Girls

It is not a safe time to be a girl.

Saturday March 11, 2006
Front page Los Angeles Times

6-year Terms in O.C. Sex Assault

This is the final sentencing for a videotaped sexual assault of an unconscious 16-year-old girl by three young men, one of them the son of an ex-assistant sheriff of Orange County, that took place four years ago. Google Greg Haidl if you want to see the back story on this case. Because of her age at the time of the assault, the victim is only know as Jane Doe. After the assault, this young woman became the target of a harassment campaign by defense investigators to discredit her including fliers with her photo and name being posted in her neighborhood. This campaign of harassment followed her when she changed schools. As is the case in many assault victims, she turned to drugs to dull her pain and she became a Meth addict. She suffered. Now let’s take a look at the defense sdie of the article.

…Haidl’s father called his son “a good kid who ended up in a very bad situation.”

His son ended up in a bad situation? Maybe if the little SOB had been taught to resect women instead of treating them like objects for his sexual pleasure or perversion, this teenage girl would not have suffered as she did.

Al Stokke, Haidl’s attorney, said it was unclear whether Jane Doe’s troubles stemmed from the videotaped incident of from preexisting emotional problems. Stokke switched gears from the defense claim that she was feigning unconsciousness. He compared the crime committed on the passed-out Jane Doe to someone plunging a knife into a corpse.
“She couldn’t have felt it happen,” he said. “She only knows it happened because of the videotape.”

Current psychological research states that experiences that are not consciously remembered are stored in the body at a cellular level. When a child is abused at a young age, at a preverbal age, they have no frame of reference as to how to categorize the abuse. Young children “forget” the abuse but it is still remembered by their body. That is why places, sound, scent or touch sensation can trigger memories of childhood abuse. The body knows. She knew on some level that something was wrong, I guarantee it. She just didn’t know what it was. It’s a feeling akin to trying to remember something that is on the edge of your awareness, a fine thread that you can feel is there but can’t figure out what it is. What the video did was not inform this girl of what she had suffered, it brought her nightmare to life in vivid color.

Same day, same newspaper
B section - California

Girl Raped at School in Buena Park

A 12-year-old girl was raped at knifepoint Friday by a man who apparently followed her into the restroom of a Buena Park elementary school, police said.

It is not a safe time to be a girl.

Reading this one column, six-inch long article, I can only pray that this little girl is getting not only the medical but the psychological help she needs. I pray that she is not further traumatized by the reactions of her family and age mates around her. I pray that the man who did this is caught and castrated, although following the local news yesterday, he has still not been caught.

Are children not safe anywhere?

What saddens me even more is that it is not just the little girls who are in danger. Boys are also the victims of sexual abuse. Male sexual abuse is largely unreported, even more so than female sexual abuse goes unreported. What is being done to protect the children? What can we do to prevent their childhood innocence from being stolen from then?

If I knew the answer to any of these questions, I would be shouting it from the rooftops.