Too many adults are unaware, even disbelieving, of the shameful acts done to children behind closed doors, perhaps in their own house to their own children! Child abuse is not just something that happens in the poor communities.

The American Medical Association has declared that child molestation has reached epidemic proportions. They have urged doctors to learn more about victims of sexual abuse and how victims blame themselves.

Peter Jennings reported that evidence of changes in brain wave patterns has been found in adults who were abused as children. This discovery has been verified with brain scans. Victims of childhood abuse, whether mental or physical, do indeed, react to situations differently than adults who were not abused.

Victims of child abuse do not trust, because their trust has been betrayed. Their feeling of guilt is their reality...that somehow, something they did caused the bad things to happen to them.

Child molestation is no respector of wealth or position...homes with a chemical dependency such as alcohol double the risk. Sexual abuse can happen in the best of families, and often the mother is the last to know. Teachers need to be alert to the subtle clues that only they are in a position to observe.

When are children the most vulnerable to abuse? Not as adolescents, as commonly believed, but before the age of six, when they are most trusting of the adults who care for them. Once started, sexual abuse usually does continue for many years.

Strangers are not the main offenders, fathers and step-fathers are. Other family members and close family friends are next most likely to molest a child.

Many more girls are molested than boys. However, those boys have the added onus of doubting their manhood as they grow up because they were most likely molested by a man.

Abused children react in many different ways. Some push such experiences deep enough to deny them entirely, others create another self to whom these bad things happen, some act out, others retreat into a shell. There are many other defense mechanisms. The one thing almost all victims of child abuse have in common is a feeling of guilt. That, and the code of silence, is usually instilled in them from the beginning by the offending adult(s).

Autobiographies by various adult survivors can provide the in-depth backgrounds to assist in the prevention of such abuse. However, there are far too few such first hand accounts in print.

Those are precisely the reasons why Barbra Liberté was urged by many, including some of her children, to write her story, aptly titled, "Am I Guilty?"

Barbra emphasizes with tears in her eyes that, "Children are robbed of their childhood with that first violation." Now a grandmother, she has bared her very soul in this autobiography in hopes that the book will assist in the education of responsible adults. It takes that kind of education to enable adults to help save children from abuse.

"Am I Guilty?" by Barbra Liberté may be ordered directly from the publisher online using a major credit card, or you may print an order form to send by fax or mail (checks, money orders & purchase orders accepted). It may also be ordered from Amazon Books Online, Barnes & Noble Bookstore Online,
or special ordered at any local bookstore (ISBN 0-931563-18-6).