Tagged: sexual abuse

Around this time of year, a lot of people walk to achieve the highly coveted yellow-polka-dot-bikini body.

Lauren Book walks to help mend lives.

Book ended her fourth annual trek on Tuesday, walking 1,500 miles from Key West to Tallahassee.

She was joined on the last mile of the trip by an army of supporters in blue shirts adorned with footprints and the words “Walk In My Shoes 2013.”

For tourists visiting Fort Lauderdale, a stroll across the massive 17th Street Causeway Bridge affords a rare panorama of bustling Port Everglades and the city-block-sized cruise ships that navigate the waters leading out to the Atlantic Ocean. For Jen Klaassens, it's an invaluable training ground.

"I go up and down the 17th Street Causeway Bridge and back and forth," Klaassens said. 

The person who robbed me of six years of my childhood wasn't a stranger, or even an acquaintance. My abuser was my live-in female nanny, someone who my parents trusted implicitly.

I know what you’re probably thinking: this is unimaginable. This would never happen to my family, or to my child, or in my house. But 90 percent of sexual abuse victims know the perpetrator in some way. When the victim is a child, the abuser is likely someone they – and their parents – not only know, but trust.

The Boy Scouts' "perversion files" have been released and the names of at least 160 Floridians are among the 1,000 former Boy Scout leaders and volunteers accused of sexually abusing Boy Scouts between 1965 and 1985.

Lawyers involved in the case say the Boy Scouts of America kept careful records of the suspects and allegations but never reported them to authorities.  Many were flagged as "ineligible to volunteer."