Taking a Proactive, Aggressive Approach to Ending Pedophilia
I cannot picture, for anything in my fucking life, ever letting a child walk into a school.
Not just because of the school shootings. Though that is a reason. But my worry is fucking pedophiles who are running rampant in the youth programs and literally nothing is done until it’s already too late and there have been dozens or more victims of a single fucking perp.
The vast majority of pedophile cases in the youth system are not known, exposed or addressed.
Far less attention than to school shooting is paid to the also extremely deadly issue of child sexual abuse in the school and youth programs in this country. Victims of child sexual abuse die to suicide, like in this recent case of an online pedophile ring that was extorting young people online. Dozens of deaths of kids from just that one.
Victims of child sexual abuse die of addiction, overdoses, suicide, reckless behavior, and further abuse from other predators who sense weakness. (Which they can do. They are animals).
One research study found the following:
“Sexual abuse is associated with PTSD and higher risk of co-morbid psychiatric illnesses, including MDD, SUD, and suicidal behavior. In-depth research on the relationship between child and adolescent sexual abuse and chronic suicidality is warranted.”
“Children who experience physical, sexual, and emotional abuse or neglect are at least two to three times more likely to attempt suicide in later life, according to the largest research review carried out of the topic… suicide attempts were… three times more likely for people who experienced sexual abuse as a child.”
Studies on the relationships of child sexual abuse to even severe mental illness like bipolar one have been documented. As a bipolar person who was also a pedophile vicim, I strongly believe that the stress and PTSD of an attack during high school, provided a significant foundation for the expression of a genetic predisposition to psychotic disorders in my case. Early age stress, sexual abuse at any point, and PTSD of any kind, can contribute to the development and severity of mental illness and the possibilities of bad outcomes. Children and teens who have experienced child sexual abuse are more likely to have young-age suicide — sometimes directly in the wake of these attacks as recent cases have shown.
And 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 10 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse.
And we know, pretty much beyond a shadow of a doubt, statistically, that every single fucking youth system — a school, a sports program, a child/youth organization like the Boy Scouts, most likely has active pedophiles in it. These schools and related activities consistently attract sexual predators exactly because they provide a position of power and access to children.
Yet this is in no way is acknowledged or reflected in any efforts that involve the safety of children at school.
Why do we accept the constant state of putting our children in danger by sending them into institutions that we know, that we KNOW, are full of child sexual abuse, that have NOT been put through any comprehensive movement to remove the pedophiles from them, and knowing what we know, that pedophiles CONTINUALLY operate within the school environment where they rack up a large, large number of victims, ruining lives again and again over years, without intervention by schools and parents? Rings that have not been investigated in a systemic and proactive manner even as evidence after evidence after evidence shows that this is happening and that waiting until the dam breaks — usually because a critical mass of victims have spoken out against all odds — means its too late?
This defensive posture towards pedophilia is 1000% the wrong approach and the approach needs to switch to a proactive, aggressive stance towards the criminal, often organized, presence of pedophilia in the schools. This requires a recognition that pedophile attacks are not rare, outlier events but rather conscious operating systems. And that we can act on them and act of them NOW.
We have a culture of violence and abuse towards children and recklessly leaving them in areas that are specifically known to attract sexual predators. This is very serious neglect. Providing a safe environment is one of the most important things in child care and child development. Yet we accept unsafe environments, like schools, as the norms, and totally fail to take proactive stances towards these predators that roam the halls, sit in the detention room, teach sports, serve as school counselors and “beloved” teachers.
How.
H
O
W.
After the Boy Scouts? After Nassar? After Sandusky? After Epstein? After the Catholic Church schools and youth programs? OKAY.
We know that pedophiles specifically flock to schools because that is how they get access to children. Many pedophiles go into school systems that allow them to pray on endangered and at-risk children. Pedophiles also take up positions in sports departments that give them open access to unsupervised access to youth for long periods of time. They gravitate towards after-school programs and extra curricular activities where they are often alone with children and hold great influence over them. We have seen some very alarming and highly visible cases of predation in these contexts: the Sandusky attacks in the football program, to the predation on the Girl’s Olympic team by Larry Nassar, the revelations of systemic child sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts. Millennials will remember the case of Mary Kate Laternau. Recently, police were found engaging in systemic sexual abuse of young Black boys.
