A very interesting article, you've raised a lot of important points and addressed them in a logical manner. But you seem to have missed one possible conclusion.
You've brought up the idea that the current model of upbringing is very desexualised. Especially when you've brought god into the equation. I like how you've portrayed the victim as wanting to refrain from sex with her boyfriend until marriage as her way of fighting back against the previous abuse.
You've also raised the very unpleasant fact of child molestation. The sexualisation without restraint of children, even young children, is without doubt one of the worst examples of the human psyche.
I don't know if you meant to portray sex before marriage as a bad descision, you've raised the subject of god several times in your piece. If so, and your exhortation to the father to have taught the victim about 'Tell me of the depravity of man' lead me to assume that you're aiming for a more liberal, yet still orthodox, christian view on sex.
The one thing I thinked you've missed is that children are in fact sexual objects to begin with, as well as all their other atributes. All objects are sexual to some degree, but in contemporary society we are taught not to see certain objects, children, lamp posts, baloons etc as sexual objects a priori.
As you've raised the point of sexual education at a much younger age, you seem to be more progressive than the current society, but you still seem to regard some objects as being unsexual a priori. You tell the father to 'Tell me of the depravity of man', this is, if I might say, rather sexist to begin with. As well as ignoring the fact that it is society itself that denotes what is 'depraved' or approved. I must protest against the use of 'depraved' in this light. You seem to imagine that 'man' as you put it, is somehow the root cause of the pain that your character has felt.
Now I agree with you that the pain your victim had to endure was a direct result of the monstrous events at the hands of her relativeshad after her father had died.
However, to simply blame this on the fact that her father hadn't taught her about 'Tell me of the depravity of man' and the crimes of the molesters is to ignore the larger point.
As I said, children are sexual objects, the role of society, and especially the parents or in this case the father, is to educate the children in such a way that they are not just passive objects. You've already started down this path by telling tha father to 'Tell me of the depravity of man', but this is just another path to passivity.
To portray children as objects to be instructed is to leave the child out of the equation altogether. Sex education must start on a basis of equality. Yes there are serious problems on the part of some females, and especially children, from the strength/size differnces between them and adult males, but to desbribe sex as a function of the difference between physical atributes is just another way of putting females/children into the passive mode again.
For real equality and safety, as you want to have, you have to educate everyone, from the earliest age, to be totally active participants in the world around them.
As you've stated in your conclusion, children have to 'report an incident once in a safe environment'. This again is a passive act. You seem to want to only educate on the premise that 'sex is wrong when you are a child' rather than the more active 'don't let someone do something to you that you don't want them to'.
I doubt you'd have any objections to a child reporting that another child stole a toy form them. This is an active reaction, the child wants their toy back, and they make the conscious descision to act in the way that will most likely get that toy back, by reporting the theft to a responsible adult.
To simply hand a small child a list of places they shouln't be touched and acts they shouldn't perform you make any action the child makes totally passive. Instead, if you educate the child on the entireity of sex from a young age, then the child will understand exactly what the molester wants from them and can make the active decision to report the offence. This of course is entirely dependant on the child being taught that any sexual act before at least puberty is in the same category as touching hot objects or standing in the road. An act that is physically dangerous, which of course it is.
The conclusion I'm aiming for is that to educate children to be completely active observers in the sexual world around them instead of passive victims will give them the several years of experience and force of will to actively choose whe and how to have sex when they reach a proper legal age.
A person that has been kept ignorant of the facts, as your victim was, and takes any sexual advances in a passive manner will be unable to react in an effective and safe way when the really intensive, to a normal child not your victim of course, sexual tensions in the life of a teenager and young person.
I think simply to dismiss sexual molestation of a child as 'the depravity of man' misses the point entirely. The point is that your victim, at every point in the story is a completely passive victim of the horrors that are happening to her. Only when she finally 'snaps' and makes an active, really a proactive, act and stabs her rapist is she in control. Yet as we she from her position, waiting for a sentence from a jury, the act she performed was excessive to society as a whole.
How much better that she'd have been in active control all the way through? She'd have learned all the skills in a safe environment with her father watching over her, and could have immediately taken the proper action againt her molesters when her father died. For 5 years she was a completely passive victim of the molestation, this is of course not her fault but the fault of the molester, with enough prior education about the realities of life she could have made an active descision to end the problem as soon as the first of her molesters touched her.
A very well written moral lesson, but I feel that you've missed the essential point about sex education. That 'sex' per se isn't bad or evil, it just 'is', but you need to be given the right tools to be able to make active decisions on our own when new situations occur.
Thank you for such a well themed piece. I have a distinct annoyance with the concept that the victims of sexual assault of any kind should be regared as passive, when they should have been taught how to make active choices before the crime occured. |
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but of course I would, but as a fellow traveller that's looked at some of the same ideas as you have, I can appreciate good thinking when I see it.