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Aerosmith's Steven Tyler opens home in Tennessee for abused girls

"This does my heart and my soul good," Grammy-winning singer, 70, said at the opening. "This is real."
Image: Steven Tyler
Steven Tyler performs at the 2016 KAABOO Del Mar at the Del Mar Fairgrounds on Sept. 17, 2016, in Del Mar, Calif.Christopher Victorio / WireImage file

Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler celebrated the opening this week of Janie's House, a facility in Memphis, Tennessee, for girls who have been abused or neglected.

The Grammy-winning singer, known for tying scarves around his microphone stand, attended a "scarf-cutting" ceremony Monday at the house he helped fund.

"This does my heart and my soul good," Tyler said at the opening. "This is real."

The house and its name were inspired by Aerosmith's 1989 hit, "Janie's Got a Gun," written by Tyler and bassist Tom Hamilton, about a young girl who is abused by her father.

Tyler, 70, said he was exposed to the realities of young victims of abuse whom he met at a treatment center.

"While I was there, all the girls I met had been abused either physically, mentally or verbally, or at least 90 percent of them all," he said. "So when I got out of there, I laid it all on Janie. I said, what are you going to do?"

Tyler's foundation, Janie's Fund, which he launched in 2015, donated almost $500,000 to the new project.

One in four girls will be sexually abused before they turn 18, according to the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Janie's Fund was created to bring more awareness to the abuse and neglect of children and to generate financial support to "ensure that girls receive the most effective services available to help them overcome the trauma and pain of abuse," the foundation's website says.

The facility is operating out of the location of a nonprofit known as Youth Villages in Bartlett, northeast of Memphis. Youth Villages says it helps emotionally and behaviorally troubled children and their families live successfully.

Up to 30 girls between 12 and 18 are expected to be helped annually and given access to medical and therapeutic care. They will stay at the house on an average of four to six months with the goal of reuniting with their families or finding another stable home, officials said.

The first and only other Janie's House opened in 2017 in Dougslasville, Georgia, about 20 miles west of Atlanta.