There are so many cases we don’t know, and those events happen in a constant drumbeat of child sexual abuse that is one of the longest lasting takeaways from schools for many children and teens.
We KNOW that pedophiles are bee-lining for these environments. And yet, revelation after revelation, nothing changes. Bust after bust, raid after raid, lawsuit after lawsuit, nothing changes. We drop children off at school, practices, etc. where particularly men are left with no supervision whatsoever? Why are we so willing to compromise our kids? Why are we willing to accept these as statistical anomalies, even though the statistics indicate this has a serious blast radius and affects a staggering amount of your youth? We are we so willing to sacrifice them and just accept that hey, 25% of young girls will have been sexually assaulted by age 18, many of them by older men? And by peers in the school system who are protected by administration including sexual abusers in the administration? How is *25* percent something that is accepted as the reasonable risk?
No. Fuck no.
This is a very deep, very sinister type of neglect. This is like sending a kid into a war zone just as much as school shootings. Statistically, pedophile attacks will produce more deaths in suicide, addiction, drug overdoses, self-medicating, chronic disease, and reckless behaviors than school shooters do. This is not to subordinate the import of addressing school shootings, but rather to demand attention of the fact that pedophile attacks ARE deadly, the risk of death on many dimensions for pedophile victims, makes this a life or death matter. Yet it is not TREATED as a life or death matter, because if we would acknowledge this, we would have to acknowledge the scope of our negligence and all that it may engulf. And the responsibility of taking on a response that is actually proportional to the problem.
Pedophiles kill children because children and teens of pedophile attacks as well as survivors in adulthood often kill themselves and may die of drug overdoses and through other secondary effects of the attacks. These are the most serious, most damaging, most deadly events that happen inside of schools. Even where drunk driving, drug use are positioned as vital issues for schools to address, despite also being very serious and potentially deadly circumstances, pedophilia does not make the list of priorities. Perhaps because, for once, it would be focusing in on adults as a major source of the problems here — after all, they are the ones who have power in these and all situations with a child — instead of blaming the child and the child’s coping behavior, like drug use, reckless driving, etc.
Through the schooling and youth sporting mechanism, pedophiles are able to abuse huge numbers of children and teens as class after class after class delivers new children into their ward. Oftentimes with zero supervision whatsoever. Despite the fact that there have been no proactive, aggressive measures to address this, men — above and way the largest offenders, though there are female offenders in the schools — it is considered totally normal standard operating procedure for children to be left totally un-supervised with men. Many would cite the expanding class sizes but that is no excuse to leave children at risk. We must find a way.
Every single pedophile that is in the system can equal dozens and hundreds of victims. Pedophiles are REPEAT OFFENDERS and mass predators, which most people don’t seem to realize. So for every one of those pedophiles that we continue to allow to operate in the schools, we might be looking at dozens of victims and that is just the reality of it. According to Darkness to Light [PDF], ”70% of child sex offenders have between one and 9 victims, while 20% have 10 to 40 victims”. We’ll revisit these stats later in the piece for some more application.
The pedophile perches at the corner of the school and pounces out at a constant stream of new victims, just like what we have seen with the Catholic Church and its programs and schools. The willingness of the adult population to lose some staggering amount of children to sexual abuse, brings into serious doubt the fundamental mechanisms by which we are interacting with and educating our children, and the fundamentals of parenting.
I hope it is not so cynical that people hope that it won’t be *their* child in particular and thus do not bother. Or because adults, even parents, are at large facilitators or at least silent witnesses. It is alarming in these cases how often we find out that multiple ADULTS knew what was happen. Yes, including parents. Or the parents themselves are the offender.
