To Downplay Abuse Is to Enable It

The Boston Herald

She doesn't look like a victim of sexual abuse. She doesn't look like a woman whose father beat and molested her for five years, from the time she was 3 until she was 8, until the state came and removed her from his home. 

A model, an actress and a screenwriter, Angela Shelton spoke last Wednesday at a dinner to benefit the women at Pine Street Inn. On the outside, she's different from these women - confident, successful, glamorous. But on the inside, she's scarred, and therefore the same.

Four years ago she was in Hollywood writing screenplays when the Writer's Guild went on strike and all she was allowed to work on were reality shows or documentaries. So she decided to do a documentary about women, narrowing this to all the women in the United States who shared her name. She found 76 Angela Sheltons on the Internet and ended up interviewing 40 of them during a 57-day journey that took her across the country. What shocked her was that during these interviews, 24 of these women confessed that they had been raped, beaten or molested.

But this buffered her, too, because so had she.

She says now that she broke her silence to break the cycle. ``It's scary when nobody knows about it. When you don't tell your family and you don't tell your friends.’'

In her documentary, ``Searching for Angela Shelton,'' 16 Angela Sheltons talk openly about what they've been hiding for so long. And the filmmaker talks to her father, whom she confronts on camera.

According to a six-year study conducted by the National Center on Family Homelessness, 92 percent of homeless women in Massachusetts experienced ``severe physical and/or sexual assault at some point in their lives,'' 60 percent of them by the age of 12. Abuse destroys women's lives.

Loretta Carey, who lives at Pine Street Inn and shared the podium with Shelton, was nearly destroyed by abuse. Hers started when she was 2. She's 52 now. ``When I was homeless, I was an alcoholic addict. But my life is good today because of Pine Street.’'

I hear the stories, too, in the middle of other stories. “My father molested me. My brother. My brother's friend.’'

One woman told me she was 12 and babysitting when the brother of the child she was watching came home and raped her. Another said she was 2 when her father began molesting her. ``When my own daughter turned 2, I had a breakdown.’' 

A woman in her 60s said, “My uncle would come into my bedroom while his wife and my mother were talking in the next room.’' 

“I tried to tell for years,'' said a 40-year-old. `”I practiced the words but I could never say them to anyone but me.’'

Angela Shelton says her movie  “is a movement,'' that the way to out abuse is ``to break the silence.’'

``I am not what he did to me,'' she said. And the audience applauded.