UNITED STATES
The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing
Virginia Jones
Background Information: Louis Bauschard: A Life Dedicated to Breaking the Cycle of Abuse
Louise Baushcard started her adult life as a stay at home mother before going back to school during the flowering of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 70s. She studied Social Work with an emphasis on Women’s Studies.
Her studies and her mentors inspired her to open a Women’s Self Help Center in St. Louis, Missouri, in May 1976, to bring women together and empower them to create positive changes in their lives — a noble goal that would soon be subsumed by specific problems of an overwhelming nature. Within a short time, phone calls came in to the Center seeking help for physical abuse and sexual abuse, and the mission of the center transformed to that of a hotline for domestic violence and child sex abuse survivors.
The problem of abuse, that has surely always been with us, was just coming out into the open in the 1970s. Much secrecy, guilt and shame surrounds abuse, causing victims to remain silent even today, but at least today we know that 1 in 4 girls is a victim of child sex abuse and 1 in 4 women will become a victim of domestic violence at some point during her lifetime. Men and boys also experience both physical and sexual, albeit in smaller numbers. In the 1970s, no one knew how prevalent these problems were.
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