Stop Child Abuse Now (SCAN) - 2085

Tonight's special guest is Laura Landgraf from Post Falls, Idaho, a returning NAASCA family member who's an author, activist, speaker, and life coach. Her mission is empowering women and men who survived childhood abuse. In the process, she believes we protect our children. Laura survived a childhood of trauma. The family avoided consequences in the United States by moving to Africa. In adulthood, Laura pushed away from her past to try to live the “perfect” life—until the moment her own children were threatened by her family. Her book is a memoir, “The Fifth Sister: From Victim to Victor - Overcoming Child Abuse.” Laura she grew up in a wildly dysfunctional family, surviving complex trauma. For eight years Laura and her four sisters struggled to survive the nightmare of sexual and emotional abuse. She lived it .. the isolation, the fear, the losses, the manipulation and control, the tentative and fragile bonds with one another, finding humor, and a burgeoning sense of self. As an adult, she buried memories of her family's dysfunction and strove to build a life as close to perfect as she could imagine. Then, on a rare visit to her parents' home, Laura walked into a room and saw her father playing “Tiger” with her own children. Memories flooded back: the game of “Tiger” was always the prelude to molestation. Stunned to discover that her father was still an incestuous abuser, Laura faced her past to protect her children, for their children's sake. Going undercover, she was able to prove a twenty-year history of molestation, which her mother aided and abetted—at first passively and later actively. Be sure to check out her new TEDx Talk, "Razed By Lions".