Avia Ustanny, Outlook Writer

Ricardo Makyn/Staff Photographer

Deborah Francis, blessed with a statuesque figure topped with a smile like melting chocolate, says she is the image of the man who fathered her.

"I am five feet 11, just like my dad."

Yet, it was this man who left her to be raised by another, who abused her hideously and continuously from age three to 14.

The chipped front tooth in her mouth is evidence of the first blow she received from her abusive stepfather at age three. "The tooth never fell out. I think God left it there as evidence."

BEING ABUSED

She was to need such things to convince others that she was being abused, because her mother, even when she saw her stepfather sodomising her at age 12, blamed her for everything and never protected her.

Instead, when she ran away from beatings and rape and then would come back home because of hunger, this woman would force her to sleep outside and would refuse to give her food for days.

Francis, the convener of the No More Shame Ministries, has chosen February 2007 as the month to go national (she has already been to many foreign countries) with her programme to encourage women and men to talk about the abuse they suffered as children, and to accept the healing of a loving God.

The ministry, Deborah Francis says, is the inspired result of her own years of abuse by her relatives and other men who raped her. She wanted to kill both her stepfather and the men who raped her.

"I went to church to get an alibi for murder," she says today, "but God had other plans."

MOTHER OF FIVE

Deborah - at age 39 - is now the mother of five children. The first is the child of her stepfather, born when she was aged 15. The second was born to her at 17, the child of a man who raped her and threatened to kill her if she terminated the pregnancy. Now she finds herself able to extend unqualified love to all her children, love which she was never to receive from her own parents. It is with that love that she called them to a meeting and told them the story of her life.

She was living with her mother and stepfather in West Kingston and then on a farm in St. Mary when, at age three-and-a-half years, her stepfather started fondling her. He would also beat her badly, resulting at age three in the broken front tooth and several chops to the head in the years to follow.

By age 10 he was having sex with her, and sodomising her too.

"He started to have sex in my anus at age 10. When my mother saw, it was then she believed me, but she would never take me to a doctor."

Shortly after, at age 11, a relative of the man, who was aged 15, also started having sex with the little girl.

During these years, Deborah was never sent to school for one year continuously. She recalls, "I started at Hugh Sherlock Primary in Rema for two months. Then it was to Denham Town Primary for three months and in another year, I attended Islington Secondary for 4 months. I went to school so bad."

The last institution she attended in her teens was Islington Secondary.

By the time she was 14 and pregnant for her stepfather, she was also unable to read and write. She was despised, she says, by her sisters and brothers who blamed her stepfather's hatred on her.

MORE ABUSE

At age 15 she ran away for the last time, determined that she would not give birth to her child in the home in which she was abused. Her mother, she said, followed her to Kingston and took the child from her when he was born, but poor and determined never to return to St. Mary, Deborah began a downward spiral into more abuse.

Living in Coronation Market (the old people there would feed her), she was found again by her mother who rented a room on Dumphries Road in Kingston for her. But, one night she was captured by a group of men, the leader of whom raped her and threatened to kill her if she terminated the pregnancy that resulted. She was raped again while pregnant. "It was a spirit following me - a spirit of rape. I came off a bus on Orange Street, they came out of an old building, held me at gunpoint and draped me. I became so bitter.

"I began to feel so wicked. I wanted to get at everyone who had destroyed my life."

Deborah contemplated murder while she attempted to start a business of buying and selling, and entered relationship after relationship which failed because of what she now calls her aggressiveness.

"How can you love someone if you have never known what love is?"

Deborah joined a gang with the motive of getting the men to kill the men who had wronged her, drinking and smoking and engaging in what she describes as a completely rebellious lifestyle.

DEFENSIVE SPIRIT

"It was a defensive spirit. When people say anything to you, you get so aggressive. I was drinking, smoking, doing cocaine in seasoned spliff. I even started robbing people," she recalls.

In her early 20s, she met one man who loved her and who sent her to Curacao and Panama to shop for her business.

"I knew he cared for me, but I could not love him. If you cannot face something and fix it, you cannot move to the next level."

Deborah, as she watched her relationships crumble, was fixing to end the life of her stepfather and everyone else who had raped her. She even found a killer and fixed a price. Shortly after, she walked into church to create a watertight alibi, saying to herself that if she was caught, the pastor and church members would vouch for her Christian character.

"God had a different plan," Deborah states. At age 26 she said yes to God and became a true follower. However, the road to self-appreciation and love was still a tough one.

"Even in church the road is rough. The leaders rejected me and put me down. I was like a non-existing person."

While she was happy that she had learnt to read and write with "the help of the Holy Spirit and the Bible," Deborah felt she was being followed by a spirit of rejection.

One day in 2003, feeling depressed, she was walking up Red Hills Road and speaking aloud to God asking, "why, Lord?"

Whenever she told someone in the church her story, they would use it to put her down. She had also lost her business and her home in one month after saying yes to Christ, living on the roadside while her children were taken in by boarders.

At the same time, whenever she heard of someone who had been raped, her heart would fill with fury. She was not pass her past. Deborah was also very over-protective of her daughter, causing the young girl to suffer from her suspicions and fear.

She cried as she walked, asking God why. She remembers this day, she says, because it was the day God answered, saying to her 'No more shame'.

The revelation of that day was that she should start speaking publicly about her experience of abuse in order to help many who continued to be filled with the shame of their secret life of past abuse.

Deborah said that she answered God's directive. She changed her church, moving to Love and Faith Ministries where she was taught spiritual warfare. When she expressed her desire to go to Australia (as instructed by the spirit) to speak to other ministers, she was sent. There she ministered to hundreds of pastors with tears running down her face.

Since then, the young woman has been to Colombia, Singapore, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, Turks and Caicos and Zimbabwe, among others, on her mission to speak to those who have been abused but who are ashamed to speak of it. For 2007, she is fully booked for Africa.

Her first trip was to Australia, where grown men and women responsible for pastoring churches have wept after her talk. One man admitted that he had been raped by five men, and was quite unable to relate well to his wife and two children because of this.

Personally, Deborah's relations with her own children have improved.

GOD PROVIDES

And even though she is no longer into buying and selling, this woman states that God provides all her needs. She prays, writes letters to him expressing her needs and, invariably, the next day she receives calls with information on travel specials and others with offers of money for travel or her children's needs. She is not paid a salary, but notes that because God hears her prayers, she never needs to beg for what she wants.

The aim of the No More Shame Outreach Ministry is to "reach out and touch the lives of the broken-hearted and deliver them from pain and shame."

No More Shame also aims to network with other ministries and organisations to mobilise and bring people into "God's divine will and purpose for their lives."

"There is No More Shame 2007" will be held held February 22-25 at the Agape Christian Fellowship in Portmore, and March 1-4 in Kingston and will include Missionary Deborah Francis herself; Bishop Juliet Fagan; Dr. Lloyd Maxwell, Bishop Neville Owens, Evangelist Valentine Rodney, Evangelist Wayne Palmer and Pastor Diane Fletcher.

Deborah Francis says, "I tell the truth - I just ask the Holy Spirit to speak through me. God is using my testimony to bring many to salvation."

Where her mother and stepfather are concerned, she notes that she led them both to salvation and baptised her stepfather in 2005.

Her mother died in 2003 and her stepfather in November 2006, buried by the woman who had forgiven them.