Child Sexual Abuse: The New Terror Threat in America?
Have child sexual exploitation and abuse become the new terror threat in America? Or is this an age-old problem, the darkest specter of which remains largely beneath the surface like an iceberg? Activist and author Linde Grace White says it's the latter.

Monroe, VA www.prweb.com October 4, 2006 -- A gunman takes six female students hostage at a Colorado high school, sexually assaulting several of them before shooting one girl dead. A respected Florida Congressman resigns in shame after his sexually predatory e-mail exchanges with former male pages come to light. The Catholic Church virtually bankrupts some of its dioceses to pay out multi-million-dollar settlements to victims of past child sex abuse. The North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is excluded even from raucous gay pride parades because it generates too much controversy.

Have child sexual exploitation and abuse become the new terror threat in America? Or is this an age-old problem, the darkest specter of which remains just beneath the surface like an iceberg?

If you ask Linde Grace White, author of "Dollbaby: Triumph Over Childhood Sexual Abuse," she will tell you the larger threat lurks in scary proportions within our own neighborhoods and homes.

"I am not an alarmist but a realist," says White, who survived years of abuse from her own father (now deceased) that started when she was as young as 2. "The U.S. Department of Justice statistics tell the story. They maintain that as many as one in three or four girls and one in five or six boys will be sexually abused before their 18th birthdays."

Most of this abuse will be perpetrated by people known to the children or by family members in their own homes, according to the Justice Department and the National Victim Center. Family members commit 47 percent of these heinous acts while friends, neighbors or other trusted individuals (teachers, coaches, youth workers) commit 49 percent of them. Only 4 percent of sexual assaults against children are by strangers, yet such attacks are what we are led to fear the most.

"My story confirms this bad news," says White. Now in her early 60s, she grew up in an era when such crimes were routinely ignored. Silenced by fear and the indifference of her mother and other relatives, she coped through extreme denial and what she later learned was Dissociative Disorder, or a segmenting of her personality into several alters through which she lived her life in survival mode for many years.

Debilitating depression finally led her to seek professional help. With the assistance of a counselor and a support group for survivors of incest, she began putting the pieces of her shattered life back together. The result was "Dollbaby," part memoir, part self-help book. No one who reads it comes away without being profoundly moved ... and motivated to do something.

"Linde Grace's manuscript came to me at just the right time," says Debbie Thurman, a family mental health advocate who also runs Cedar House Publishers. She teamed with White to bring the book to life. "Not only had I experienced childhood sexual abuse myself, but I also had been witnessing its effects in the lives of too many adults who were trying to break free of their past trauma," she says.

Linde Grace White is adamant about seeing more abuse education and prevention programs implemented in communities, churches and schools. "It is clear that child sexual abuse is at the root of much of the mental illness we see today," she says. "Not only do we have a moral obligation to these suffering individuals, but we also need to realize the economic impact of failing them."

For more information about "Dollbaby," visit the Cedar House Web site at www.cedarhousepublishers.com. To schedule an interview or speaking engagement with Linde Grace White, call (434) 929-8002 or e-mail.