Stop Child Abuse Now (SCAN) - 2433

Tonight's special guest is Charles De Leon from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who's directed a documentary, 'The 20 Year Journey', about adult male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Charles shares, “I grew up in a section of North Philadelphia that earned the nickname ‘The Badlands’. I learned early on that if you wanted to make it you had to be hard. A lesson I learned from my father early in life. My father was physically abusive towards my mother and around the time I was five he started to sexually abuse me. I never fully understood the impact this abuse had on me. I was a very angry child and would get into fights daily. Later I would understand this anger was just masking my fear and self-loathing. As an adolescent, I questioned my sexuality and it scared me. I felt unworthy of love, unworthy of life. I became angry at God because in my mind he hated me first. He gave me Johnny as a father and left me unprotected like a lamb to the slaughter. At 22, two weeks before my son was born, I had a panic attack. It dawned on me that I may be my father. I was scared that I would do to my son what my father did to me; or at best I would abandon my family.” Charles is a mental health counselor in Philadelphia who currently works as a clinical supervisor for a partial hospitalization program for preschool age children. "I have been working in the mental health field for over 15 years," he says. "Six years ago I came out publicly to discuss my sexual abuse as a child. The weight of that abuse at the age of five I still carry with me today."