Stop Child Abuse Now (SCAN) - 1378

Tonight's special guest is John Davis from West Milford, New Jersey, child abuse survivor and author of the memoir 'My Father's Son'. John writes, "Every family has secrets. Ours were just bigger than others." He goes on, "My earliest memory is of a gun." That gun was in his father's hand .. and it was pointed at his mother's head. John grew up on the rough streets of Brooklyn, a place where no one thought twice when parents smacked around their kids-or each other. At the center of the tumultuous neighborhood, and John's world, was his larger-than-life father, a big time cocaine dealer. "In addition to his violent mood swings and mental torture," he says, "he also used me to palm drugs to customers, get money as well as make deliveries." John, in particular, seemed to bear the brunt of Roberto's wildly swinging moods. "My mother was also a victim and either wasn't able to protect me or didn't care," he writes. "My father hit me until I was 17 and even asked me to drive the car as he kidnapped and wanted to kill his enemies." Every knock on the door might be one of Roberto's enemies, or the police. "At the age of 34 I found he wasn't even my father, John says, "but that he had adopted me. The search for my real father ended with finding his obituary notice." In his publishing debut, "My Father's Son,' John recounts how he spent his childhood in constant terror and his teen years learning to fight back. He explains, "I wrote the book as a catharsis but [many] readers have wanted to open up to me about their own abusive situations."