by Becca Cougill

Created on: May 08, 2008   Last Updated: August 21, 2011

I don't know how many saw what was going on before my mother stumbled into the room, on that fateful day, that lead to my family moving away from a job they enjoyed, and family they thought they could trust. I am quite sure that someone saw. I didn't after all live away from civilization. No, in fact, I was the child of people working hard to help children who had been removed from their family home for what ever reason. My parents were house parents at a Christian run children's home. My grandparents were as well, both sets of them. This was the very place my parents had met and married. But, apparently no one noticed, when at the age of three, one of the boys under my grandmothers care started luring me off so he could sexually abuse me. No one ever noticed when he left me alone in places, I wasn't suppose to be so, that when my mother found me, I would get in trouble. No one ever saw the adult, I know was encouraging the acts, but whose face, I can say, I have only seen in my nightmares.

My mother was the one that acted after nearly two years of abuse. She found me there in that dark concrete confines that was the children's home tractor shed. She saw what was happening to me. She reported it. My grandmother dismissed it. Her reaction was the boy was slow. He didn't know any better. He couldn't have been too slow. Our armed forces were quick to embrace him when he enlisted. The Children's home director basically told my mother it was in everyones best interest including my own, if the subject was just dropped and never mentioned again. I was so young, there was no way I could remember. People who should have acted didn't. I don't know how long others had known and never acted to stop it. The campus was decent size but so were the number of people around. I will never believe that no one knew what was happening before that day.

What is worse, is that once they found out, their inaction allowed it to happen again when I was older. I can't tell you how old I was. Some where between the 4th and 6th grade. I remember that much, because I remember what town we were living in. I only lived in that town from the beginning of fourth grade to the end of the sixth. I was the one that put a stop to it then. I felt ashamed and guilty that all it took to make him go away was to tell him no. Somehow, I felt like I had brought all of it on myself. Maybe everyone would have been right and I wouldn't have remembered what happened at the children's home had he not bothered

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