I can think of nothing else than that this comes from a place of cowardice, of lack of empathy, of lack to care for your child and children more generally, from parents who have young students in schools. If there had ever been a mass rising of adults against schools for pedophilia, the schools we were looking at today would look very different from those we know today. But there hasn’t been. At all. We have seen far more mobilizing by adults around school shooting than we ever have about pedophilia.
One thing that pedophilia and school shooting have had in common is that the focus always turns to the child, their responsibility, their culpability, and more than that, efforts have focused on changing the behavior and systems of discipline that children face, further supporting the idea that this is the child’s fault and that the change should happen at the level of the child. The emphasis has been on policing what children do and on surveilling what children do and limiting their access to things like online tools, when the reality is that many of these problems and indeed the worst of them are actually coming from adults. In fact, pedophilia does not emerge in a vacuum, but rather in a culture and educational and parenting system where child are considered fair game for abuse and are the primary victims of abuse. Pedophilia occurs on a large spectrum of child abuse and it is enabled and affected by all the rest of these systems.
This is not something that should be placed on the child to understand or stop. Consider the fact again that pedophiles often target vulnerable children — children who are already experiencing child neglect and abuse, children who are already being bullied, children who have PREVIOUSLY been sexually abused, children who face abusive and authoritarian households which are only reinforced in the school environment which is focused on criminalizing children as a major function. Child abuse of all kinds in fact opens the doorway to the worst of them all: pedophilia attack. (And though it isn’t the focus of this particular article, many instances of child sexual abuse are committed by people around, in or close to the family, including and especially fathers and even brothers, etc.)
Various forms of child abuse are rampant in the schools just by default. Teachers are known to demean and humiliate children and to take sadistic joy in bullying them or exercising their power. When I was growing up adults would scream at us, use corporal punishment, neglect us, verbally and physically abuse us, drag us around, make fun of us, demean us, insult us, “slut shame” (yes, slut shaming children for wearing spaghetti strap tank tops was a school scandal and that you could get written up for, banned when I was growing up in the fucking late 1990s. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the fuck the spaghetti straps that caused a 45 year old pedophile to attack me. Fuck that. )
In the case of pedophilia in the school, this is often enabled and preceded by abuse in other areas of life; this neglect and this attitude and hatred of children, we see stretched to the furthest degree and its ultimate expression in child sexual abuse. As many of us should well remember from growing up, adults in these environments are openly sadistic, and it is obvious to a child when someone is enjoying torturing them and when someone is maltreating them. When I was growing up we all knew that the teachers were power-tripping, cruel, abusive, frightening and inappropriately punitive.
And there were whispers of which teachers not to be alone with.
And which ones liked to watched while we showered after gym class.
Children are FORCED to take a position of obedience and helplessness in front of adults, with a high rate of pedophilia in this area. This sets them up to be victimized. This is all enabled by a baseline situation where adults have a ton of power over children and children have no control over their lives, either at home or in the school. Children do not have self-determination. How do you expect that child sexual abuse awareness efforts like “say ‘no’” to actually work, when there is literally no instance in the child’s life where they are ABLE to say no? That that would even be something they have any experience in doing? “Stranger danger” classes given in the 90s to children emphasized saying no; as if pedophiles give a shit about consent and as if the child has literally any autonomy in their life to say no to parents, teachers, coaches, life guards, doctors, literally any adult is in control of children and often abuses the child in some form. Or is just a complete asshole totally eroding the self esteem and autonomy of the child.
Fundamentally, this involves restructuring the entire societal relationship between children and adults, so that consent is something that even means anything; the default of the experience now is coercion. Since that is a broader topic and even a more difficult one, I wanted to address at least a few considerations for how to address this problem in the schools in a more immediate way.
