By JULIE CARLE
BG Independent News
Trigger warning: This article will discuss a specific person’s experiences as a result of childhood sexual assault. This may be triggering to readers with similar experiences.
Erin Merryn wants to make sure no children suffer in silence from sexual abuse like she did as a child. Her perpetrators were people she knew, but whose threats of harm kept her from speaking up from the time she was six years old into her teenage years.
Merryn was in Bowling Green recently to talk with educators, mental health professionals and community members about Erin’s Law. The law, which was passed in Ohio in December 2022 and signed by Gov. Mike DeWine in February 2023, requires schools to teach age-appropriate sexual abuse and violence prevention to all K-12 public schools. Educational plans need to be in place by the end of the 2023-24 school year.
Ohio, the 38th and most recent state to pass the law, took seven years and three visits to the statehouse by Merryn before legislators approved it. Merryn said Ohio and New York were the two most difficult states, thus far, because of lobbying efforts that were concerned about the curriculum in the classrooms.
“We have bus drills, tornado drills, fire drills, and even ‘Stranger Danger’ education that tells children not to answer the door when their parents are away, not to talk to strangers, but there is nothing taught about sexual abuse,” she said. The reality is that 90 percent of children know their abuser.
D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) programming in elementary school kept her from ever drinking or smoking because she knew the consequences, Merryn said. She learned there were eight ways to get away from alcohol and drug situations.
If she had been taught about safe and unsafe touching and safe and unsafe secrets, she is confident she would have told someone sooner about the sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of a friend’s uncle when she was six to eight years old, and her older cousin when she was 11 to 13 years old.
“I never said anything because I thought they would hurt me, but the red flags were there when I started to act out” in elementary school, she said. School officials and her parents assumed her bad behavior was because her parents were splitting up, “but no one was educating me about how to speak up,” she said.
With statistics that indicate one in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused in their lifetime, Merryn said the need for sexual abuse education is long overdue.
Wood County Health Commissioner Ben Robison put some local numbers to the issue. In a 2021 community health survey, three percent of children reported they had been sexually touched; two percent said they had been asked to touch someone sexually; and one percent said they had been forced to have sex.
That means, of the approximately 26,000 Wood County children, ages 0 to 17, Robison estimated between 800 and 6,000 of them could experience sexual abuse in their lifetime.
The Cocoon is the sexual abuse agency in Wood County, said Executive Director Kathy Mull. “We recognize the importance of these conversations,” which is why she partnered with the Wood County Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services, Children’s Resource Center, and Wood County Educational Services Center to bring Merryn to Wood County to speak about Erin’s Law.
Merryn started her journey to healing after turning her secret childhood diary entries into “Stolen Innocence,” published in 2005. Additional efforts to deal with the trauma and put a voice to the abuse, gave her perseverance and resilience and helped her heal and grow. Along the way, she she wrote four additional books and became the force behind Erin’s Law, passing first in her home state of Illinois.
Now her mission includes getting the legislation passed in all 50 states—with 12 remaining—and sharing the path forward to ensure children are taught to protect themselves from sexual abuse.
“This is not sex education; it is a curriculum that is done one time a year to teach children how to speak up if abused,” she said. There are options for parents to review the curriculum and to opt-out for their children’s participation, but she cautioned against that.
A mother who had already educated her child about sexual abuse and felt it wasn’t someone else’s job voiced concern to Merryn “that other stuff would be taught.” Eventually, she allowed her child to participate in the session. “One kid came forward, and it was my kid,” she told Merryn. “I thought I was educating her, but the predators told her they would harm her mother.”
“It took someone other than mom to hear the message,” Merryn said.
Angela Patchen, prevention education program manager at Wood County ESC, said the afternoon session with educators and mental health professionals, was held to help put plans in place for implementing Erin’s Law starting in fall 2024. There will be a combination of preparing teachers to present the curriculum and utilizing the ESC prevention educators to include Erin’s Law education in the schools where they are already presenting prevention education.
“I hope this is a starting point,” said Wood County Prosecuting Attorney Paul Dobson. “Child sexual assault is the worst thing someone can do. The damage this singular crime does is permanent and often debilitating.”
Helping educators and students to find words to identify what is happening to them and to get them to safety, “has to be of the highest importance,” he said.
