By Elisabeth Strillacci

KANNAPOLIS — A lost childhood due to trauma is one of the most challenging things a child can face, and when the trauma is something a child thinks they have to bear alone, the hurt multiplies exponentially.

Erin Merryn has faced both a long-term childhood trauma and a multitude of additional challenges in her lifetime, and while there are still difficult moments, she has dedicated herself to turning those challenges into help and protection for others.

On Tuesday, Merryn was the keynote speaker at the annual Child Abuse Prevention and Awareness luncheon for the Jeff Gordon Children’s Advocacy Center. The center, located in Concord, serves Kannapolis as part of Cabarrus County, and the event was held in the main room at the Laureate Center. April is National Child Abuse Awareness month and like many CACs across the state, the Jeff Gordon center makes the most of the month’s focus.

Merryn, 40, is an Illinois native who still resides in the Chicago suburbs with her husband and four children, three girls and a boy. She is a published author with an MSW and a laugh that is contagious. Her confidence fills the space around her and she infuses a room with her energy.

But it has not always been so.

At the age of six, Merryn was spending the night with her best friend, a child of a single mother whose adult brother was living in the home to watch the children while she worked.

At that sleepover, Merryn awoke in the middle of the night to her best friend’s uncle sexually assaulting her. His threats of killing her family and burning her house down kept her silent. She refused future sleepovers, opting instead to go during the day when the uncle usually slept. When she did accept another overnight invitation, it included a third girl.

“I said I would come if all three of us slept on the floor together and not in separate beds,” said Merryn, believing she could find safety in numbers. Instead, that night, the uncle assaulted all three of them. “And sweet little Erin became angry. I began to exhibit classic abused child behavior. And the three of us were now keeping the same secret.”

Over time, the man no longer slept when Merryn visited, and the afternoon he raped her for the first time, she can still remember everything she was wearing, every sound, every smell.

“Over time the abuse got worse,” she said. “I was tied to the bed, assaulted in every way you can imagine, but I will spare you the full details.”

One day, her sister pulled off her shoes the same way her rapist had, and it sent her spiraling into full panic mode. In banging her hand on the back door of her own home, she put her fist through the glass window and ended up in the ER. Still in full panic mode, hospital staff made the unfortunate decision to restrain her, which just sent her farther into fear and panic.

“My parents could hear me screaming all the way down the hall,” she said. Her behavior in school became so bad that she was labeled “emotionally and behaviorally disturbed” student who required an Individual Education Plan or IEP.

And then, at the age of 8, salvation. Her family moved, and she no longer saw her friend or the uncle. And within six months, her behavior issues disappeared, and the school counselor told the family she no longer needed an IEP.

Three years later, Merryn, now 11, went with her family on an overnight vacation. There were about 20 children there of varying ages, but she was the youngest and when the older kids went out that night, she stayed home and fell asleep.

And woke up to her oldest cousin sexually assaulting her.

He told her if she told, she would destroy the family, and that no one would ever believe her, because it would be her word against his.

“I wanted to talk to my mother so badly, but I was so afraid he was right, no one would believe me,” Merryn said. She went home and in the back of her pint diary, where she thought no one would find it, she wrote “Something happened last night and I don’t know who to tell.”

At the age of 12, her aunt asked her to watch her younger cousins while her aunt ran errands or got her nails done, and Merryn, who has always loved children, dreaming of her own family one day, said yes. One day, she was playing hide and seek with the kids, and Brian, her older cousin, came in.

She had suppressed that first assault so successfully that at first, she said she didn’t get any warning signs. Things felt normal. He said he had the perfect hiding place where they would never find her. She followed to see where he had in mind, but as they reached a hidden space, that gut feeling began to creep in, and the assault came with full force, along with the assertions that no one would ever believe her.

She dealt with the abuse for two years, and the behavior issues began to come back.

Until one day, she and her younger sister, now 11 herself, were walking and her sister said “Brian’s gross.” And she knew. The day Merryn got away and hid behind the washing machine, Brian had found her sister instead.

It was time to tell someone.

“I thought, OK someone has to believe us now, because there are two of us, and the same thing is happening to us both.”

The sisters sat down and told their parents everything. Merryn’s father called his sister immediately and insisted they talk. But Brian’s mother, instead of believing the girls, said they were lying, that her son would never do such a thing. And Brian, which is a pseudonym, was a star athlete and “not at all the picture of a pedophile or rapist,” and his mother insisted it was not true.

Merryn’s parents believed the girls, but also believed because of his age, Brian would not get much jail time and they believed jail would not help him get the therapy and counseling he needed. Initially, they agreed that if Brian would get help they would not call police. Brian’s mother asked that they not tell anyone else in the family.

Merryn’s parents agreed, thinking they were helping both the girls and Brian. Instead, Brian’s mother went to the rest of the family, telling everyone that the girls were telling horrible lies about her son. And all but one of the extended family turned their backs on Merryn and her sister.

Brian’s threats were now coming true.

So Merryn’s parents called the police. And were told the two girls needed to go to a Children’s Advocacy Center and tell their story. On April 30, Merryn and her sister met a forensic interviewer who asked Merryn, as the older sister, if she would be strong enough to go first. Merryn agreed, and for the first time found someone who could handle the whole story and who believed her completely. When she came out, she told her sister, “these people are on our side, they believe us. Tell them everything.”

It was a six-year battle against sexual abuse with a short, nearly three-year break in the middle for Merryn. At some point, she began to realize that in school, she was taught to say no to a number of things, but there was no class, no education that taught children body safety, safe and unsafe touch, good and bad secrets, and how to find and tell a safe person if they had been assaulted.