Specifically, I suggest we move from a defensive, passive approach — in which something is only done, or more likely, not done, when victims surface; and into an aggressive, proactive approach that is focused on
- Locating and removing pedophiles and pedophile rings from schools
- Deploying resources (child therapists, sexual abuse experts, etc.) in communities to attempt reach out to possible victims
- Setting up emergency hotlines/tip lines and reporting systems
- Going into school systems to dig up victim reports and evidence that often are purposefully buried to protect pedophiles in records
- Conducting interviews with staff at schools with the specific purpose of ferreting out possible pedophile activity
- Doing a comprehensive and extensive database, web, private investigator, etc. searches to detect the many child sexual predators who are still able to enter and operate in the youth system despite have previous lawsuits, convictions, and even being registered on the sex offender list. This should include running the entire fucking registry against everyone involved in the youth system
- Setting up victims services, restitution and health care
- Arranging large scale legal services and children advocates for victims and families
- Retaining class actions lawyers
Specifically, I suggest that pedophiles are highly organized serial criminals, who often work together within and across systems, who are operating totally freely and openly in the school system, and that they should be proactively sought out and removed just like in any other case where we would attempt to extract a criminal element from any kind of system. These are fucking knowing, sadistic predators who know exactly what they are doing; study after study shows they are not rehabilitatable, only the fear of a grisly violent death (literally) motivates them to stop, and they lack empathy for their victims, and are driven almost entirely by their sadism and desire to rape and kill children, either in the case of pedophiles who kill children with their own hands or pedophiles which cause death to children as a result of the catastrophic trauma that pedophilia inflicts.
Taking a defensive posture doesn’t work and it is high time that we begin to take a proactive approach to pedophilia; this includes online platforms like Twitter that have consistently welcomed the MAP pedophile community and indeed, a MAP recently abducted and repeatedly sexually assaulted a child after grooming them across multiple platforms; and specifically was openly being groomed on Twitter while no one intervened. This recent event highlights the importance of taking an aggressive proactive approach; if the pedophile ring had been dismantled instead of protected under “free speech” , this would not have happened. Allowing pedophiles to organize and operate unabated inevitably results in child rape and that is the exact same thing we see in schools.
The only thing that makes sense to me is to go after this how you would try to go after any criminals, serial and organized, that were infecting any system. Specifically, I recommend a fucking emergency nation wide investigation into the school system and associated youth programs with the express purpose of finding and uprooting pedophiles and finding and reaching out to potential victims and victims. I suggest that this be conducted as a national effort and would even recommend closing the schools and youth programs while this is done. This reflects a recognition of the systemic nature of the issue and allows us to bring a preponderance of coordinated resources onto the problem under an aggressive timeframe. I think within a few weeks of proactive effort, we could rip out huge amounts of the pedophilia and pedophilia rings that are functioning in the youth system, significantly weaken their grasp on the youth system and their ability to organize together, and locate the many, many victims that are out there who are living in silence, fear and shame and require serious medical support for ongoing issues associate with rape and sexual assault and grooming.
I recommend doing community interviews, interviews with the school, mandatory access to teacher/youth leader files held in institutions, working with local professionals in medicine and child care, advertising for potential victims to come forth, setting up national and local tip lines, setting up a technical team that can compare registries with youth professionals, and hiring private investigators that can help dig up information on concerning parties. We need to locate and find those rings and pedophiles, remove the pedophile from the school room and into the justice system, and find and treat and compensate victims. Through this process, done correctly, the full extent of the pedophile networks in the school would come to light.
Then we crush them totally.
ANY teacher, sports coach, PA, school nurse, after school program facilitator, etc., who actually cares about children, and understands the severity of child sexual abuse and its implications, should not only be willing but EAGER to participate in this process. It’s very important to know that no one has a RIGHT to work with children, that is not a right that anyone has, and therefore, this is in no way a violation of teacher’s rights, for them to be removed from the system if there is a credible cause for concern about child sexual abuse.
If you are willing to put the uncontested rights of adult men to work with children over the reality of systematic child abuse in the schools, I simply have no words for you except fuck you. Stay away from children.
