FIGHTING ABUSE

Sexual abuse of children, especially if incest is involved, is one of society’s darkest, dirtiest secrets. Almost nobody wants to talk about it openly. One of those who does is Erin Merryn, 25, Chicago.

She has been traveling across the country, sharing experiences and feelings that many people won’t divulge to their closest friends.

Merryn will speak from 1 to 3 p.m. Monday at Pittsburg Memorial Auditorium in conjunction with April as Child Abuse Prevention Month. The free public event is being sponsored by the Children’s Advocacy Center and Pittsburg State University SAVE Alumni.

“Society needs to wake up and quit ignoring what so many want to avoid talking about,” she said Friday in a telephone interview. “I will not let anything get in my way of bringing this epidemic into the spotlight.”

She was first abused at the age of 6 1/2 by her best friend’s uncle.

“He was like a live-in baby-sitter for my friend, and he abused both of us,” Merryn said. “As I was running home, my friend came after me and asked me to pinkie promise that I wouldn’t tell anybody about it. Her uncle had told her she would lose her house if anybody found out.”

At 11, she was molested by a teenaged cousin she had loved and trusted.

For a time, Merryn did feel ashamed and wondered if the abuse had somehow been her fault. But, at 13, she and her little sister, who had also been abused, were taken to a Children’s Advocacy Center.

“That was the first place my sister and I told our stories,” she said. “It was the very first place in my childhood where I broke my silence and began sharing some of the details of what I went through. I learned there I was not at fault for what happened.”

Now, Merryn said, she is dedicated to the work of the 700 Children’s Advocacy Centers in America. “After I talk Monday in Pittsburg, I’ll be going to Nebraska to talk for a Children’s Advocacy Center there,” she said.

She has also written two books about her experiences. “I turned my childhood diary into a book, ‘Stolen Innocence,’ and self-published it when I was a high school senior,” Merryn said. “It was republished by Health Communications Inc. in January 2005.”

Her second book, “Living for Today,” came out in November. It deals with her successful effort to forgive her abusers and reclaim the joy in her life.  “I won’t let them take the joy and happiness from my life,” she said.

Merryn has appeared on the Montel Williams show and Good Morning America in 2006, and in 2008 was part of a slide show about superwomen on Oprah.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in social work from Western Illinois University in 2008, and completed her master’s degree in social work in 2009 from Aurora University.

Right now she is focusing as much as possible on speaking and promoting what she calls “Erin’s Law,” which would mandate education programs in elementary schools to teach children about abuse.

“We teach kids to stop, drop and roll in a fire, yet no one teaches them about safe touch and unsafe touch,” Merryn said. “Or, if they do, they talk about ‘stranger danger’. The truth is that about 93 percent of sexual abuse is done by someone the child knows and loves.”

She hopes that, by speaking out, she will encourage others to break their silence and start to heal. “You can’t continue to run from the past, because it will surface later,” she said.

Merryn told of a speaking at a school, and later getting a call from a teacher who said that the mother of a student wanted to talk with her.

“I called the mother, and she told me that her son had been abused by his stepfather but would never talk about it,” she said. “After her son heard me talk at school, he came home and opened up to his mother. She wanted to thank me.”

Sometimes abuse victims carry their secrets for decades. “The oldest person who revealed to me was 83,” Merryn said. “I was having dinner with a friend and her grandmother. The friend told her grandmother about the books I had written, and the grandmother told me what had happened to her when she was 6 or 7. She had never said a word about it to anybody before.”

Merryn has come to believe that everything in life happens for a reason, and that her childhood suffering has given her a purpose in life.

“My life is not defined by evil, but how I have risen above evil,” she said. “None of this would have been possible without my faith in God, and He has opened my eyes and heart more than I could have imagined, showing me my purpose.”