Stop Child Abuse Now (SCAN) - 1498

Tonight's special guest is AmyAnna Soto from Turlock, California, a survivor of  childhood sexual abuse, emotional and physical abuse, rape, stalking and harassment. She is now a public speaker, artist and poet. She often speaks to college classes and other programs through a program at Peer Recovery Art Project. She organizes an in person and facebook art group for adult childhood trauma survivors called Creative Progress. She has published a book of poetry 'After the Rain, Before the Storm' under a pen name of Nicolette Lucid. AmyAnna has a dissociative identity disorder or multiple personalities, and has a speech impediment because she developed spinal meningitis at the age of two. She almost died. Her mother told all her classmates that she ‘could have been retarded' and they teased and bullied her through all her school years. She learned if she didn't talk then no one would know she was different. Multiple sexual assualts and rapes followed. As a teenager, AmyAnna kept the secret which led to her to be isolating and fearful of everyone. One of her predators also was watching and warning others to stay away from her. For the next 25 years he stalked and harassed her by phone calls, making friends of her friends and driving by her house. At age 18, AmyAnna married a good man, and now has a 21 year old son. But things in the marriage were sometimes rocky. She has been battling depression and suicide for 12 years and also has PTSD. But she's doing much better now, having progressed from writing to her therapist to public speaking, and we hope she'll be an active member of the NAASCA family!