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Filmmaker, Actress, Child Abuse Survivor Shares her Story at Bivona Child Abuse Summit

bivonasummit.org

Hundreds of law enforcement, mental health, medical, and child abuse prevention professionals are attending a two-day conference on child abuse in Rochester this week.

The keynote speaker Thursday heard today from filmmaker, writer and actress Angela Shelton about her own survival of child sexual abuse.

Shelton traveled the country several years ago, trying to meet every woman who shared her name.  She thought it would make a funny film.

That's until she started hearing their life stories and discovered that 70 percent of the women she interviewed had been the victims of child sexual abuse, rape or domestic violence.  One of them was tracking sexual predators in the town where Angela's own father lived. She said he had sexual abused her when she was a child.                     

"As a survivor, I wanted to crawl into a hole and go back home, and as a filmmaker I was like, 'This is brilliant! You can't write this! I'm going to have to go confront him,' " Shelton said.

Angela said her father denied ever having abused her, but she isn’t sorry she confronted him because it was crucial to her healing.  She has learned to silence the inner voice that used to plague her.

"I'm too fat, I'm too ugly, I'm stupid, I'm worthless...it goes on and on and on. You don't have to be a survivor to have that (self)talk," Shelton said. "But survivors especially have that believe 'I'm damaged goods, I'm disgusting, I'm not worthy.' "

This morning, at the Bivona Child Abuse Summit, Shelton also talked to professionals who help abuse victims about managing their own trauma that comes from the work that they do.

Her philosophy is, you can't heal the world until you heal yourself.

Beth Adams joined WXXI as host of Morning Edition in 2012 after a more than two-decade radio career. She was the longtime host of the WHAM Morning News in Rochester. Her career also took her from radio stations in Elmira, New York, to Miami, Florida.