“Drugs, alcoholism, domestic violence — all of that was in our life growing up.

“My dad was a salesman. He made a lot of money, but he spent it on alcohol and drugs. He beat my mom often. They ended up splitting up.

“My mom worked in bars. That’s where I spent a lot of time at an early age. Some of her friends had boys who were 4-5 years older than me. They would leave them there to babysit me, so they could go out to drink, chase men, and chase that dream of being loved. Often, those boys would molest me when nobody knew. I didn’t tell my mom until I was a little bit older.

“My childhood consisted of rape, molestation, beatings and bruises. It was really, really hell. How I handled it was by being a bully. I beat up my brother often. I’ve asked for his forgiveness, but that’s something I’ve got to live with.

“I was the oldest of my mom’s four kids, and I had to take care of the others. That’s where the bullying came out. I had to act like a parent long before becoming a parent. I started at 9 years old, changing my twin brother and sister’s diapers. I was beaten because I wanted to go outside and play. The boyfriend wanted me to stay in there taking care of the children, while my mom was at work. She was always on that search for being loved by somebody. But she searched for it in the wrong places, and we all suffered because of it.

“There were a lot of secrets in our home. My mom would be like, ‘You can’t tell this person this’ or ‘You can’t do that.’ I went to my grandfather once when I was about 12, and I just balled my eyes out. I told him the type of hell that I was living. But he said that was not to leave the house. It was to stay within our four walls.

“There were a lot of things that were hidden. I found myself feeling that I was to be hidden, too. I began hiding from my own self. It was like, who you are should not be seen. I functioned like that all the way until I left my mom’s house when I was 19.”

— Rebekah Mansker

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“You have that hope for things being better the next day. And that’s really what helps many people survive and transcend. But I’ve added to that whole thought process.

“One day, for some reason, I thought, who am I really? Am I somebody who is constantly going to look at someone and think he’s the guy who attacked me or the guy who raped me? Am I going to continually encounter people and put up a shield?

“And what I realized was that when something happens in your life — while it can be for just a minute or, unfortunately for some victims, it can last years — it’s still a very short period in God’s time. In reality, you have so much more life to live. So are you going to spoil the rest of your life by carrying that instance when you were victimized?

“Sure, you need to go through the whole process of grieving and acknowledging, then accepting and moving on. But then you should ask yourself, who am I really? Am I a gun-toting mama? Am I going to allow those instances to change the type of person that God made me to be? That’s what it all came back to for me, when I realized that those things don’t have power over me because I’m God’s child.

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“Then one day at a bus stop, I got held up at gunpoint and was attacked. I ran back home, and they never found out who did it.

“A few years later when I was 24, I was in my own home getting ready for work. My son was about 14 months old. And this guy breaks into my house and rapes me. I was an art major in college, so I was able to draw a composite. He tried coming back to my house a couple of days later to grab my trash, probably to go through it looking for my name. My husband at the time saw the license plate, which helped track down the guy.

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