Meanwhile, her cousin actually confessed to police in interrogation, but because he was a juvenile and only confessed to three instances, instead of years behind bars, he was given seven years of probation and required to attend two years of therapy and counseling for sex offenders.

What she did not know was that pressure from Brian’s family reduced his probation to six months, and he never got the therapy or counseling. Today, he has children of his own who have sleepovers at his house, said Merryn. And she worries.

Those worries and her past have driven her to other action to help victims, though. In 2010, she helped create Erin’s Law, the first in the U.S. to require sexual abuse prevention to be taught in schools. Illinois, her home, was the first state to sign it into law on Feb 14, 2011. The law mandates schools in the state teach a one-hour class each year on body safety and what is OK touch and what is not, what secrets are OK to keep and what are not, and to give children the power to tell their story.

New York was one of the hardest, resisting passing the law for eight years. Merryn said one legislator who blocked the bill repeatedly did not want to pass an unfunded mandate, and refused to even talk with Merryn about the law. But at last, in August 2019, New York became the 37th state to sign Erin’s Law into legislation.

And in 2021, the proof of the effectiveness of Erin’s Law came into start relief when nine students, who had just completed the Erin’s Law class, came forward and reported their principal had sexually assaulted them. In court, 26 students testified. Northwood Elementary School principal Kirk Ashton was convicted of 46 counts — 11 counts of sexual abuse in the first degree, 17 counts of course of sexual conduct against a child and 18 counts of endangering the welfare of a child. And both police, attorneys and the executive director of the area’s CAC said Erin’s Law played a tremendous role in the initial reports and subsequent coming forward of many of the victims.

Merryn still has moments when life gets the best of her, when she struggles to find the sunshine in her days. She fought anorexia for a long time, because that was one thing she could control when it felt like she couldn’t control much else. And not long ago, following a miscarriage, she became suicidal, despite fighting with everything she had. But when those nine students came forward, she regained her footing, realizing that what she has done and continues to do truly does make a difference.

And since then, she and her husband celebrated the birth of their son, and Merryn returned to the road to continue to fight to get Erin’s law passed in the remaining 12 states and to begin to take it international. During testimony in one state, her then three-month-old son slept on her shoulder.

At Tuesday’s luncheon, she encouraged the 150 guests who attended to reach out to their legislators, “because you don’t want North Carolina to be the very last state to pass it.”

Asked how people could approach legislators to convince them, she recommended using statistics and “encouraging them to describe it as personal body safety, because what I often hear is objections to sex education. This is not sex education in any way, shape or form. It is teaching children what is OK, and what is not, and that they have the power and the right to tell someone.”

She added that legislators need to be reminded it is no longer an unfunded mandate. She has created the Erin’s Law Foundation, and under that she has worked to develop a free, age-appropriate curriculum. The one for kindergarten though sixth grade is available in the immediate future and the one for middle and high schoolers should be available by the end of summer.

“So there will be zero cost for schools,” she said. “I mean, it’s an hour a year.”

The final story she told was of the mother who reached out to her who said she had been unsure of the need for her child to take the class. She had almost chosen to opt her child out, because she had been teaching her child body safety all of the child’s life. At the last minute, she decided to let her child go ahead and stay in the class. It turns out, of all the children in her daughter’s class, only one child reported. It was her own daughter. The woman’s father had been assaulting her daughter. But the mother realized that her child needed to hear it from someone besides mom.

“We sometimes forget as parents, because we love our children, that they can’t always hear things from us,” said Merryn. “Sometimes it takes someone outside to get through.”

And in that sense, she credits her local CAC with saving her years ago. Even after reporting what her cousin had done, she refused family therapy or even individual therapy. She could not bring herself to talk about it in front of family or with adult strangers. But her local CAC started a group for girls who were survivors, and that broke the logjam. She was able at last to talk and made lifelong friends there with others who knew from the inside what she was carrying.

And in time, she found her way to forgive Brian. Not to make it OK or to forget, but to allow the anger and the pain to leave her. She no longer is willing to carry it, and forgiveness let her let go. She also eventually reported what her neighbor, her friend’s uncle, had done, and although he was never prosecuted, her friend’s mother believed Merryn and kicked him out of their house, refusing to have anything more to do with him. He died six months ago.

The center in Concord is sponsored, and has been for 10 years, by the Cabarrus Healthcare Foundation, the fundraising arm for the Atrium Cabarrus hospital. President Charlie Sastoque said when he came aboard 10 years ago and the CAC came to him about supporting the first luncheon, “it was a no brainer for me. We are the stewards of the resources given to us by the community and there is no better investment.”

He said 10 years ago, the CAC served 500 patients in a year. Last year there were 300 patients, so “the numbers have ever so slightly decreased, but the need is still out there, and Erin’s story makes that imminently clear. This month is always essential in both fundraising and awareness, and I am so glad Erin was willing to come and share her story and I hope it moves people to support this effort.”

Tami Napier, DNP and medical provider for the Gordon Center, said there were 30 people at the first event 10 years ago, and this year they had 150 seats and they sold out.

“We are so grateful to see the level of support for the safety and well being of children,” she said. “We didn’t have a lot of funding when we started this, and we went to the Foundation for support, and I will tell you, I have never gotten a no from Charlie, and I cannot say enough how grateful we are.”

Merryn is in the process of creating a documentary of her work to pass Erin’s Law, and says she intends to keep fighting, keep pushing until all the states adopt it.

“The one thing about me is I don’t go away, I keep coming back,” she said. “One in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused by the age of 18, and there are 42 million survivors in the United States right now. I can’t stop fighting for them.”