These proactive efforts should be informed by what we know about pedophiles from the stories that HAVE come to light, the high-profile cases, and the results of sociological and medical studies. We know that other adults often KNOW that there is a pedophile operating in the environment; this has formed the substance of inquiry into the Sandusky case, Epstein case, Jackson case, R. Kelly case, and other high-profile instances, where we see an ongoing pattern of other adults looking the other way, failing to report, failing to respond to reports from victims or to act on the obvious signs of sexual predation, which often manifest immediately as this is such a catastrophic injury (though many children will hide what happened).
We also know that pedophiles often work together, either within the same environment or across them. They are able to recognize each other and will often co-offend, share information, develop and share child sexual abuse material, share information on potentially vulnerable victims, cover for each other or facilitate the abuse in other ways. That means that capturing one pedophile can lead to the capture of others. This is another reason for a full-out, temporal response: gotta catch ‘em all.
The facts of how pedophiles operate, how pedophiles operate with other pedophiles, and the fact that so many people often know about these offenses, means that it is wholly possible to go after pedophile rings in schools and to do that in a deliberant way and in a systems way that responds to the multiple and material operations of pedophiles in these environments.
The idea of doing it all at once makes tons of sense because this allows us to consolidate and scale resources, set up shared investigation and reporting infrastructure, and follow leads from victims and adult witnesses, to actually pull this out as a system. It gives pedophiles less time to respond and adapt on either an interpersonal level or functioning as parts of rings.
This is what you would do if you found out that say, there was a network of people in schools who were stealing lots of school funds; you would try to rip out that entire network. Pedophilia is not about sexual attraction. It is about hurting and raping children. Pedophiles are highly organized criminals and they have been operating in an extremely permissive and open environment. Thus, it makes sense to go after them AS organized criminals and AS organized criminals who are further working together. A strike-based model, gives us a better chance of attacking this as a system; as this should be a systems attack on systemic predators.
To really drive the urgency of this all home, I think we should talk about what could we be looking at as far as numbers here.
In the general population, they peg 1-4% of the male population as pedophiles. There are about 4 million *teachers* in the USA at the PreK-12 level; this does not include non-teaching positions. There are 7.5 million youth sports coaches. Daycares employ 1.5 million people. So just for our purposes now, let’s say that is 13 million people in this system. Since most offenders are men, we’ll cut that in half, so we’re looking at 6.5 million. (This is like on the low side since the majority of youth sports coaches are men, but let’s just get some numbers on the board here.)
So we are looking at 65,000 at the low end (1% pedophiles) and 260,000 (4% pedophiles) on the higher end, just based on general statistics.
And I would suggest the number is likely higher than that BECAUSE of the fact that pedophiles go directly to areas where they will have access to children; the CONCENTRATION of pedophiles in the environment is higher than what we would likely see in a general population. And, this also doesn’t include the many other people who work in youth environments, like youth doctors and religious figures, but this is an important illustration, if conservative, to start with.
Now, we must revisit the fact that pedophiles are repeat offenders. According to Darkness to Light [PDF], ”70% of child sex offenders have between one and 9 victims, while 20% have 10 to 40 victims”. And yes, some of them have more than that and over a long offending career — say, a 30 year career as perhaps a teacher AND a youth services provider (they are often both), you can see how the numbers really add up.
So let’s take the medians of these ranges and carry out the calculation for the scenario.
In the best case scenario here, we’re assuming 65,000 pedophiles in our sample population. Assuming 70% of these offenders have 5 victims and 20% of them have 25 victims, you are looking at 550,000 victims.
In the “worse” scenario we’re looking at, we’re assuming 260,000 pedophiles. Assuming 70% of those pedophiles have 5 victims and 20% have 25 victims, you are looking at more than 2,200,000 (2.2 million) victims.
And these are conservative numbers. They don’t necessarily include familial sexual abuse. They don’t include the many other non-teachers in the school and youth system such as administrators, guidance counselors, security guards, church figures, etc. It also doesn’t include the juvenile facilities and abusive programs for “wayward youth”, where Paris Hilton was sent as a youth and has bravely spoken up about the sexual abuse that she endured there.
