HUG YOUR CHILD TODAY

HUG YOUR CHILD TODAY is the central line of a bumper sticker Billy Milligan had printed after opening an account for the Foundation Against Child Abuse. Set against the book’s account of childhood abuse and its sharply contested accounts of later assaults, the short imperative joins a public appeal for children’s safety to a story in which questions of harm, fear, and consent are repeatedly at stake.

Origin and Appearance

On January 10, a little more than a month after Billy Milligan’s transfer to Athens Mental Health Center, he opened a bank account in the name of the Foundation Against Child Abuse and deposited $1,000. The money came from a five-figure payment for his painting The Grace of Cathleen, sold to a woman in Columbus planning to open an art gallery. The sequence connects the sticker’s origin to a specific source of funds and to Milligan’s work as an artist; the evidence does not say how much the printing cost or how widely the stickers circulated.

The sticker was printed with black letters on a yellow background. Its central line, HUG YOUR CHILD TODAY, was followed by “it’s painless” and the additional appeal “PLEASE HELP STOP CHILD ABUSE—BILLY.” The design’s plain imperative gives the message the form of an immediate, everyday action, while the accompanying appeal names the larger harm it asks the public to help prevent.

Message and Context

The sticker’s subject is not incidental to the book’s account of Billy Milligan. The narrative describes abuse in his childhood, while later scenes show how accounts of sexual offenses and victims’ experiences can be disputed or misrepresented. During a discussion of trial strategy, Arthur claimed that the three women had cooperated and had not been injured; Judy and Gary did not accept that account. The narrative clarifies that they understood Arthur to be describing Adalana’s perceptions, not establishing the women’s consent as fact. That distinction matters beside the sticker’s appeal: a message about protecting children sits within a story attentive to how another person’s account can obscure the experience of someone harmed.

Elsewhere, Donna West is shown frightened during her abduction, and Polly Newton cries when Adalana tells her she wants to have sex with her. These scenes do not document the sticker’s use, but they reinforce the book’s wider concern with vulnerability and the difference between an aggressor’s account and a victim’s circumstances. The expression is therefore most securely read as an appeal against child abuse, not as proof that the foundation’s money or the stickers were used in any particular campaign.

Meaning and Limits

The slogan makes care concrete: it asks for a gesture toward a child today, then widens that gesture into a plea to help stop abuse. Its directness contrasts with the complex explanations and contested testimony elsewhere in the narrative. Yet the evidence establishes the printing and wording, not a distribution campaign, a measurable public response, or the foundation’s subsequent work. The sticker remains a documented statement of purpose—an appeal that gives the book’s history of childhood harm a concise public form.