- Child sexual predators have long been considered the
worst kind of scum mankind has inadvertently defecated on itself. Many
people, if fanatically, equate this behavior with the most savage kinds
of murder. Sometimes torture and murder are involved.
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- "Pedophilia" may have its supporters of a fashion,
who refer to the customs of the days of Socrates -- the sexual play between
adults and children seemingly implied by certain tales of the gods -- or
to certain current schools of psychological theory. But even for these,
the idea of coercing or tricking a child -- dependent on adults for food
and wisdom too -- into sexual acts, can instill a sense of horror and grotesquery.
It is a reaction on which the media often capitalize with hearty morbidity.
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- One city's newspaper gloated over a former mayor found
with his lifeless face beaten to hamburger by the hammers of anonymous
avengers; he had confessed that, in his younger years, he had seduced young
boys. There was the South African politician who resigned in disgrace for
having been caught with child pornography on his office computer. There
was the university professor who committed suicide, having been caught
with the same. There was the Boston priest who, decades later, was finally
caught up by the dozens of altar boys he?d molested. There was the Detroit
woman who brained her boyfriend, caught diddling her young daughter.
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- Priests, rabbis, preachers, teachers, Boy Scout leaders,
doctors and psychiatrists and psychologists, government officials, and
more, have all been caught in the act of preying sexually upon children.
Child sexual predators have been psychoanalyzed, shamed, jailed, beaten,
and murdered.
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- They've roamed free and still do, sometimes knowingly
allowed by associates and relatives, sometimes not. Consider the famous
photograph of John Wayne Gacy beaming proudly from his clown suit with
a smiling First Lady Nancy Reagan; she doesn't appear aware that the clown
she was favoring with this photo-op, for his charity and political work,
happened to have 37 boy corpses buried in his basement, whom he had tortured
to death. Couldn't she tell? (Then again, her husband had killed a few
children, himself, albeit on official business, more or less approved by
Congress).
-
- Consider also your home town. In a test of this essay,
several of my kindly readers responded by relating childhood incidents
of sexual predation by an uncle or a stepfather or a stranger. None of
them wrote to me from either Sodom or Gomorrah. None of the victimizers
went to jail.
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- Nothing has solved the problem, not civil law nor religion
nor psychology. Still, this will not be an essay appealing to anyone's
helpless fascination for hidden domestic horrors, but a query. How is it
that a problem which routinely balloons into horrific scenes, continues
on so strangely unfaced among the masses of the people from whom it springs?
It's like the warnings about the national debt. The doomsayers are drowned
in the silence of those who would rather not hear.
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- While I write, and while you read, a vast commercial
slave trade goes on in the world. Money changes hands between wealthy child
predators and, usually, poverty stricken parents, for their young children.
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- Who is even aware of it? I checked child+sex+slavery
on the internet and found 196,000 entries; that took less than a third
of a second to complete. There are indignant essays and reports and TV
shows galore. Even the glamorous news show "60 Minutes" has been
in on the act, referring to slavery in Sudan; (in the 1980s "60 Minutes"
helped fuel hysteria and crucify several innocent day-care workers from
Newport Beach, California; the day-care workers were convicted of child
sexual abuse by toddlers who were prompted to give false testimony. Their
lives were destroyed; this too made interesting news later on).
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- With all that hubbub available at the click of a computer
mouse (not counting in that number the come-on sites selling child-sex
and sex-slave fantasies), one might guess millions of people are working
ineluctably against child sexual predators and their commercial venues
thriving merrily in this world. But if they are, 196,000 entries are dwarfed
by the number of fantasy sex sites one may find, touting ?young! young!
young!? selling photographs of naked prostitutes of so-designated ?youngest
legal age?; any combination of teasing words brings up millions of such
sites in the same split second, never mind a mere couple hundred-thousand.
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- Away from the internet and into reality, the subject
seems like the proverbial crazy old aunt in the attic; she?s a problem
we don?t speak of. I tried to bring it to the attention of a little group
at a coffee shop, and got apathetic objections... plus the word ?inappropriate?
applied in one of the more grating tones normally used to express it, by
an elderly socialist who had dyed his hair and beard purple as some sort
of political statement. A sane discussion among those not already obsessed
with the subject seems out of the question. Perhaps we fear the guilt-inducing
noises our crazy old aunt could make, should we approach.
-
- Owing in part to the secretiveness inherent in child
sex predatory behavior, any statistics showing it to be an uncommon activity
in this world can probably safely be presumed to be fraudulent.
-
- My private experience is that it's never very far out
of casual earshot. Like my correspondents with their private stories, I
didn't grow up in Gomorrah either. Mine was the middle class Midwest and
New England. Without racking my memory, I can count 8 individuals who preyed
sexually on children, or tried to. These incidents involved childhood relatives
and friends. These 8 do not include the uncountable number of adult men
who propositioned me while I was a teenager, a minor, in one brief happenstance
or another. One of these latter was a respected schoolteacher for whom
I did odd jobs.
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- Twice, once as a teen and years later as an adult with
my own son in school, I had a hand in exposing chronic child sex predators
to the community. One of them was a sixth grade teacher in Watkins Glen,
New York, who was tenured there, who already had a criminal record of child
molestation in Pennsylvania. This teacher had been frottaging an 11-year-old
boy in front of his sixth grade class nearly every day. No one wanted to
believe the little ?troublemaker,? least of all his own religious fundamentalist
parents. It was four years before anyone accepted reality and responsibility
and this child sexual predator to jail.
