MASSACHUSETTS
The Milford Daily News
By Julia Spitz/Daily News staff
MetroWest Daily News
The people Barbara Hansen seeks are the ones most would shun.
“This is my purpose in life, to reach out to the underdogs and addicts,’’ she said, sitting in her living room in a Milford neighborhood that’s “a completely opposite world’’ from the crack houses and prisons she has visited.
While she hasn’t traveled the road of alcohol or drug abuse personally, she feels a kinship with “that part of society people don’t want to deal with,’’ and sees a common thread in many of their stories: abuse.
Oftentimes it’s the kind of abuse she knew as a young girl growing up in upstate New York and Texas.
“Listen to the Cry of the Child: The Deafening Silence of Sexual Abuse,’’ her book about the pain of being molested by her grandfather, and later a pastor at a religious camp, and her path to healing, was published in 2003.
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