Stop Child Abuse Now (SCAN) - 1530

Tonight's special guest is Harold Glen Hull from Puyallup, Washington, a survivor of sexual, physical and emotional abuse as a child, and now a motivational speaker at Quest for Survival. Glen was born three months premature but his twin sister passed away three hours after birth. It took months for him to be released from the hospital, and his mother wanted nothing to do with him. "She told everyone that I should have died like her little girl had," Glen says. When he was 5 his father left the family. "Every day I was physically beaten by my mother. She got great pleasure seeing my pain and fear of her." Abuses happened elsewhere, too. When he was 10 he was raped and sexually abused for the first time by a neighbor man." Glen says the man forced him to do things that to this day he's never told anyone. The neighbor went on to rape him many times after that night. "I was taken out of my mother's home when I was 12 years old," Glen tells me. He became a ward of the state. "In the boys home we were physically and sexually abused by the clergy and the older boys." As a young man Glen was very violent and put himself in constant danger "trying to get killed." He joined the Army in 1972 and wanted to go to Vietnam, but never faced combat in 30 years of service. In the Army, Glen received counseling. "I was called upon to speak with children and young adults who had been in abusive homes and families," he says. "After sharing my story in the groups and having it written about in the base paper I realized that I could actually help other childhood abuse survivors." Glen is now a writer, speaker and advocate against child abuse. "It is okay to give ourselves time to heal," he explains. "We were victims! Now we are survivors!"