Profiles

I grew up in a household with a father who was a drunk and who was physically and sexually abusive. I remember the fear of watching my mother being beaten, what it was like to feel helpless and hopeless and being unable to protect any of us.

Things changed in 1992, when my brother was convicted of sexually molesting a child, whose family I knew. He and I had been buddies as children, and he tried to protect us from my father's abuse. The fact that now he was doing what my father had done was very upsetting.

Wynona I. Ward, as told to Mary Medland

I grew up in Cleveland's Detroit Shoreway neighborhood, where I now live and work, but I spent my teens in the suburbs. My mother’s family immigrated here from Italy in the 1890s, and my father’s parents came from Tennessee after the Second World War to work in the steel mills.

When I was 19 and taking a couple of years off from college, I had a job working for a wholesaler that provided health and beauty supplies to independent, predominantly African-American, inner-city grocery stores. This really was an eye-opener for me. It really gave me an appreciation for diversity and for different points of view, which I didn’t have as a white teenager in the suburbs.

As told to Mary Medland

It is a few minutes before 7 a.m. on a Thursday, and Lauren Abramson, executive director of the Community Conferencing Center, is already on her cellphone chatting with a staff member while meandering back and forth between her living room and front porch. Her home is in a placid middle-class neighborhood that is vastly different from those of the Baltimore schools she will visit this day.

She is eager for her colleague, Nel Andrews, to arrive. When she does, the duo will head off to present a violence-prevention workship for public-school teachers. They have their work cut out for them: On average, just under 100 Baltimore students each month are arrested for incidents that occur on school grounds, according to the Baltimore City School Police, and on average more than 150 city students each month are involved in heated conflicts with one another that require intervention by adults.

I was the middle of three sisters who were raised by a single mother in Brooklyn. My high school had a lot of violence, as did the neighborhood in which we lived. When I was 15, I was a member of the Deceptinettes, a gang of girls. At this time, I really was in need of help: I had been arrested for assault and robbery, and my boyfriend had been murdered. Fortunately a police officer assigned to the gangs unit and a couple of my teachers believed in me, and I managed to cut my ties to the gang and finish high school on time.

My first job, while I was still in school, was working at New York’s detention facility for girls on Staten Island, and in most of those girls I saw a reflection of myself. I remember thinking that they were smart and resilient, but that they came from homes where they had been some sort of abuse, whether sexual, physical, or emotional. These girls were victims; they were acting out and ending up in the juvenile-justice system. Worse yet, the system would see several generations of women from the same family. The cycle just kept continuing.

As told to Mary Medland