“Grateful” from Eva-Mary by Linda McCarriston

There are 59 million children in America. Of these, there are 3,200 to 4,600 abducted by strangers each year. Less than one percent of this number are killed or held captive indefinitely by the kidnapper. In 1998, the first year in which these kinds of records were kept, there were 115 FBI investigations of “stereotypical” abductions of children by strangers. In 2001, there were 98 FBI investigations of such abductions. There is, then, a decline in this type of crime. Or so I learned on CNN.com/LAWCENTER. At the web site for The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, I also learned that now about 100 children a year, on average, are abducted by strangers and never returned to their parents, as opposed to 200 or 300 annually in the 1980s. As a parent, I went to these sites because I was in search of comforting statistics, of hard facts that could take the place of my irrational fears about sexual predators who kidnap children. Unfortunately, the facts I found were of no real comfort, simply because they cannot take the place of the faces of this summer’s missing, abused, and murdered children who have been in newspaper photographs, on magazine covers, and on television news.

Recently, the media has been awash with pictures of these children: first Danielle van Dam, then Elizabeth Smart, then Samantha Runion, then the miraculous child who escaped, Erica Pratt, and, most recently, Cassandra Williamson, not to mention the less publicized Laura Ayala, Jahi Turner, and Alexis Patterson. With the obsessive media coverage of each new development, every parent I know has experienced a heightened sense of anxiety, sometimes akin to panic. My friends who are mothers have remembered guiltily every instance they have ever let their children out of sight in a public place. Suddenly, for all of us, the unthinkable lurks just around the corner. And because of the circumstances of several of the cases, when we awaken at 2:30 a.m. to check our children in their beds, the unthinkable has even entered our homes. In those hours, with subconscious fears at the fore, it is difficult to think rationally, and the statistics we call to mind do not help. So we lie awake and listen, and think, and maybe once more look in on dreaming children. Then later, even in the light of early morning, when the same friends and I run or bike together, the conversation often turns to the same frightening topic. We continue to seek comfort, either through reassurances concerning the general safety of where we live, or by an imagined meting out of punishments, swift and without compassion, to the perpetrators of crimes against children.

Finally, after we have done violence to the violent, we become calm enough to talk about the fine line that exists between having a “street smart child” and an unnecessarily frightened child. This naturally leads us to the painful fact that at least one of the children who was abducted, molested, and killed did everything right — she said no, she screamed, she fought. And she died anyway. This is what is most unbearable, because it dredges up the worst of our fears — that no matter how hard we try, we cannot control the world we and our children must inhabit.

When I started writing this article a few days ago, I did so while my own child and her visiting cousins, all 10 and under, were upstairs watching the video Tomb Raider. What our children watch at home is something that parents can control, though some are more vigilant than others in doing so. On this particular day, I was of the less-than-vigilant variety, having never seen the film myself. I was, irresponsibly, not even in the same part of the house from whence issued the techno music that undoubtedly accompanied daring kicks and bosom-jiggling leaps. I knew that the film was not entirely appropriate, though I justified it by telling myself it was part of the new genre of gorgeous-women-kicking-butt-while still-looking-gorgeous films, hence mildly feminist, at least if one stretches things and admits a fondness for the defunct Spice Girls’ brand of “grrrrliness”.

We don’t even have television, per se, at our house, just a small television/video player that we take out of the closet for video viewing. Although I’m smug about 20 years without television, and I feel that its absence has had a positive effect on my daughter’s view of the world, I have to admit that our substitute version has been out of the closet a lot lately, with the amount of time it spends out in direct correlation to the number of children in the house at any given moment this summer. I usually like to think of myself as a conscientious and deliberating parent, and I haven’t, as a rule, let my child watch even mildly questionable movies unless I’m at least there to discuss them with her. But all of the children had begged for this movie in the video store, and it’s rating wasn’t entirely prohibitive. However, I have to say that the real bottom line was my own desire for an afternoon spent with my writing. And I did manage to write a few paragraphs, feeling only like a mildly bad mother, until one of the children did a practice kick on his sister, (undoubtedly inspired by Tomb Raider Babe), thus disrupting the movie and sending all of the children downstairs to me insisting that I make good on my promise to take them swimming. Because I really do hold children’s trust as a high priority, and because I am about as guilt ridden as they come, I left my writing, gathered towels and sunblock, loaded my car with swimsuit clad children and their paraphernalia, and drove to the busy local swimming pool, a world safer and more appealing to them, in fact, than the one they had watched in the movie.

