Something I Can't Get My Head Around...or...a decidely unfunny post

thanks to the generosity of a friend, i was able to read the book Push, the story of Claireece Precious Jones and her struggle to learn how to read.

well....that paragraph is like trying to describe a christmas tree by only talking about the 3rd ornament 2 rows from the bottom.

actually, Push is about a young girl who struggles with the horror of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse and the hands of her mother and her father. A father who ends of dying of AIDS...but not before infecting Precious with the virus.

and not before causing two pregnancies, one resulting in a child with Down's Syndrome.

and i'm not even going to go into Precious' knowledge of and reverence for Louis Farrakhan and Harriet Tubman, her disdain for dark-skinned blacks, and her lack of awareness of the hypocrisy of these thoughts...

this is by and far the most devastating read i've tackled in quite a while. i thought Back Roads was a toughie, Push threatened to completely crush my mood as i fought my way through the stream of consciousness style of story-telling and it's graphic, horrifying accounts of abuse.

reading this book opened my eyes in a lot of ways. it reminded me that survivors of this type of abuse are walking around, some functioning, some still struggling, but among us. when i debriefed the book with the friend who loaned it, she said she didn't think she knew anyone who had gone through the things in the book.

but probably we do. we probably all do. the story is right there under the surface.

i thought about Tiffany Wright, Keara Hess, and Mackenzie Phillips, all victimized, the crimes committed against them making the news within weeks of each other.

i thought about the case in Alabama in which the husband, father, Preacher killed his wife and hid her body in a freezer for several years after she caught him sexually abusing their daughter.

Roman Polanski's distasteful attempt to get everyone to forget that he orally, anally, and vaginally raped a 13 year old girl after giving her alcohol and Quaalude. (really, Whoopi? are you serious?)

and then today, this comes out.

i don't know what the answer is. can parent education fix a person so broken they'd damage a child in this way? can court-mandated therapy? why are there so many men and women who see children as sexual objects and prey upon them??? and why are there so many apologists lining up to go to bat for the adults mistreating children.

Precious often asks why those terrible things had to happen to her. Why the schools didn't teach her, why her mother abused her, why she had to have two kids by her father, why one had Down's Syndrome, why she had to have HIV.

i don't know how to tackle this issue but i do know just thinking about it isn't going to solve the problem. it's not going to affect a change. but maybe if more people keep the physical and sexual abuse of children on their radar, maybe if more people start speaking out against it instead of acting like it's either not happening or the child victim's fault...

well, then maybe we can finally make a difference.

National Association to Prevent Sexual Abuse of Children