Writer turned abuse secret to healing story
Victim response to article in magazine led her to book
The Huntsville Times
By PATRICIA C. McCARTER
Times Staff Writer patriciacm@htimes.com
August 11, 2005
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Robin D. Stone was 9 when she was sexually abused, but she didn't tell anybody until she was 21.
That's actually a pretty quick turnaround for victims. Some never tell.
As journalist/author Stone told 300-plus social workers at the National Children's Advocacy Center's Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Conference here Wednesday, it's the secrecy that leads to shame, and she wants to change that.
The former reporter for The New York Times and The Detroit Free Press let her secret out by writing a story in Essence magazine a few years ago. The 500 letters and phone calls she got from other victims led her to write the book "No Secrets, No Lies: How Black Families Can Heal from Sexual Abuse."
The Detroit native had graduated from college, and the family was planning a going-away party for her because she'd gotten a job at The Boston Globe. She told her parents she didn't want to go.
"The party was going to be at the house of the uncle who had sexually abused me when I was 9," said Stone, now 40. "I told them I didn't want to go, and then I had to tell them why."
Her parents dealt with it by saying the uncle - who said it was a "misunderstanding" - would never be allowed to be around when she was.
At an Essence retreat in 1998 when Stone was talking to the group about what made her who she was, she began crying, and she realized she hadn't dealt with the abuse.
She saw a therapist and began to understand the why of it all. She talked to some colleagues and friends about it, and she learned that some of them had been abused, too.