If this STILL sounds unreasonable, consider that when the systemic sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts was revealed, 92,000 sexual abuse claims were filed against the organization, meaning within this generation. There were likely far more cases than were reported. What we see is usually only a fraction of the size of the abuse that actually occurs.
Under these considerations and considering again that the size of the entire youth apparatus, which INCLUDES these abuses by the Boy Scouts, in far larger context, it doesn’t seem preposterous at all that we are looking at hundreds of thousands and millions of victims that were harmed in these systems, that the perpetrators are alive today and deserve punishment and even more importantly to be removed entirely from the ability to hurt children. And there is an urgent need to intervene; as many pedophiles will continue to offend across their whole lives; many of these victim’s abusers are still in the youth system and need to be removed.
Still don’t believe it? Consider that a recent investigation into widespread pedophilia in the French Catholic Church found 330,000 minors were victims of sexual abuse between 1950 to 2020. That is over a very long period, but France is a much smaller country than the US and the US school system vastly eclipses that of the French Church over time. Like priests, many teachers will offend over a 40 + year career. Over a lifetime, these extreme numbers of victims are generated by abusers who, like teachers, are in positions of authority of children and are, by default, considered safe.
And the American Catholic Church was sexually abusing kids throughout that entire timeframe as well.
Taking a defensive stance towards this problem makes no fucking sense. Because of the shame and stigma of victims of child sexual abuse, because of how the legal system is (is not) set up, because of how youth programs are negligent and often complicit, because children are often not believed even by the people they trust the most, and because the dysfunction caused by the abuse persists into adulthood when it is very difficult to confront this, pedophiles who have hundreds of victims are able to continue offending and the vast majority of pedophilia cases are never reported or compensated or prosecuted or confronted in any material way.
KNOWING that, we have to realize that sitting on our asses and just allowing this to happen and only dealing with it in the rare instance that it comes up, usually decades later, after hundreds of thousands + victims, is literally doomed to fail and has failed continuously. This is a crime that easily and often stays buried; hoping that this is just naturally brought to life is dangerously naive and in my mind willfully fucking stupid. Obviously this does not work as a strategy.
In general I strongly recommend and advocate moving from a position and stance of defense and passivity and working towards a proactive approach that is based on a deeply informed knowledge of how this predation works, how to find it, how to confront it.
All of these victims are entitled to a hearing, are entitled to restitution, are entitled to mental and other health care. This is also about bringing needed services to what is a massive health crisis in the youth system caused by pedophiles and the systemic enablement of them.
For those who are worried about a witch hunt, I gotta tell you, usually its pretty fucking black and white if something happened or it didn’t, there are lots of experts, and people do not tend to lie about being abused. Further, the decision to pursue any other means besides removal from the school should be decided on a case by case basis. The minimum viable response here is to have someone with any kind of question about them, to be removed from the environment.
If there is even a QUESTION that there has been pedophilic activity, that person obviously needs to be removed. And as we will revisit in a bit, no one has a natural right to be a teacher, to be a coach, to be in any position where there are children; that is not a right and therefore being barred from that activity for questionable activity or suspicion of any sort, is not a denial of rights; this is how people act about the issue however, which simply speaks more to the fundamental entitlement to children that is also at the base of this.
It is actually not that hard to determine who is a child rapist and who isn’t. It’s the person who raped the child.
Taking a more aggressive role means you are setting out with the goal of ripping out all of those pedophiles — and that means going into the schools, conducting interviews, setting up hotlines and tiplines, doing community education, working with local medical care providers, working with private investigators. That means removing predators from the school or sports environment, replacing them with other professionals. This means investigations, hearings, town halls and school board meetings.
Period.
This would be a major effort but I believe it is the only route that makes sense: a nation-wide and simultaneous raid on pedophiles in the school and youth system, that attacks them as they are: coordinated mass predators that are totally burrowed into a community where they are actively praying on children, and that in most cases, there were multiple adults that knew about it.
