Shining a Light - Charleston Group Takes Message Nationally
Posted Courtesy of The Post and Courier (http://www.charleston.net)
BY JENNIFER BERRY HAWES
Of The Post and Courier Staff
Anne Lee's good luck really began two years ago when Al Katz introduced her to Don Deluca, who suggested lunch with a new man in town named Stewart Birbrower.
Lee knew plenty of folks in Charleston's social circles, but she didn't know much about Birbrower. Something about a career in advertising, about coming here from New York.
If she'd known more, she'd have been nervous.
Lee was keyed on pitching a crusade to raise awareness about child sexual abuse, a campaign called From Darkness to Light.
And she was about to claim a lunch-hour's worth of attention from the creator of such household ad campaigns as American Express' "Don't leave home without it" and Johnson & Johnson's "I am stuck on Band-Aids."
Birbrower, it so happened, had just moved to Kiawah Island with aims of retiring. He, his wife, Lee and Deluca met for that fateful lunch at the Harbour Club.
Lee launched into her spiel: One in four girls will be sexually abused. One in six boys will be. Victims are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, become teen parents, consider suicide, develop eating disorders, wind up in prison, molest children themselves ...
"Stop! Stop!" Birbrower interrupted. "I'm in."
Even with four children of his own, he had no idea about the magnitude of child sexual abuse. "I thought it was something that just happened every once in a while."
And truth be told, Birbrower didn't really want to retire. He needed a new project. With 42 years of making highly successful commercials, he sensed a perfect fit.
Three days later, they met for lunch again.
Birbrower picked up a menu and flipped it over. "Just start talking," he told Lee.
Two hours later, he'd drawn four commercial storyboards, the stark black-and-white heart of the now-familiar From Darkness to Light campaign.
The first commercial aired in January 2001. Three others followed, each haunting in its raw message. A year later, the campaign is poised for a national rollout, perhaps by next year.
From Darkness to Light is perhaps best known for its TV commercial of faces, young and old, each peering intently, intimately, into the camera to disclose a few basics about their personal traumas, as in, "It happened to me when I was 9."
Another familiar spot shows a sweet adolescent girl in a flowing white dress gliding on a tree swing. In the end, she swings with the rounded belly of pregnancy to the warning: "Stop adults from having sex with children."
Then there are the ads on radio, billboards, newspapers and magazines.
All share the disturbingly in-your-face style, not unlike the spotlight Lee wants flashed on this crime whose trauma is inflicted in secret, behind closed doors, with no witnesses, amid quietly intense threats.
It's a silence she knows on the most personal level.
FINDING DIRECTION
My great-uncle abused me, and my mother didn't even know about it.
Anne Lee is hard to ignore.
With short blond hair, a crisp business suit and eyes that reveal a deep hurt, she's smart and intensely driven. And Lee's not afraid of sharing her own story of molestation to personify a victim for those who still don't believe this sort of thing happens in their safe little neighborhoods.
Like so many victims, she is white, middle class, educated.
nd like many, she was abused by a family member but didn't tell anyone, not her parents or closest friends, until she was 38. That's when her own daughter turned 4, the age her abuse had begun. Lee looked back on her three failed marriages and a longer trail of destructive relationships.
"As I sat there and looked at my precious, innocent 4-year-old, it was like, 'Oh!' It was a real turning point."
At the time, From Darkness to Light was a new annual conference created by a group of friends led by Cynthia K. Tew, who chose the name to contrast an adult survivor's hope of tomorrow with the abused days behind.
"It's really a story about community, about one heart touching another," Tew says about the well-connected women who launched it, including Sarah King, Anne Frances Bleecker, Libby Ralston, Terry Katz, Susan Romaine and Tracy Doran among others.
Tew gave seed money and began to search for donors, which took her to the Roper Foundation where Lee was working as executive director.
For Lee, it clicked with her new self-examination.
The first conference was held in 1997, the same year a man named Guerry Glover came forward with allegations that would rock the most elite circles in Charleston: Former Porter-Gaud teacher Eddie Fischer had molested him and other young men.
Lee volunteered with the conference and later helped out at the Lowcountry Children's Center and was amazed at the 900 to 1,000 abused children a year who came for help.
And it was just one of a half-dozen local groups swamped with victims.
"If this was a medical problem that left physical scars, we'd have telethons every weekend," she says. "But it's the sexual, the intimate."
As 2000 set in, Lee took the name From Darkness to Light and created a nonprofit group, though one without money or a real defined mission aside from generating public awareness.
She knew this much: Local nonprofits struggled to meet their own demands.
"They don't have the time, the money or the expertise to launch a massive media campaign," Lee says. "What we want is to be the voice."
From Darkness to Light would "shine a flashlight" on the problem and then refer people to services. For instance, people who call the number in their commercials are connected to Hotline Inc.
But exactly how to shine that spotlight remained murky.
Then Lee met Birbrower for lunch.
READY, SET ... ACTION
We spend more money protecting the endangered spotted owl than the freckled child.
Lee left her lunch with Birbrower clutching the storyboards that would come to define From Darkness to Light's campaign.
"You can keep on having meetings with 20 people or put one commercial on the air and reach millions," Birbrower urged.
But commercials cost a heap of money - and Lee's project had almost none.
Plus, Birbrower wanted the campaign to look first-class, good enough for a national audience. The commercials would be recorded on film, by a stellar crew and then edited by a New York house with a strong reputation.