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- In the course of my life, about one out of every five
women with whom I have confided has related a story of having been molested
as a little girl, by a father, an uncle, a neighborhood friend, a stranger.
These are all women in ordinary walks of life with ordinary lines of work.
Not prostitutes. Not mental institute inmates. Not magical movie stars
who've overcome terrible adversity and lived to tell the tale in tears
on TV. They?re ordinary hometown women.
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- Lastly: not long ago, one of my brothers discovered,
about 30 years after the fact, that there had been a certain amount of
sexual predation going on in our own family -- beyond what I myself had
to contend with in a high school friend in that small town in those days.
30 years ago or not, the news upset him deeply. He wrote to all our brothers
and mother about it. Is everybody okay now? What did this do to us? Why
didn?t the parents know about it? Our other brothers lambasted him for
?upsetting mom.? Our mother's reaction was to quote the bible and blame
him for having brought it up.
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- I wonder if we don't have a whole civilization that,
individual by individual, doesn?t just ignore its crazy old aunt in the
attic, they aspire to it.
-
- I mention these anecdotes to challenge every reader:
if you deny that child predatory behavior is not far from where you happen
to be standing, then maybe you quote your bible too much, like to blame
others, and prefer not to know.
-
- Because it exists in your hometown, it may not take too
strenuous a leap of imagination to recognize that there exists a commercial
market for all this. It is a fact that there are countries in this world
where slavery thrives largely for the buying and selling of children as
"sexual delicacies" (so it was expressed to me by an Angolan
man who knew about the trade).
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- The customers would usually be highly polished professional
men in high places, who have the cash to try anything -- who are approached
by those with the "anything" for them to try. This would be organized
commercial behavior, a very brisk business. Very young children are being
traded for money, not to pluck cotton and sing hymns, but to sexually gratify
wealthy child sex predators.
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- Whatever else this grotesquery may be, it is slavery.
This crazy old aunt is real, whether people are listening to her or not.
-
- It is certainly against the United States Constitution
to engage in slavery, and it is high treason for an American to support
it. Any country that engages in slavery is an enemy of the United States,
and any United States Citizen who supports slavery in any material way
is aiding and comforting an enemy of the United States, in favor of perpetuating
slavery.
-
- Any United States citizen who does business with a slave
owner commits high treason. Any representative of an official United States
office is made aware, by swearing an oath, that it is his personal responsibility
to uphold and defend the United States Constitution. If he engages with
slave owners for any purpose but to publicly defeat them, he knows he is
defeating the law and ideal of the Constitution, and committing high treason
against his own country. American businessmen who trade with countries
engaging in slavery, who claim to know nothing about the trading of hundreds
of thousands of child sex slaves to sexual predators might be blind, blaming
bible-beaters, or participants.
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- They are a part of it.
-
- Elsewhere among the 196,000 entries on the subject of
child sex slavery:
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- High ranking members of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's
government were recently implicated as part of a child-sex slave ring.
Blair himself quashed the story, employing a "D-notice," a legal
means to censor the media as a matter of national security. Is the story
true? It has been censored, but it has not been retracted. This child sex
slave ring seems to have come through Portugal.
-
- At the same time, a child sex slave ring which had operated
for many years in plain view of Portuguese authorities was exposed in Portuguese
media. The stories were not censored by the State boss.
-
- Further elsewhere, officials of a U.S. government-hired
company, Dynacorp, have made high profits supplying child sex slaves along
with weaponry in the Balkans. President Bush has not canceled the Dynacorp
contract, despite the wide-open facts of the matter. Is a bit of hand-slapping,
if any, enough? How about even a speech? As to this and other child sex
slavery incidents involving Americans, the U.S. State Department has officially
resolved to cluck as hard as it can; but as we have seen with the "war
on drugs," such official paper clucking tends to increase taxes, the
size and oppressiveness of government, enrich suppliers of weapons like
Dynacorp, and fatten the crazy old aunt in the attic.
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- At this point one must finally walk up the attic stairs
and take a look at the crazy old aunt. Consider the transactions between
so many wealthy American businessmen, governors, senators, what have you,
over the generations, with Saudi Arabia in oil and weapons and personal
friendships.
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- There are an estimated 450,000 child sex slaves in Saudi
Arabia -- all of whom, logically, would be concentrated in the hands and
harems of only the wealthiest Saudis. Could half-a-million child sex slaves
from Central Africa (to name only one of many exporters), escape the notice
of both the bin Ladens and their multibillion dollar business partners,
the Bush family?
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- This crazy old aunt could crash through the attic floor
one day soon.
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- Tom Dark
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- Tom Dark is a freelance editor, music producer, and runs
a small world-wide dream experiment group. He can be reached at Poet777@excite.com
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- Postscript:
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- Thanks to Bernard Weiner (www.crisispapers.com) and Alan
Stang (www.etherzone.com), two gentlemen of different schools of thought,
who are both courageously attempting to get their fellows to notice the
banging in the attic in general. There is a lot of it, about much. Their
encouragement is essential to anyone who is doing the same.
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