A critical part of any real strategy for dealing with sexual predation.....
I was two years into therapy, which I began in the spring of 2005 when I heard that a child in my old neighborhood in Iowa had been murdered by a sexual predator. The horror of that event pushed me to examine the impact of growing up in environment where the young and vulnerable were sexually exploited by those in power. At that point in my progress, I knew I couldn’t trust myself to not try to start secret, sexual relationship with a student.
The perpetrators in my neighborhood in the 1980’s were not adults, but babysitters, older siblings, and teenage neighbors sexually exploiting the younger children. I remember being molested by a babysitter under a blanket while watching a movie and being “humped” by an older boy in a basement. I also have small flashes of other memories, a painful slideshow that has been slowly coming together over time.
Another target of the same kind of abuse was one of my friends, a neighbor girl one year younger than me. The abuse stopped when she moved away from the neighborhood at age 9. After that I only saw her at school. Neither of us told anyone what had happened. The memories faded over time, except far-away flashes in my mind when I’d see her walk by in the hallway. We gradually drifted apart and fell out of contact.
About a year after I declined the art school position, I found her online and we met at a restaurant in Minneapolis. I was instructed by my counselor to use extreme caution in broaching the subject of abuse, only to discuss it if she wanted to. I didn’t need to wait long. As soon as the waiter left us alone, she began: “We grew up in a pretty messed up neighborhood, huh?”
At that point in therapy, I had been working through my reoccurring nightmares of being sexually attacked and seeing my childhood friends be exploited and prostituted. When my neighbor and I spoke, her memories lined up with my nightmares and it became more real for both of us. She told me her memories of both teenage boys and girls abusing her — being shown pornography then instructed to act it out, having several boys molest her in a sleeping bag in one night, and being traded to older teens in exchange for alcohol.