The world I inhabited as a child became less safe and appealing during my thirteenth summer. The day before my fourteenth birthday, on a plastic raft a few hundred yards out in the Atlantic Ocean, a distant relative, an adult in his 40s, made inappropriate sexual advances towards me. Because I couldn’t swim, I also couldn’t remove myself from the situation. Having had no access to swimming pools, and with the branch of water near my home only a few inches deep, I had never learned. The experience, though frightening, disturbing, and unforgivable, could have been much worse. I was spared further violation by a combination of the relative’s wife watching us from a distance on shore, and by my own repeated and fervent no. Because I was lucky, and because my fear, shock, and repulsion must have been more than evident in the bright July sun, I was returned to the shore intact, in most every sense of the word, although I was terribly confused. Looking back, I can see that when I stepped onto the beach that day, I did so having learned a difficult lesson about whom I could trust. (And certainly, this question of trust is shared by a number of people who have had similar or even worse experiences, as everyone knows, if for no other reason, then from the many accusations made against priests and given great publicity in the last year.)

My parents trusted this man who made sexual overtures towards me, a girl still prepubescent, never suspecting that he was a pedophile, just as I trusted adults up until that time, and as all children trust adults unless they are taught not to do so. My parents had allowed me to go on a beach vacation with this relative as a treat for me, a child for whom the beach was a novelty. I was to help my relative and his wife by babysitting their children. They were to help me by broadening my view of the world, if only a bit. He kept his end of the bargain, because he did show me a world I knew little about, but it wasn’t at all what my parents had in mind.

Generally speaking, parents do trust people they feel they know, and it is the stranger and predator they read about in the newspaper who sends them into panic mode concerning their children’s safety. But again, statistics offer no comfort concerning the people we think we know. In a study done as early as the 1950s, when people were far more reluctant to discuss sexual issues than they are today, 25 percent of female respondents reported being molested as children. In half of the cases, the molester was someone they knew. In an ongoing YWCA Rape Crisis Center study, 25 percent of females and 14 percent of males reported having been abused before their eighteenth birthdays. Eighty percent of the victims knew their molester. And I would say these statistics are about right, based on the women I know and conversations we have had. Men find it far more difficult to admit having been abused as children, and the reasons are obvious. However, none of this is encouraging news. The only gleam of hope I can find is that, in all but 20 percent of the recorded findings, the sexual abuse was a one time occurrence, as in my own experience. This is, I know, a dubious kind of hope, but repeated abuse is far more damaging to the victim, and it results in pathologies much worse than my own difficult and embarrassing memories.

Every parent worthy of the name wants to see children grow up in a safe world, with good experiences that create healthy memories. However, while we can control most of what children see and do in our own homes, we cannot control all of the damaging and even deadly manifestations of a society that is consumed with youth and sex. We can only teach our children what is appropriate and inappropriate touch, and that, while most adults are good, not all are worthy of trust. For most children, this kind of information is enough to keep them safe. Although records show that an average of 114,600 stranger abductions are attempted each year, only 4 percent are successful, indicating that someone, either the parents or the child, is doing something right. And while the numbers alone strike terror in parents, they also tell us that we can and should teach our children to protect themselves, that what we teach does have a strong effect. We can teach them to run or fight, if necessary, but we should also teach them that chances are good they will never need to do so. We can teach them to make their way through life with anticipation, instead of anxiety, with assurance, instead of fear. And, yes, we can teach them to swim, and take them often to places where they can practice in safety, watching with pleasure the pure beauty of children moving through a different element, trusting, hoping that their acquired skills will always keep them afloat.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young is a public school teacher who lives in Cullowhee.)