I’m learning a lot about child abuse this term. It is no fun. It’s got me feeling sad–depressed, even–pissed off, and creeped out. Did you know that 1 in 20 American men sexually assaults a child? That’s 15,000,000 men! I’m having trouble with that.
I saw a documentary last night called Playground, about child sex traffic in the US. I’m still feeling heavy about it. One of the points it made: If someone broke into a woman’s room and raped her, a video of the crime would not be called “pornography.” It would be called “footage of a crime” or “evidence of sexual assault” or something like that. Footage of a child being raped shouldn’t be called “pornography,” either. That gives it too much legitimacy, like it’s just one of the more repulsive niches of that booming industry, pornography. How about we call it “footage of a child being raped”?
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 
May 26, 2010 at 3:16 pm
In my opinion, one of the main, important, vital jobs of parents is protecting their young. What happened?
May 26, 2010 at 5:17 pm
A lot of the time it’s actually one of the parents who does the abusing. And it’s usually–something like 80% or more of the time–someone the child knows and trusts, like a parent or relative or friend of the family.
That’s for abuse, though, not child pornography. I don’t know the stats for child pornography, but the movie made it look like these were mostly kids in foster care, who had been removed from their parents care because of some kind of abuse, so they’d already been mistreated. They interviewed a pimp who said something like he looks for girls who have been abused because they’ve numbed out to sex–they’re the ones that are easy to turn into prostitutes.
May 26, 2010 at 3:28 pm
In my childbirth classes, the one thing I stress over and over is, particularly to the fathers, that they need to protect their babies. They need to: protect their wives in childbirth, their unborn babies against drugs and other harmful substances, their unborn babies from questionable technology performed on the mother/baby during childbirth, their unborn babies from malnutrition of the mother and the likelihood of premature birth and all it’s consequences for the baby, the baby’s health, security, bondedness, intelligence, etc, etc, by supporting mother’s successful breastfeeding, avoiding things, like antibiotics, vaccines, and other drugs, when children are still developing their fragile immune systems, surrounding their children with only the best influences from birth, and on and on. If a man is highly invested in the well being of their child from the womb on, they are not likely to prey on any child later on. That’s my opinion and my best shot at protecting children.
May 26, 2010 at 11:51 pm
I remember taking Psychology of Trauma two summers ago and feeling quite depressed and helpless after spending an intense week talking about this subject. The whole class seemed weighed down by it. I was shaken by a study that stated the preventative measures in place (school programs, mostly) rarely work because they only account for situations dealing with strangers where the danger is obvious rather than the scenario this kind of abuse usually takes place in, as you just mentioned. I want to be a mother some day, but this is frightening enough to give me pause.