YahooLife! x Activist Donna Hylton
Activist Donna Hylton, who spent 27 years in prison, on understanding Cyntoia Brown: 'Believe us when we say someone hurt us'
Donna Hylton had faced sexual abuse for most her life when, at the age of 20, she entered prison — which is where she finally learned, however ironically, that she was not alone.
“I thought I was alone in my abuse,” says Hylton, now a 54-year-old activist, speaker and author, about the start of her long journey to freedom. “I realized as soon as I went into prison, like, oh my God, I’m not alone.” The realization was cold comfort, though, as she quickly put the pieces together about the stories of inmates in the system. “Prison is violent in its very being. And so to place someone who has been so traumatized, so abused, into an environment like that — how do we expect healing?”
