Steven Tyler has partnered with Youth Villages, which operates facilities and programs for children across America, to open ‘Janie’s House’, a women’s shelter for abused girls.
The Aerosmith frontman opened a facility at Youth Villages’ Inner Harbour campus in Douglasville, Georgia in December last year.
Now, he’s opened the second of its kind in the US, this time on the Youth Villages Bartlett Campus, just outside of Memphis.
The Memphis location will serve up to 30 girls annually and provide access to medical and therapeutic care.
It’s the latest initiative from Tyler’s Janie’s Fund foundation, which has injected almost US$500,000 into the Memphis project.
At the “scarf-cutting” dedication to officially open the home, Tyler said the inspiration for Janie’s House was in fact from Aerosmith’s 1989 hit song ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’. The song tells the story of a girl who was abused by her father, and later takes revenge.
At the opening Tyler said the song was written around the same time that he started to address his struggle with addictions. During his treatment, he met several young women who had been abused, thus inspiring one of Aerosmith’s most well-known songs, ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’.
“This does my heart and my soul good. This is real,” Tyler told WMC in Memphis.
According to the Janie’s Fund website, Tyler has said he often thinks about what could have been done to prevent the kind of abuse that inspired ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’.
“What kind of help could Janie have received that would have prevented her trauma? How often does sexual abuse like this happen in our country? What can we do about it? With Janie’s Fund, Steven is using his big voice to give a voice to the thousands of victims who haven’t had one. He feels this is his life’s work and legacy.”
Watch Steve Tyler open Janie’s House below:
