Voices Set Free Outreach Project

By Virginia Jones
Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing
March 1, 2013

http://compassionategathering.blogspot.com/

Virginia Jones, the co-founder of Compassionate Gathering, and Louise Bauschard, the founder of Voices Set Free, are announcing a joint venture, the Voices Set Free Outreach Project. We will be filming stories of survivors and posting them to You Tube. Our first goal is to provide each person a small measure of justice of by enabling him or her to share their stories to a wider audience in a supportive venue. Our second goal is to educate the general public about the long lasting and traumatic nature of the wounds of the various forms of abuse. Our third goal is to nurture among individuals and within the wider community, a sense of connection between survivors. When officers are called to a domestic disturbance, they are required to investigate for child abuse because the two abuses often accompany each other. When called to investigate child abuse, however, the police are not required to investigate for domestic violence. Once we are abused, our boundaries are punctured; we lose the ability to protect ourselves. We accept the abuse in our relationships and often repeat the pattern in various forms. To reduce abuse in our society, we must increase our awareness of the sources and symptoms of abuse, of the interconnectedness between various forms of abuse, and find ways to heal ourselves and support one another along the healing journey so that we stop the cycle.

We begin our journey with the story of Lydia Wakefield Hubbard, who survived incest by her father from the age of 4 to the age of 17. Lydia's father told her to keep his abuses secret, which she did for many years. When she began speaking about these abuses in her forties,

Lydia spoke of them only in private. More recently she began speaking in public. She is now 80 years old and remains passionate about telling her truth out about abuse. Here is her story in three parts.