Traumatized Girl Wills Herself to Silence

May 26, 2005 -- -- For years, 8-year-old Armani Stevenson has hardly spoken a word outside her home. She wills herself to silence.

Psychologists call the condition selective mutism, and it is often caused by trauma. It is an extreme form of control for a child who can control so little else.

When she was just 10 months old, Armani was left on the doorstep of her great-great-grandmother's home at the Baxter Terrace housing project in Newark, N.J.

Okella Foster, 85, said Armani had raw, open sores all over her lower body. Her mother, Foster's great-granddaughter Nicole, is a drug addict. Her father has been in and out of prison.

Over the past five decades, Foster has raised a dozen of her family's abandoned children.

She is currently raising five boys and girls in a cramped apartment. When "Primetime" met her four years ago she was receiving about $250 a week. That was about half as much as a foster parent in the same situation would have received.

For Armani, one of the most positive aspects of her life is a special school called the Child Development Center in nearby Bloomfield, N.J.

The school specializes in children with behavioral and learning disabilities and provides Armani with intensive personalized attention, and educational and emotional support. It also provides her hope.

There are therapists, social workers and other services for the roughly 100 students who attend. Armani is a good student, even though she doesn't speak.

One of the teachers she had during her years at the school, Megan Vogel, said she hopes the school is doing some good. "I think we'll make them better -- put them in a better place than they were," she said.

When Armani graduates from high school, her great-great grandmother will be 95. She told "Primetime Live," "I pray to God every night to take care of her if anything happened to me."

"Primetime's" Cynthia McFadden asked Foster how she felt about how her family turned out. "I want the best for them. I want them to finish school," she said. "I don't know what goes wrong."