Silent No More: (cont.)
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She stresses that unless their father gets counseling, the sisters have to contend with the fact that when their children are around him, they, too, will be in danger. That concern became quite real a few years ago, when one sister suspected their father had begun to abuse her 6-year-old son. Her fear for her son led her to finally confront her father about the abuse she and her sisters had suffered. As the secret tumbled out, her mother reacted with disbelief. "You all must have done something," she said lamely, apparently not knowing how else to respond. Stephanie's father insisted nothing had happened with his daughters or his grandson, and her mother let the issue drop. Stephanie's sister, dismayed by her parents' denial and needing to protect her son, now avoids her parents' home.

That episode was the first and last time the sisters ever openly discussed the abuse with their parents. Turner believes that the entire family will need to go into therapy if real healing is to occur, but she acknowledges that it is unlikely that Stephanie's parents will ever move past their denial. Mothers who can't acknowledge their daughters' abuse have often been abused themselves, she reflects. Until they can deal with their own demons, they can't help their daughters. "It's like a cancer," Turner says. "If your grandmother had it and your mother had it, you're susceptible."

As for her father, Stephanie is resigned. "People are who they are," she says. "Rather than have him live out his last days being miserable, I've made a conscious decision to make him feel comfortable." A soft sigh escapes her as she adds: "That just leaves me waiting until he dies."

Sex, Money, Drugs

Evelyn's eyes say she's 50. In fact, she is only 35. She grew up in a comfortable home in New York City with her parents, sister and two brothers. When she was 10, her brother's teenage friend began to creep up to her bedroom to fondle her. He'd give her candy to keep silent. Evelyn finally threatened to tell when he pressured her to "let him put his thing in me." Then he left her alone. In junior high, she fell into a clique of girls who regularly visited the principal's office. "We let him feel us up, and he gave us money and good grades," she says. The principal was fired when one of the girls became pregnant and told. No one else in the clique breathed a word.

At 16 Evelyn befriended a man who owned a neighborhood store. He invited her into the basement for drugs and sex. Not long after, she got pregnant and dropped out of school to have his child. She was in the ninth grade and could barely read. "I was always used to a man taking care of me," she says. At 18 she met Benny, who fed her crack habit and then beat her. Desperate to escape him, Evelyn left her baby with her mother and took off on her own. Soon she was prostituting to buy crack. "It didn't matter what they did to me," she says of the countless tricks she turned. "I just wanted my money."

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