Age of Innocence Became Age of Abuse for JoAnn and Barb : Families: Teens were victimized from childhood, turning them violent and suicidal. Now they are trying to put their lives together.

JoAnn and Barb are two children who lost their innocence too soon, two horror stories in search of a happy ending.

Barb was raped repeatedly. In fact, she said, when she was 10, her father used her body as currency, giving her to a step-uncle who had driven him to the doctor, a sort of payment for services rendered.

JoAnn’s father sent her to get drugs for him. He beat her and touched her indecently from the time she was a baby. She was 9 years old, she said, when her father first had sex with her.

Is it any wonder that Barb became promiscuous, suicidal, a drug abuser? That JoAnn became violent, and swallowed 120 aspirin? That they both ended up in a facility for troubled girls, desperately trying to save their young lives?

“Their stories seem unbelievable at first because they’re so awful,” said Joyce Nodine, head teacher at the Germaine Lawrence Assessment & Diagnostic Program, where both girls were sent by the state.

Germaine Lawrence offers girls a 90-day safe harbor. They are taught grammar and reading, math and art; they join group discussions on everything from sexuality to AIDS awareness to job skills. Then they are sent on to long-term facilities or foster care or their own families.

“As children, they are the forgotten kids,” said Elisabeth Spiotta, the program’s educational director. “But as they get older and their behavior becomes so undesirable to society, they become the unwanted kids.

“No one wants to deal with helping these kids. People find it very difficult to believe and to understand that kids are being sexually abused. . . . I think people are having a very difficult time understanding the amount of violence and abuse that these kids have experienced.”

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From Barb’s file at Germaine Lawrence:

“It seems as if the client feels a great deal of shame about the sexual abuse and is reluctant to talk about it. She feels it was her poor judgment that placed herself in precarious environments.”

Of course, she was born into the first of those environments--the home where she said her parents allowed her to be abused by her 18-year-old step-uncle. Her parents deny it.

The next year, she was hospitalized--she was considering suicide. She told authorities she was sexually abused and, at the request of her parents, was made a ward of the state Department of Social Services.

She was promiscuous, they told officials.

The language they used with Barb was more brutal: Her parents called her “a bitch, a slut, a whore,” she said. “My father, one day, just decided to just drop me off to my social worker at DSS because he said I kept saying that foster homes were better than being home because of what was going on.

“He said, ‘I just can’t deal with her no more.’ And he looked at me and he goes, ‘Oh, you make me sick,’ and just walked out the door. I was crying.”

What followed was five years of foster homes and residential facilities, of drugs and alcohol, of forced and unforced sex, of suicide attempts. A partial diary of those years:

1989--Raped by two men who fled the country before charges could be filed.

March, 1990--Slit wrists with a razor blade.

April, 1990--Swallowed shampoo and slit wrists.

August, 1990--Slit wrists.

May, 1991--Slit wrists and arms.

In late 1991, Barb said, she ran away from her foster home and encountered some men. “I was hanging around with them and my ex-boyfriend came along and I wouldn’t sleep with him so he and his gang raped me.

“They locked me in a house. About seven or eight of them raped me the whole night. They would take turns. One would have sex with me and one would kiss me to keep my mouth shut.”

She escaped to her parents’ house. There, she told a reporter, she was raped by a brother-in-law while her father slept. “He took advantage of me, saying that he loved me and that I was the best-looking girl he had ever seen and that my sister meant nothing to him.”

(She told Germaine Lawrence a different story: “Barbara denies that she was sexually abused by her brother-in-law and said instead that she did a good job of stealing him away from her sister,” the counselor’s report said.)

She went back into foster care; once, she tried to stab a foster mother. And she went back to suicide attempts, and to a life of sex and drugs.

By her own count, she has slept with more than 80 men. “I didn’t know what I was doing. That’s how I thought I could show somebody that I really loved them, to give them a piece of me that I didn’t really cherish. I didn’t really care about my body at that time, so I would just give it away.”

She said she started drinking at age 10. The height of her drug use came when she was 13 or 14; she said she used marijuana and cocaine, took LSD 45 times, injected heroin every other week for days at a time.

Finally, this year, she was diagnosed as homicidal and chronically suicidal and was sent to a hospital psychiatric unit and then to Germaine Lawrence.

There, she turned 16, and discovered some truths about herself.

