NPR

Finding Strength In Shared Stories Of Childhood Sexual Abuse

In a StoryCorps conversation, two women who attended the New Bethany Home for Girls in Louisiana talk about the abuse they say they experienced there and how it affected them years later.
Joanna Wright, 58, and Tara Cummings, 47, spoke about their time at New Bethany Home for Girls during a StoryCorps conversation. Both women have testified that they were abused at the Louisiana school.

New Bethany Home for Girls in Arcadia, La., opened in the early 1970s as a religious reform school for, as its founder said, "the incorrigible, unwanted rejects" who "haven't been loved and haven't had a chance in life."

Over the next three decades, law enforcement officials repeatedly investigated claims of physical and psychological child abuse at the school.

Joanna Wright

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