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Well, yes, Hedda. I must confess it has always rather puzzled me how these events can be so life-destroying. The other thing that always strikes me, but I fear to say, is the suspicion that it is precisely because of the shame society projects around matters sexual that these events are so traumatizing. People talk about feeling dirty. But why do they simultaneously blame the culprit and feel shame? I guess a person *can* feel shame around something not his fault, like being ugly or something. But this is something they claim not to have done. Why the guilt if they have no agency? But you daren't even ask these questions. Furthermore, in other countries and in this one's past, children not far off twelve are married. Do we take them to be traumatized for life by their honeymoon? Maybe they are? I'm not saying. I'm just asking.
And what's clear is everybody else already understands perfectly. I mean, what exactly did these two do? Dare not ask? What was it about it that made it ruin her life? Surely some small exaggeration at least.
Now I don't mean to be heartless. All these questions may have perfectly good answers. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. Perhaps if it had done I would feel quite differently. But, you know, like Hedda, I've had my own run in with criminal street violence. It wasn't pleasant. You know, had to get surgery on the bones in my face. Laser eye treatment. Well terrified to go out for some time.
But that's all physical. What we are talking about here are emotional scars. I grant the metaphor some force, but is the metaphorical scar really more injurious than the real one? I'm all over my trauma now. I just get about business as usual, day and night.
The physical damage of sexual abuse is surely the lesser part of it, and while unpleasant, I'm not sure how it can destroy a life. The emotional part seems to hang on issues of guilt and shame, which in turn hand on a condemnation of sex as sinful. Or is it that there has been an abuse of trust by a figure of authority? That I can understand. Does your head in. Like Bloody Sunday, when soldiers deputized to protect us start killing us. But here the analogy seems overdrawn. There is a question of how inherently damaging is the behaviour of the authority. The lady says she was manipulated. What was going on there? Twelve years old girls, some of them, are capable of saying 'no'. They can be quite prissy little madams. They can also be shy, charming and obliging. They are at the age when they are becoming aware of the power of their beauty, if they are lucky enough to possess it. They certainly won't necessarily do what you tell them. Despite the need for legal categories, there is no clear line between a child and an adult in terms of responsibility. It is a gradual change, and as advertising attests, adults remain subject to the power of manipulation. So could the feeling of being destroyed be tied in with a sense of partial responsibility for something shameful?
Sorry for going on. I really wish it were possible to ask these questions and discuss these things more generally. Is it just me? Am I the only one puzzled by this? Sometimes it seems so. Even as I write this, perhaps foolishly, I'm contending in my mind with the possibility some cop could be checking my IP address and finding out where I live and putting a little note in my file. Doubtless I'm just paranoid, but you never know.
Just to be clear: I'm not in any way condoning what this lady is alleged to have done. But I do think's it's perfectly reasonable to try to measure the extent of the harm done, for penal considerations, if none other. Instead, society seems to take the view that the harm done is off the scale, limitless and incomparable with any other crime. One day this will seem mad.
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