When something as awful as sexual abuse happens to someone, they very often push the pain down and bottle it up, and rarely speak about it. It’s not an experience they’d like to relive.
With one Bristow woman, that’s certainly not the case. In fact, she’s being forced to deal with her past everyday.
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Danyelle Dyer was molested by her father’s step-brother when she was just 7 years old and he came to visit them for the summer.
By that time, Harold Dwayne English had already been convicted of sexually abusing a child in Texas, according to a story on CNN, but the family wasn’t aware of it. That summer he molested Danyelle on repeated occasions and told her not to tell anyone. When she told her parents about it, he was arrested and sent to prison and Danyelle began to move on with her life.
14 years later, this horrible piece of her past came moving back into her life, quite literally next door. English moved in with his mother—Dyer’s grandmother—who happens to live adjacent to Dyer.
It turns out that there’s no law that prohibits a convicted sex offender from moving next door to their victims after they’ve served their time.
That’s something Dyer and her family, along with State Representative Kyle Hilbert, is trying to change. Hilbert is rallying the other legislators to come up with a law that will “ensure it can never happen again in Oklahoma,” he said in a recent Facebook post about Dyer’s situation.
For her part, Dyer has chosen to make the best of the hand she’s been given, becoming outspoken about her experience and sharing her story to help those who have been victims. She began by posting a photo of her abuser and her situation on Facebook.
Then her father had banners made that make it very well-known that there is a convicted sex offender living at the address. The hope is that English will become so uncomfortable that he’ll leave the area.
In the days that the story first came out, it’s since been shared on multiple local and national news outlets, including CNN.com and People.com
Dyer is just hoping that her story will help support other victims and put a plan into place that will bring about a change in legislation.
“I don’t want anyone else to ever have to go through the feelings of reliving the trauma from something like this.”
