This story begins and ends with a photograph taken when I was two years old. Finding it was like discovering that I really did exist after all . It was as if someone was saying ‘No, it wasn’t all in your imagination, that childhood really did happen, and it happened to you.’Brought up in South London by violent and abusive parents, the Roche children knew only cruelty, neglect, starvation and squalor. As one of ten and regularly b...

We are presently living at a truly extraordinary time of profound transformation. Most people, wherever they may be living in the world, are presented with very real and great dangers but equally real and perhaps even greater opportunities. To survive and thrive in the 21st century it is essential to activate our intuition and to awaken our spiritual consciousness. The royal road, the fundamental skill, to achieve this is prayer.Integrating the teachings of the spiritual tradition,...

To live well one must be able to die well and vice versa. Life and death are two faces of the same coin but with a fundamental transformation when one moves from the spiritual dimension to the physical and back to the spiritual. Actually, there is but one thing: Life without beginning and without ending but with two expressions, one on the spiritual plane and the other on the material plane. Today, in the West we find a great paradox: we have made enormous progress at the material, technol...

I have held my silence until now. This is the first time i have told the whole story of the abuse i suffered at the hands of my alcoholic step father.You may this true and honest account distrubing and upsetting but this was my life as a child

Karen McConnel earned a B.A. from the University of Toledo and her M.S.W. from the University of Alabama. She developed and coordinated a Therapeutic Foster Care Program and was Executive Director of a community-based agency providing services for runaway and homeless youth. Eileen Brand is a journalist and author whose work has been published in newspapers and journals in the US.

Unforgivable is the shocking real-life story of suffering and survival from child abuse victim Collette Elliott."I brought you into this world and I can take you out with one click of my fingers."What if Baby P or Daniel Pelka had lived to tell their tale?Collette Elliott once had a similar story. She slipped through the net and only just survived.Her childhood was a place of filth and terror. Her prostitute mother abused and neglec...

He beat them, he abused them, and he tortured them. He broke their dreams. But they came back stronger.‘Terrie and Paul are two of the bravest people I have ever met. I have only shared the briefest glimpse into the true horrors this brother and sister have endured, but I rarely come across cases this bad. After the unspeakable abuse and shocking betrayals, two incredible human beings came through – to inspire us all.’Sara Payne OBE, co-founder of Phoenix SurvivorsTe...

Every little girl dreams of being a Princess, she just wants to be her Daddy's little girl and for her Mommy to come back...Finding Anna is a gripping first-hand account of a child who survives the horror of sexual abuse and abandonment in a society that turns a blind eye to to the stark reality of molestation, child abuse and sexual exploitation.A love-child, unwittingly passed on from one caretaker to the next so that her mother could provide for herself and her young dau...

A young girl at the mercy of her abusive stepfather and the religious community that protects him - Bad Things in the Night is a moving true story of pain and triumph.As a child Beth was imprisoned within a Jehovah's Witness family, kept away from her mother, forbidden from wearing a school skirt above her knees by day, abused by her stepfather at night. Years later, when she summons the courage to report her stepfather to the police for the first time, she is forced to re...

Jane had a pretty good life. She was a single mother, and she worked hard for her three kids, who meant the world to her. One autumn evening she met someone she believed to be the man of her dreamsthe only thing missing in her nearly perfect life. He was handsome, gentle, quiet, and kind.Eleven months later, they bought a home and were married. Jane was so happy. Soon, however, her daughter, Michelle, began to change; she became distant and withdrawn. Something was wrong, but Jane ...

The third in a series of true short stories from foster carer Mia Marconi.Brody had been on the at-risk register since birth but was only removed from his alcoholic parents when he reached the age of six. Foster carer Mia Marconi was thrilled when he first arrived – a boy the same age as her son.It can be so bewildering for foster children when they arrive. The older ones are usually withdrawn and sullen. The younger ones will be screaming, spitting at you, making themselve...

The true story of Donna Ford, who between the ages of five and eleven was abused by her stepmother Helen. Labelled 'the bastard', the 'little witch' and 'the evil one'; beaten, isolated and afraid to even look at her own reflection, this beautiful little child was told she was lucky to be the victim of abuse - abuse which began as physical and mental, but progressed to the most appalling sexual attacks.Despite an horrendous early life, Donna is now a successful artist and mother of...