Victim Now a Voice for the Children

Forty-year-old Becky Clark says she is deaf today because of repeated blows to her head from her stepfather when she was a child.

She survived beatings and sexual abuse for nine years, she said, before she moved out of her family’s home at 17. But she was dealt another blow two years later when her twin brother, Ronnie, committed suicide. He left behind a scrapbook of pain-filled poems and willed a gun to his mother so she could protect herself.

“It was a very difficult and most violent upbringing,” Clark said recently.

The Sherman Oaks resident said her pain has given way to a driving need to help others in similar situations.

“I am the legacy for my twin and other abused kids--victims and survivors,” she said. “It’s important that we no longer stay silent.”

Clark worked to raise awareness about child abuse and prevention last week as the Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley volunteer ambassador for the 12th annual “Day of the Child.” The idea was developed by a Simi Valley grass-roots organization to help promote awareness and encourage child abuse prevention nationwide.

Each year on Dec. 1, people from across the country do whatever they can to get the word out about preventing child abuse. According to a 1997 report by the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse, the crime has increased 41% since 1988 nationwide.

Clark became the local ambassador by happenstance. About two weeks ago, while researching child abuse on the Internet for a book she is writing, she discovered the organization’s Web site and learned that the Los Angeles area lacked a point person.

So she stepped up. She soon was persuading the media to run public service announcements on child abuse and making her own plans to get her message out one handshake at a time.

Clark was at Fashion Square Sherman Oaks for 11 hours Friday, handing out fliers and mint-green ribbons to shoppers. She said it was a painful day of remembrance. She was particularly moved, she said, by a woman in her 50s who admitted for the first time that she had been abused by her father.

“We were both in tears by the end of the conversation,” Clark said.

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Clark knows the importance of being heard. She said few in her hometown of Memphis believed her or her brother’s stories of abuse. So she kept quiet about what went on inside their middle-class house--the drinking, the hitting and how she would watch the doors to her room “like a hawk” at night.

Clark, who works as a sports psychology consultant, a writer and personal trainer, said her life’s dream is to establish a foundation for abused children and survivors of abuse. She hopes to collect tens of thousands of teddy bears for “Day of the Child 2001” to donate to shelters for abused children across Los Angeles County.

“I don’t want my brother to have died in vain or others who have suffered from child abuse,” she said. “I want them to know there is hope.”

For more information about “Day of the Child,” visit https://www.dayofthechild.org or call (805) 527-5841.

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