I don't think I've ever blogged twice in one day but I'm mad as hell tonight. I just heard a footballer on trial for having sexual relations with an underage girl trying to explain what happened.
He describes himself in terms that make you think - or are meant to make you think - that he's just a naive wee working class boy who was experimenting/didn't know what he was doing/was copying his mates on the team. This is a man of 27. Other men of that age are married with kids, holding down a job, trying to pay the rent or the mortgage and aiming to give their kids a decent life. They are not online trying to get into the pants of a 15 year old lassie.
When I was a young teacher, I know I missed at least two cases of child sex abuse. Both girls. And they have stayed with me ever since.
One girl aged 12 would come to my class and then take ill. She would drape herself over the radiator, crying and saying: 'It's terrible, I hate it.' Of course, I was concerned and tried to help. She couldn't explain what it was that was terrible and after a few days of this I passed on my concerns to the 'Lady Adviser', a job that has long disappeared from Scottish schools but which had its uses. The girl vanished. I don't know where to. The Lady Adviser hinted she had been abused by her mother's boyfriend.
The other girl was in the same school and was also about 12 but I only saw her at the Children's Panel. She had climbed out of her bedroom window two flights up and jumped. She had been locked in. Hence the escape by window. When her parents got hold of her and got her in a taxi to go to the local hospital, she jumped out on a main road. How she wasn't killed I don't know. She recognised me from school and stared at me across the table at the emergency Panel meeting where we tried to decide what was wrong and how to help her. When the Panel suggested at one point she could go home, she looked at her father sitting next to her and said quite clearly: 'No. Not with them.' Her mother was a pale, sad woman who cried throughout the hearing. The father was a wee, shilpit creature whose face was permanently stuck in a frown. In the end, the girl went to a 'place of safety'. After the hearing, we said to the lawyer that there was something bad going on there. Did he have any concerns about the father? He did, but said: How do you prove it?
You prove it by believing the victim.
Kids don't have the vocabulary to invent stories about abuse. And why would they? Adults sometimes ascribe adult motives to quite young children claiming they make allegations because they're unhappy over the divorce of their parents/because they are jealous of the new partner/because they're wicked, etc.
The footballer in this story is probably going to be convicted as a paedophile. He followed the same pattern as other paedophiles: he picked on someone young and vulnerable; he groomed her, making her feel special; he made their meeting a secret.
He knew what he was doing. He's not the victim here.
If you think kids just get over events like sexual abuse, here's one to think about: a girl of 10 is sexually abused by her older brother over several years. She finally gets help at school but her parents refuse to believe it has happened. The police are involved but the investigation is made very difficult by the family closing ranks. The girl is taken into care. By the time she is 18, she is using drugs and living a very dangerous life. She dies after an overdose, ironically - if you read the first lines of this post - at the age of 27.
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