“On the day my grandmother caught him fondling me, I was wearing my favorite pink cotton dress. Now pink is a trigger for me.”
Roz Overstreet-Gonzalez
Growing up, Roz Overstreet-Gonzalez lived a typical life in San Bernardino, California, with her parents and two siblings. She played sports, learned the piano, and was a Girl Scout. After school while her parents worked, she would go stay with her grandmother.
Every time she was there, a teenage male relative was, too.
Then one day when she was about 6, he transformed from family member to child molester. And this continued, often with a friend of his joining in, for about two years.
“There were bunk beds in the room, and sometimes I was on the bottom bunk and could see the bedframe of the upper bunk. It was black with a little tiny checkerboard pattern,” she said in a recent interview. “I can still vividly see that.”
Overstreet-Gonzalez — now a staff attorney in the parole division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia — is one of the estimated 20% of women who are victims of child sex abuse, according to the National Center for Victims of Crime, which also reports that children are most vulnerable to sex abuse between the ages of 7 and 13. Just two months into the pandemic last year, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), a nonprofit that runs a national sexual assault hotline, reported the number of calls made by children and teens rose by 22%, with 79% of the callers saying they were living with their abuser. Nearly 70% identified their abuser as a family member.
Children such as Overstreet-Gonzalez who are victims of prolonged sexual abuse often develop “low self-esteem, a feeling of worthlessness and an abnormal or distorted view of sex,” according to the National Center for Victims of Crime. Children may become withdrawn and distrustful of adults.
And child sex assault victims — fearful of threats, as well as the reaction of others, if they talk — sometimes wait years or even decades before they tell friends, family members or mental health professionals what happened to them. That, in turn, prolongs the time it takes to heal from the trauma.
“The average age for women to share is 52,” said Lori Poland, executive director of the National Foundation for Child Abuse and Neglect. “No matter what it is, it’s the wrong number.”
Hiding in the bathroom
When her male relative was around, little Roz would hide in the bathroom, staring at the walls and ceiling. She still remembers every inch of that bathroom even though she’d like to forget what happened to her in those early childhood days.
He would bribe her with candy to ensure she never told a soul. Eventually, he got caught by her grandmother fumbling with her clothes while trying to take them off. The grandmother put a stop to it and immediately called the police and Roz’s parents.
Overstreet-Gonzalez remembers talking to a detective and a prosecutor.
“I remember going to a prosecutor’s office to explain to him what had been happening,” she said. “The prosecutor was a white man and I recall sitting in his office with my mother. There was nothing warm about his office or about him; it was a cold and sterile place.”
Overstreet-Gonzalez can’t recall if anything was done after that. Back in the late 1960s, therapy wasn’t common or necessarily trusted — especially within the Black community. Although she’s unsure if any official actions were taken against her relative, she is certain that he was forbidden to ever come back to her grandmother’s house.
Her parents, however, didn’t know how to help her. Even so, they did their best to make sure she would get over her trauma and tried to give her the best life they could, Overstreet-Gonzalez said.
This kind of supportive response makes a big difference for victims, according to clinical psychologist Jim Hopper, a child abuse and sexual assault expert who is a teaching associate at Harvard Medical School.
“It’s so devastating when the response to the disclosure is not believed,” said Hopper. “That can be more traumatic than the abuse itself for sexual assault survivors.”
Poland — who was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and left to die in an outhouse when she was 3 — is now a therapist herself. Even though her abductor was a stranger, she continues to face denial within her own family about what happened to her.
“They feel responsible,” said Poland, who is writing a memoir. “Families will rewrite the story and victim-shame the victim. The most important thing [for parents] to remember is, that experience is that child’s experience.”
Exercise and special forms of yoga for trauma survivors can be healing for child sex abuse victims, Hopper says, but therapy is important to consider.
“I totally understand the fear of talking to a therapist and the fear of talking about things they don’t want to,” said Hopper. “But It’s important to know there are therapists who are really good at talking to people about this — trauma-informed therapists.”
For Overstreet-Gonzalez, going it alone with family support seemed to work for a while as she got summer jobs and joined different school clubs.
Then suddenly she started to gain weight and developed issues with eating and food.
“I experimented with bulimia and just stopped eating so that I could lose weight,” she said. “I did everything I could so that I could look and feel normal so that no one would know that I was damaged.”
She felt out of place everywhere she went.
“All of these things made me feel like a fish out of the water — like I didn’t belong anywhere,” she said. “But at the same time, the inner me wanted to do everything, and prove to everyone that I could, despite having gone through this.”
So she joined every sports team and club that she could. Rather than facing her trauma, she did everything she could to ignore it.
Her past trauma started to catch up to her after high school when she moved to DC to go to Howard University. She found herself unable to live the college life she expected. She didn’t want to engage with other students, but never understood what caused her to act like this.
