Always the Children – Why?

I can’t see it, I can’t hear it, but it’s there, ominously grunting with each thrust against the innocence of the child who can’t fight back, whose cries die in her throat, as her body is violated again and again. And again.

For a time, I operated a shelter for abused women and children. These are some of their stories.

Our first client was an angry, in your face belligerent thirteen-year-old. She had been on the streets for years, her case known to the police and town council social workers. She didn’t talk except to chat back. She did what she was told to do begrudgingly.

 An elderly missionary lived in a container on the property. She drove him mad, flashing at him.

I got her into school. It was tough, she was so much older than the other Grade 1’s. After only a few weeks, the complaints began. She was waylaying students on their way home from the secondary school nearby inviting them to have sex with her. We were asked to remove her.

We figured the abuse against her had begun at an early age as she wet her bed. Do you know that a child’s emotional development stops at the age of the first sexual assault? Emotionally they are arrested, caught in that moment for years, sometimes for life.

One night in a fight with one of the other girls, the truth came out. “You weren’t raped when you were seven,” she spat.

So why would she go looking to be raped? A psychiatrist friend of mine came to visit – she came each year fro two weeks to help assess our clients and train our staff. The verdict on this child: the only time she received approbation was when she was being raped. So, when insecurities overwhelmed, she looked for the only endorsement of her that she knew.

We never did get her “straight”. The last time I saw her she was filthy and spitting spiders, stoned as a rock, demanding money and attention. She wouldn’t wait until I could attend to her. The police lost sight of her, too. Just another statistic.

Another child raped at 12 was ripped from front to back giving birth to a baby her small frame was not meant to carry, her innards permanently damaged. She lived on the streets until she was twenty. Every weekend her mother combed the country, looking for her, desperate for her to come home.

When she came to us, she had full blown AIDS. Praise be, she had a revelation one night of how much she was loved by her heavenly Father, accepted that in Jesus she was forgiven, washed and dressed in robes of white. She went from nought to one hundred in record time spiritually. Light shone out of her. She reconciled with her mother, her brother, and her child. When she died, we had to double check because the peace and joy on her face made her look alive.

Another child was abused by her stepfather. He was a number and a half. He got off on throttling her. He also kept a gun on the side table as a warning as to what would happen to her if she ever told anyone what he was up to. Every night the sound of her choking and coughing as she tried to go to sleep would echo through the centre.

Without exception each child carried the shame and guilt of those who abused them. The scars remain, the pain so deep it is hard for the light of healing to reach it.

That is the legacy children who are sexually abused carry.

I carry their wounds with me, those of every child raped and sodomised and damaged by paedophiles and hebephiles. Grief overwhelms me. I keep it hidden as best I can, but it is with me all the time. When I go to sleep, when I wake up.

How much worse must it be for those precious women and men who are daily facing their abusers anew as the shambolic shenanigans around the Epstein files dominates the news. The reports have been filed. The evidence is out there – why will no one listen to the victims? Why the obfuscation, and dodging, and lying?  

The facts emerging like clues from a giant cryptic crossword speak of a scale of abuse that is beyond conception. The figure of 1000 children peeps through the narrative, a whisper of “boys”, money trails, as the biggest cover up in history unfolds, the latest twist being what amounts to a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, the most evil of all predators.

I want to shake those responsible for unleashing this horror on the world, those who still claim that Donald Trump and his merry men are not that bad, after all they are against abortion and homosexuals. But raping children is acceptable. School shootings are acceptable. The slaughter of innocent children in Gaza is righteous. Murder is okay if it aligns with some imagined biblical concept.

I am undone by the horror and tragedy of it. I am undone by those who refuse to speak out, especially those who would carry the name of my Jesus.  

God help us all.