Speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves . . . ensure justice for those being crushed. Proverbs 31:8
The mental image of a coach statutory raping a boy in a university shower has been branded into our national consciousness since 21 felony counts of alleged sexual abuse were brought against Jerry Sandusky.
Grand Jury findings that a Penn State assistant witnessed the atrocity and failed to stop it compounded by the fact that his reporting it to a revered head coach and others failed to protect other children from later abuse makes us mad, sad, and sick all at once.
The report describes despicably calculating enticement of innocent victims by targeting especially vulnerable children from disadvantaged circumstances, demonstrating superior strength as threats, orchestrating cruelly fraudulent “friendships” for trust, and insisting on sexual compliance in exchange for manipulative acts of “kindness.”
Our outcry and outrage have not been daunted nor deflected by other details stating that victims were not forced to submit to sex or that some accepted money and other “gifts” from their abuser.
Instead, our consensus reactions have been “I would stop child sex abuse immediately” and “I would not rest until kids were protected from such scum.”
So let’s.
California law victimizes children who are sold by ruthless pimps to statutory rapists by arresting these abused children rather than rescuing them if they can’t prove they were forced to have sex. We have arrested over 5,000 minor sex trafficking victims during the last twelve years-about 700 of them 12 to 14 years old.
This unconscionably re-victimization occurred during the same period the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act mandated that ALL minors involved in commercial sexual activity ARE victims.
The failure to protect Sandusky’s alleged victims is news. But the failure of Californians to protect our child victims from their sexual predators is also news though much less publicized or discussed.
Shared Hope International, part of a worldwide effort to eradicate sex trafficking, gave California an “F” in its “Protected Innocence Initiative” State Report Cards for, among other things, providing “little protection under the law” to children victimized by commercial sexual exploitation. Sandusky’s tactics that inflicted lifelong harm are the same as those wielded by pimps in a growing epidemic of child rape for profit.
Do we twist our hearts if we point fingers while sitting on our hands? Instead, let’s rise up, reach out, and rescue those who are helplessly bound to horror.
The gut-wrenching and heart-breaking “Sandusky shower scene” haunting our heads is happening to children right now in hotels and motels, streets and alleys, cars and trucks, massage parlors and saunas, apartments and houses all over California. The average age at which children are initially trapped into prostitution by merchants of bodies is 12-14 years old.
Another ambush site of child sex predators is the internet. 2005 research from the Polly Klaas Foundation showed that one in four (27%) teens 13-18 talked online about sex with someone they never met in person. Another 2005 study of on-line sexual victimization of 10-17 year olds from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children revealed that 1 in 7 was solicited for sex and 1 in 3 was exposed to unwanted sexual material.
In 2010, Marc Klaas warned, “currently, it is believed that one in five children is solicited sexually while online . . . . Sex offenders are increasingly using social networking sites to lure children as these sites grow in popularity.”
While California’s Megan’s Law requires 63,000 sex offenders to register where they live, they do not have to disclose their e-mail addresses or social media accounts. So, while in the false security of their homes, our kids are accessible to known sex offenders because the law has not been updated to include the internet, now an under-guarded gateway to children’s bedrooms and anywhere else they use computers and smart-phones.
Californians Against Sexual Exploitation (C.A.S.E.) launched a ballot initiative that will help protect children from sexual predators-whether registered sex offenders targeting children on-line or brutal pimps selling minors for sex because of ineffective legal deterrence.
If you are registered to vote in California, please go to caseact.org, print and sign the petition, encourage others to do so, and spread the word. 800,000 registered voters must sign it by April for the C.A.S.E. Act to be on the November ballot.
Thousands of our kids are trapped in a nightmare of being sold over and over for monsters to ravage them. And all of our children on-line are exposed to the vilest abusers. The call in Proverbs to speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves is over 3,000 years old yet is just as dire now.
So let’s.
— Mark