At the age of 15, Donna Bartos found herself in an abusive relationship. Although she didn’t realize it at the time. The first six months she describes as being treated like a princess. Then things changed.  Her boyfriend started to tear her down, she says, telling her she was fat and ugly. “Humiliation,” Bartos says, “is the first sign of an abusive relationship.

It took a violent incident for her to walk away. That was 20 years ago.  But the memory of what happened never left. Bartos would later find herself at a conference where a teenage girl was the keynote speaker. She talked about escaping a violent relationship that nearly destroyed her.