Abuse victim: Key to stopping abuse starts with telling your story

Abuse victim: Key to stopping abuse starts with telling your story

Sunday came around and her foster mother heaped more pancakes on her plate than she could ever eat. When she stopped eating and started vomiting the pancakes, her foster mother would force-feed her the vomit.
That's abuse. That's a memory.

Annie was the youngest of nine children. Her mother divorced her alcoholic father before Annie was born. Taken away from her uneducated welfare mother at a young age, Annie suffered emotional and physical abuse at the hands of a foster mother and sexual abuse by a foster father.

When her real mother found her at the foster home, Annie was covered from head to toe with bruises.

"I had enough bruises on me that she was able to get me out of there," Annie recalls. It was the second foster mother who made pancake Sundays so horrible.