Why did she take drugs and sleep around? “I know it wasn’t me who was doing it. It was just somebody who didn’t really care about themselves. I know I did things wrong. . . . I don’t think I’m a slut or a whore. It’s just that I thought that’s the way people would love me.”

Why did she try to kill herself? “Because of my parents, that I couldn’t be with them. I didn’t care if they didn’t love me; I just wanted to be with my real family. Everyone wants to be with their real mother and father.”

Now, she said, “I love my mother and I love my father still after all the stuff they put me through, (but) I know I’m never going to go home, so I might as well just give up trying.”

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During JoAnn’s stay at Germaine Lawrence, she tore pipes from the walls, ripped a radiator apart, busted up furniture, tried to attack her keepers with shards of glass and threatened to slash her own wrists, officials say.

“She’s one of the most violent kids we’ve ever had,” said a supervisor, who, like most Germaine Lawrence officials, spoke on condition of anonymity.

But JoAnn also writes poetry:

Where is my father

Is he dead or alive

Does he care about me

Or the parts of me he made

The parts he used as his playmate.

Why me, I ask you Lord

It’s hard going through this world

Feeling so all alone . . . .

She was born out of wedlock in Texas 17 years ago to a 17-year-old mother. She alternated week to week living with her father and mother.

“The week that I would be with my father, he would sexually abuse me the whole time, and if I did something wrong, he would beat me,” she said.

“He used to send me to drug houses for him. He used to smoke weed. If I did good and if I did what was expected that whole week, then on the weekends he would buy me a six-pack of wine coolers and he would let me drink beer.”

JoAnn’s keepers say much of her acting out and violence is directed around the bathroom; to explain why, they point to her father’s abuse.

“If she wet her pants when she was 3 or 4, he would beat her,” said one supervisor. “One time, he hit her because she fell and got blood on stuff and then made her go to her room. If she had to go to the bathroom, he wouldn’t let her. Then he whips her again if she wets her pants.”

“I wouldn’t say I hate him,” JoAnn said. “If I was to see him today, the only thing I want to know is why he did it because he not only abused me . . . my biological sister actually got pregnant by my father. She had to get an abortion.”

JoAnn and her mother moved to Massachusetts in the late 1980s, but by then the abuse had taken its toll.

Earlier this year, it all came to a head. Upset and confused by an argument with her mother and other problems, she said she wanted to leave home. Her mother told her she couldn’t leave and called her other daughter to intervene.

“When the doorbell rang, my mom went to get it,” JoAnn recalled. “I just jumped up, stormed to the bathroom, opened the cabinet and took the pills. I wasn’t thinking. Afterwards, I tried making myself throw up.”

The aspirin overdose landed her at Germaine Lawrence, and she did not have an easy time there. She was put on “consequence,” meaning her privileges were restricted, both because of her violence and because she tried to run away. (The girls at Germaine Lawrence are watched continuously, even when they shower, and they are kept shoeless to discourage escapes.)

“I was just upset and I was trying to get out of this place, hoping they would kick me out, but they wouldn’t,” she said.

“Honestly, I’ve been having a really hard time since I’ve been here . . . ,” she said. “But now, I think I’m doing a lot better.”

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JoAnn left Germaine Lawrence on June 24 to live with her mother. “It’s going good. I’m just trying to work things out,” she said. She starts 11th grade this month; her plans include college, a family, a career.

She wants to do “something that I think I would be good in. I just want to get more involved in myself. I want to help other people also. After all I’ve been through, maybe I can make a change or maybe I can help somebody.”

Barb was discharged Aug. 20 into a residential program. She, too, has high hopes: “I’m going to finish high school, look for a job, wait a couple of years and then go to college to be a therapist for sexually abused kids.”

Sadly, a Germaine Lawrence counselor thinks it unlikely these dreams will come true.

“I don’t know how you can fix someone with this extensive trauma these girls have gone under,” she said. “Maybe they can function at some level with continuing help. But I can’t ever imagine them putting their lives together in a healthy way. The damage is so great and it happens so early that scarring is terrible.”

But JoAnn’s poetry--the lyrical outlet for all her sadness and anger--renounces that reality.

When I come back you’ll be surprised

You’ll be surprised I have not died

You’ll be surprised I made it through this struggle

I made it through without the devil.