elliot are lacking the basic life skills we all take for granted, and the outside world terrifies them. Gradually unlocking the truth of their heartbreaking upbringing, Maggie tells their shocking true story.

Perhaps, you are one of three girls, or one of five boys that was sexually abused by the time you were 18 years old. Unfortunately, I fell into that nasty category. In preparing to write my first memoir, Identifying and Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse, I came upon a list of approximately 99 different after-effects that come as a result of sexual abuse. Finally, I held in my hands, a list of words that totally and completely described myself! I pray that this audiobook will give you the information that you need for a total and complete healing in your life!

When the justice system fails her daughter, a courageous mother takes matters into her own hands. In a wrenching race against time, the safety of one child is entangled in bottled-up family dynamics, court theatrics, media frenzy, and the political machine.

Amy had a happy childhood until the death of her mother when she was 10. Her father became an abusive alcoholic and she was quickly abandoned by him, given money so she would leave the house and leave him alone. And disappear she did - to drug dens, with the tragic consequence that she became addicted to heroin by age 12. Soon after, Amy's father kicked her out and she became homeless, going into care but quickly back onto the streets with other teenagers who had fallen through the net.

In Good Hands has enough twists and turns to make you wonder what to believe. Is this a tale about SIDS, a medical mystery? Or is it about murder? And if murder, what could be the motive? In the town of Irmo, where the Cutros had plenty of support, parents continued to drop off their children. They couldn’t fathom that these people might be dangerous. The Cutros had three children of their own.

This book is for all of us who have suffered abuse and need to be heard, believed, and supported by others. The time is long past for us to take a stand and speak up about the abuses we've endured and the damage caused by those abuses. We have felt alone and isolated in our pain from these secrets of abuse. The perpetrators have kept us silent, living in shame and guilt, long enough. Let’s be silent no more, and let’s be there for one another, encouraging each other to heal.

This is the story of Jacob Kalinsky, born in Koretz, Poland, in 1904 to a mean-tempered tyrant of a father and a sweet and loving mother. At the age of twelve, Jacob's mother, Sarah, dies, and Jacob, along with his nine-year-old brother, is sent to live in the care of a brothel run by a loving madam named Jordanna. It takes Jacob's father three long years to send for his sons. During that time, Jacob suffers many indignities.

At eight years old, I never imagined my entire world was about to implode. Follow along as I retell the sad and dark turn my life took, and ensuing years working through more betrayal and abuse. I thought I’d never get out of the madness or ever find myself. It turned out to be a lesson because God wanted me to use my experiences as a way to inspire others. This is the tale of decades of my nightmare life and how I made it out on top.

Before Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich begins a summer job at a law firm in Louisiana, working on the retrial defence of death-row convicted murderer and child molester Ricky Langley, she thinks her position is clear. The child of two lawyers, she is staunchly anti-death penalty. But the moment Ricky's face flashes on the screen as she reviews old tapes, the moment she hears him speak of his crimes, she is overcome with the feeling of wanting him to die. Shocked by her reaction, she digs deeper and deeper into the case.

One dramatic day in her college dorm, self-injury lands a young woman in the surreal world of a psych ward for 74 hours. Those traumatic hours define her life for many years, until she comes to see the trauma through the lens of self-forgiveness, ongoing recovery, and God’s grace of revelation. Within Discovering My Scars, Stephanie Kostopoulos makes herself vulnerable and invites listeners into her reality with raw and visceral depictions of non-suicidal self-injury. The journey encapsulates life during her 20s, while stepping back to childhood, revealing abuse....

This is a story of how I, a victim of physical, emotional, and sexual child abuse, grew to have a wonderfully beautiful life. This is a story of hope. I grew up with an angry, manipulative, controlling, alcoholic father. When I was 11, my mother divorced him. Though we were free from our daily nightmare, we were not free from the damage he inflicted.

The Florida Industrial School for Boys, which in later years was Dozier School for Boys existed for over a century in the panhandle town of Marianna. Boys from throughout the state went there to be reformed. Early on, some residents were orphans as young as five-years-old who were placed in custodial care.