No Secrets No Lies: How Black Families Can Heal from Sexual Abuse » (Reprint)

ROBIN D. STONE is a former Executive Editor of Essence magazine and the founding Editor-in-Chief of Essence.com. She was also an editor for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Detroit Free Press, and Family Circle, and has written for numerous publications, including Essence and Glamour. As a 2002-03 Kaiser Media Fellow, she researched the impact of sexual abuse, with a focus on Black families. A Detroit native, she lives in New York City with her husband and their son.

With a foreword by Joycelyn Elders, M.D., No Secrets, No Lies is a powerful and daringly honest resource guide for families seeking to understand, prevent, and overcome childhood sexual abuse and its devastating impact on adult survivors.

An estimated one in four women and one in six men is abused by age eighteen, most often by someone they know. Most of these sexual assaults are never disclosed, much less reported to the police.

No Secrets, No Lies demystifies the cultural taboos and social dynamics that keep Black families silent and enable abuse to continue for generations. Among them:

• Fear of betraying family by turning offenders in to "the system"
• Distrust of institutions and authority figures, such as police officers
• Reluctance to seek counseling or therapy
• A legacy of enslavement and stereotypes about black sexuality

Through compelling personal accounts from everyday people, Robin D. Stone, a sexual abuse survivor herself, illuminates the emotional, psychological and hidden consequences of remaining silent, and provides holistic, practical steps to move toward healing.

No Secrets, No Lies candidly speaks to: survivors, telling them they are not at fault, not alone and how they can seek help; parents, guardians and caretakers, explaining how they can keep children safe and help survivors recover; and family, friends and other loved ones, showing ways to lend support.

Publishers Weekly

Expanding on an article she wrote for Essence, where she is a former executive editor, Stone advocates many standard methods for recognizing and coping with abuse. But while the rates of sexual victimization, Stone shows, are the same for blacks and whites, "Black American women were more likely to have withheld reports of attempted rape from authorities" and "were more likely to blame their living circumstances" for an attack. It is Stone's detailed discussion of the probable reasons for such disparities, and her insights into them, that make this book unique. Drawing on her own experience, she argues that the "splitting" or dissociation used by the black community during slavery in order to cope psychologically with lifetimes of abuse is the same technique many African-Americans now use to deal with everyday racism and with sexual abuse. Stereotypes of African-American hypersexuality and of African-American women's mythic "strength" add further complications, which Stone unpacks with unflinching care and with the help of stories of abuse she has collected from black women. Chapters on "Helping Boys and Men" and "Challenging Abusers" offer more techniques for conversation and confrontation, and the book ends with "Reconciliation...and Moving On" and an appendix of resources. Stone's understanding of, and empathy for, incredibly painful situations comes through on every page, and her techniques for beginning to deal with them are compassionate and straightforward. Agent, Sarah Lazin. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.