All that would cost even more money.
The Lowcountry Children's Center became the project's incubator, offering everything from space to a coffee pot.
And Lee took Birbrower's storyboards to local leaders, foundations and friends and found they gripped people enough to open their wallets. "We wouldn't be here without that nurturing support," Lee says. She raised $50,000 in two months.
Birbrower unretired his directing hat. But where he normally worked with a crew, now he had only Lee. She became the casting director, location scout, fund-raiser, wardrobe queen and prop master.
They recruited dozens of volunteer actors - youngsters willing to attach their faces to a crime that still carries a stigma - and filmed three commercials:
- One spot that often airs locally shows close-ups
of children and then spans to show a beach full of
youths to underscore the huge numbers who are
sexually abused. Several actors are children of
adult survivors, including Lee. A voice reveals
that one in four girls and one in six boys will be
sexually abused before age 18, statistics verified
in repeated studies by MUSC's National Crime
Victims Research and Treatment Center.
- A second commercial punches home social costs of
child abuse. It shows an empty school hallway to
the jangle of a class bell. Gunfire echoes and
students scream in terror. A hush falls and then a
lone child sobs. A voice reads that 72 percent of
school shooters in the last two years have been
abuse victims.
"(Abuse) is a core issue of social
dysfunction," Lee contends. "We spend
billions of dollars a year on the symptoms of what
happened in childhood."
- The third commercial is the girl swinging with
the warning not to have sex with young girls. This
spot won a bronze Telly Award, a national industry
honor.
- But the fourth commercial would be different.
It would need the real faces of child sexual abuse
survivors.
Persuading victims to go so public would be tough.
Persuading the people around victims would be even
more difficult. "You're exposing the most
intimate aspect of their lives," Lee
explains.
Yet that's what makes the spot so disconcerting.
Many of the faces are high-profile Charleston
figures who agreed to reveal their abuse in this
most public fashion: artist John Carroll Doyle,
gallery owner Ella Richardson, writer Kate Adams
and Pam Giesick, who coordinates People Against
Rape's support groups. Lee is there as well,
toward the middle.
They all recount their abuse as in, "It
happened to me."
The close-up shots meld together with each
survivor starting a line and another finishing it,
one after another for 60 seconds to show the
epidemic nature of this abuse. The spot won a
platinum Telly Award.
Tew mulled the idea for this sort of spot years ago when getting adult survivors to identify themselves still was unheard of. But now the timing worked.
"You get to look into their eyes, to see the quiver in the lips of people who've been down that road," Lee says. "Without a doubt, it's the cornerstone. It's like a magnet to pull you into the issue."
Yet even with filming done, Lee found herself in another panic.
She needed a voice for the commercials.
A friend in the nonprofit world happened to call. Lee told him how frustrated she was growing with finding someone who would donate time. Her friend was about to have lunch with Perry King, the debonair actor who's starred in "Melrose Place" and "Titans."
"Perry will do it," he said confidently. King already was spokesman for a group of California homes for abused children.
Sure enough, King donated his stern, raspy voice.
"The right people with just the right skills have arrived for us," Lee marvels.
Today, Lee hears from people who see the commercials and say, "Oh, that's you? I thought that was national."
Lee responds, "It just started here. The vision has always been for this to go national."
That vision took a leap forward when Birbrower hooked Lee up with the head of the world's third-largest advertising firm, Young & Rubicam of New York, where Birbrower used to be a creative director.
Suddenly, Lee found herself in New York pitching the project to CEO Ron Bess, an advertising titan.
He agreed to take on the group as a pro bono client.
Now they just have to find someone to pay for a national campaign. In June, the firm plans to offer the campaign to its major corporate clients with the hope that one will take it on as a charitable cause. If so, a national rollout could come next year.
Most likely it will start with the four existing commercials.
But Birbrower promises, "There are stronger ideas for commercials bouncing around my skull."
PREVENTING ABUSE
Long before Sept. 11th, too many children already knew terror.
When the first ad aired in January 2001, Lee barely earned a part-time paycheck and worked with the help of only a part-time assistant.
During a recent meeting, six staff members sat around a table in a conference room at their new Meeting Street office.
The group's 2002 budget will reach almost $800,000, including its first federal grant, a $300,000 boost.
But the vast majority of the public exposure From Darkness to Light receives is free.
That's because when the group buys air time from local TV or radio outlets, the stations often donate two or three more spots in return.
Staffer Jane Milner even managed to get From Darkness to Light on the lists of charitable causes that national and local magazines tap when they have ad holes. That means if Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and U.S. News & World Report have an extra page in the coastal South Carolina editions, they can plug in a Darkness to Light spot for free.
Plus, Adams Outdoor Advertising donated billboard space.
In all, the donated time and space have saved the campaign $350,000 and have given child sexual abuse invaluable public attention.
That attention prompts victims to get help - and even may thwart some perpetrators, says Dr. Ben Saunders, director of family and child programs at MUSC's crime victims' center.
Pedophiles often convince themselves that sexual relations with their child of choice really isn't hurting them. The child appears aroused, doesn't tell, keeps coming back.
"They're able to create for themselves a certain level of internal justification," Saunders says.
But with a very public message that this is wrong, that it hurts children, justifying the abuse becomes that much harder.
"It won't solve the problem, but it's an important piece of the puzzle," Saunders says.
Jennifer Berry Hawes writes feature stories. Contact her at 937-5489 or at jhawes@postandcourier.com.
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