To avoid speaking to anyone, she would stay in the bathroom all day talking to herself and staring at the ceiling — just like she had done when she was little.
“While everyone was out doing college things, I would hide in the bathroom.”
The road trip that wasn’t
Valerie Davis lived with Overstreet-Gonzalez during their freshman year. Davis — who spent the bulk of her childhood in Columbia, Maryland, and in Baltimore, where she is now a dentist — has a different memory of her former roommate.
“She appeared to be more mature than the rest of us,” said Davis. And when she became manager of the women’s basketball team, the coaches and everyone else “gave her more responsibility and trusted her with the money, the keys and everything.”
Davis chalked up Overstreet-Gonzalez’s quiet demeanor — “she was introverted even though she was in the crowd” — to the fact she came from the more laid-back West Coast.
She gained a new understanding when Overstreet-Gonzalez’s mother asked whether Davis would fly out to California and then drive back to DC with her roommate after the first summer. She quickly agreed but once she got to San Bernardino, “at the last minute, I find out she’s not coming back.”
“I thought at the time that part of it was that the East Coast can be harsh and we were kind of fast,” said Davis. “She kept telling me she just couldn’t take it, and I knew there was something else that was more than I could see or thought it was. The audio didn’t match the video.”
Striking out for Spain
Then suddenly, everything changed as Overstreet-Gonzalez decided to take control of her life.
She had taken Spanish since ninth grade and decided she wanted to become a Spanish teacher to help other young people learn a new culture and recognize how it could help them professionally. She knew how she wanted to start her new path: “The only way for me to get fluent in Spanish was to go to a Spanish-speaking country, so I went to Spain.”
Once there, she felt comfortable being herself and didn’t worry about her past being known. Being Black was uncommon in Spain, and she was celebrated by many of the people in the village where she was living. They called her “La Morena” — the brown-skinned woman — and considered her to be good luck for the community.
“When I walked through the town in the morning hours, the shopkeepers tried to usher me into their stores,” she said with a laugh. “There was a local legend that if a Black person was the first person of the day to enter their stores, they would have a lot of sales that day.”
The love she was receiving made her more confident in herself and in what she was doing. Before leaving Spain, she had lost 30 pounds and had become fluent enough in Spanish to hold a conversation with the villagers.
She decided to return to Howard to finish college and then to become a lawyer so she could advocate for people who needed a voice. She attended what is now the University of the District of Columbia’s David A. Clarke School of Law and has worked for DC’s Public Defender Service since 1994. She started out representing incarcerated youth and then worked with the Prisoners’ Rights Program at the former Lorton Reformatory. In her current post, she represents clients with parole or supervised release violations.
It was the realization of who she really was that empowered Overstreet-Gonzalez to embark on her chosen career path.
“I was as good as anyone else, and what I was feeling was normal,” she said. “I could finally move on from it.”
‘Coping is not healing’
Ever since, Overstreet-Gonzalez has defied the statistics.
As a rape victim, she is 13 times more likely to abuse alcohol and 26 times more likely to abuse drugs, but instead of clinging to drugs and alcohol, she decided to do something with her life.
Along with her legal career, Overstreet-Gonzalez has chaired the board of directors of the Urban Health Media Project since 2019, and she is chair of the DC State Athletic Commission and an appointee to the Mayor’s Council on Physical Fitness, Health and Nutrition. She distributes food weekly to Latino families in need through the nonprofit Following Francis, and often mentors young DC residents of color.
She strives to become a better, more empathetic person and lawyer every day and is speaking out publicly about her experiences as a victim of child sex abuse for the first time here to help people realize “what happened to them isn’t who they are.”
“Why am I talking about this now? Why not? For decades I’ve been talking about it in my mind and only to myself,” she said. “I was just coping. I realized that coping is not healing — it’s just stacking the trauma on the shelf until it collapses under the weight.”
Most of all, she wants to help break the cycle of child sex abuse that too often prevents victims from reaching their full potential.
“Hurt people hurt people, but healed people can help heal other people,” she said.
If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, the National Sex Assault Telephone Hotline can be reached at 800-656-HOPE (4673).
Editor’s note: Dionna Duncan is a junior at Archbishop Carroll High School in DC and was a participant in a workshop on “Surviving and Thriving Despite Trauma” held by the Urban Health Media Project (UHMP). Jayne O’Donnell is UHMP’s founder and the former health policy reporter for USA Today.
Thank you Dionna for such a well written article. Thank you Roz for sharing your story which will help so many others. Continue your good works.
I am beyond touched. I know this amazing incredible woman with a heart that takes you in – and you will never leave!! Blessing upon blessing you give pure love Rosalinda!! What a journey. RESPECT. my dear friend. After all you have experienced. Lo siento en mi corazón. And still – You inspire, you energize and give love to all around you. This is so meaningful. Thank you Urban Health Media Project! Carmen Ramos-Watson