Jack’s father built their family home on a large wooded lot in rural Washington, several hours drive from Snohomish County. Jack, his younger sister and their parents live there. For several years they heated their home with a wood stove.
Everyday Jack’s father drives an hour to and from his job while his mother home-schools Jack and his sister. They use a professionally prepared curriculum of books and videotapes, visits to the library and the use of some local school resources.
Jack and his sister are well spoken and outgoing. They make friends easily with both peers and adults.
Their parents have done everything they know to do to protect them from the negatives of modern communities.
Hank and Joel’s parents were a little less pioneering, but every bit as protective.
They live in a remote cul-de-sac outside of a fairly urban area. They don’t have cable TV in order to protect their living area from the onslaught of media sex and violence. They closely monitor the boys’ use of the family computer for the same reasons.
Like Jack’s parents, they home-school all of their children and most of their social activities take place in their church. Joel is the oldest of the two boys and attends and enjoys an alternative public school for a few hours each day.
Hank says he enjoys not having friends.
These families did not know each other, but they have some other things in common. Several times a year, for example, both sets of parents sometimes bring their children to this larger urban area to do some tourist things and visit relatives.
On one of those visits by each family, their particular relatives sexually molested each of the three boys.
Most sexually abused children are abused by someone they know well; most of the time it’s a relative. There are reasons to believe that the closer the relationship, the more upsetting the incident is because it also transforms the family relationships.
In these cases, years of trust were destroyed. Important family relationships were reshaped and a few valued relationships ended entirely. Parents fought their own sense of guilt, largely fighting in vain.
Even past that, the sexual assaults ran exactly counter to what these parents were trying to protect against. For the offenders to be held responsible, the youngsters had to talk with professionals about sex. The parents worried that even discussing the words and definitions of rape and intercourse would further erode the very innocence they had struggled to preserve.
It is trite but true that you can run but you can’t hide. More than trying to hide from the modern world, these parents tried to protect their children from its vulgarities.
Their noble but futile struggle sharpens the question of how to prepare children to deal with the negatives within the community.
People, even children, can seldom be effectively separated from our deeply flawed community. Their best protections don’t come from barriers outside of themselves.
Their best protections come from inside.
They come first from inside their protective, attentive and caring families and their closest, most trusted community. From that experience, children gradually learn more about making judgments – they develop more skills in protecting themselves.
Gradually their community expands, and they learn more about protecting themselves.
Eventually, most of their protections are inside themselves taking the forms of judgments and decision-making abilities, of recognizing realistic dangers, and of knowing who they can tell about the dangers and ask for help.
Bill France, a father of three, is a child advocate in the criminal justice system and has worked as director of clinical programs at Luther Child Center in Everett. Send e-mail to bsjf@gte.net.
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