It’s my belief based on statistics and researching over a hundred pedophile cases, that the extent of the pedophile activity, the number of predators and enablers in the environment, and the number of victims; it is my belief that truly addressing this and truly digging up not only the pedophile but the systems of enablement (which often harbor multiple predators) around it, would mean a very serious hit to the school and youth infrastructure. That is to say, this represents such a significant part of the infrastructure that I would guess that the school system would be fundamentally changed; but also that it MUST be fundamentally changed.
And no, it is not a “radical” suggestion that we shut down, change, demolish and rebuild, systems that have created mass sexual abuse of children. In fact, that is indicated. That is obvious. That is fucking natural law.
As far as preventing this on an ongoing basis, as pedophiles will be relentless in trying to gain access to children, there needs to be much stricter gatekeeping SPECIFICALLY with a mind to screening out pedophiles. Efforts are not being made to monitor for pedophiles and pedophile attacks; where systems are aware they are incompetent or neglect or complicit or silent or ineffectual, meaning that the crimes committed are not answered for nor is the predator stopped. Yet the surveillance focus goes to children who are then living under a surveillance mechanism that targets them rather than protects them; surveillance cams on school-issued laptops have been used by pedophiles to spy on female students changing in the privacy of their own homes.
To me it is striking to compare the response to widespread and systemic pedophilia in schools to that of school shooting. Even though they both affect a large number of children, and both result in child mortality, they are treated totally differently. Though the response to school shooting has turned out to be woefully ineffective as school shootings have become the norm, there isn’t even a comparative whisper about the deadly pedophilia that is playing out in schools every day.
It is almost certain that there are more mortalities associated with child sexual abuse considering the scales we are looking at, both at age of offense and throughout the life of the victim, and just purely the numbers involved. Certainly, many deaths of youth related to child sexual abuse are never recorded as such; the link is not made or even known by the parties carrying out the affairs of the deceased.
It does not demean or dishonor the death of some children to acknowledge that there are other children that are also dying and being killed in these schools, as a result of what happens to them, and that they need to be included in this picture of harm and mortality specifically. One study shows that victims of child sexual abuse have “a 3.5-fold increased odds for suicide attempts”. This is consistent across the literature from many studies and countries.
This is not to compare or to diminish the importance of school shooting, which I care very much about, but more to say that this is a problem that should be taken just as seriously by parents, by administrators, by all parties with influence over this system. There are a lot of kids who do and will die from this. Many victims of child sexual abuse will kill themselves later in life. The pain and the torture of being a victim never stops.
I do have some other ideas about strategies that have to do with proactive ways for keeping the youth system safe once it has been cleansed of pedophiles. Things that should be implemented afterwards to keep schools safe.
First, the hiring/selection process needs to utterly change. There has been incredible resistance to gate-keeping the carte blanche access to children in the school system; in fact, people who work with children are often treated as above suspicion, that the desire to be around children and “take care of them” is inherently virtuous and to be commended.
Much of new efforts should focus on screening out male pedophiles; men are above and away the biggest and most prolific predators. Yet the fundamental, undemonstrated integrity of the man who wants to work with children, and his “right” to access children, take priority over the totally reasonable concern that a man who wants, in most cases, unsupervised access to children — might be a pedophile.
The idea of “pedophile screening” is deemed ridiculous but teachers already submit to background checks, they are searched on Google, sometimes drug tested, so it is not as if there isn’t already SOME bar that teachers need to meet. Yet, none that pertain specifically to the pedophile? How do we screen out pedophiles? Well, I have no problem prescribing a fairly 360 degree assessment. I think psychological diagnostic tools should be on the table. I think sessions with a trained expert in sexual violence should be on the table. I think psychiatric frameworks and advisement should be done. In fact, I have no fucking problem with a lie detector test either. If you want to be around kids and you actually care about them and you are not a pedophile, you should have no issues with this whatsoever and in fact should WELCOME *any* effort designed to keep children safe.
It is too late to identify a predator after he has already struck.
No one is saying that teachers need to submit to these procedures in order to gain access to food or voting or housing or fucking water. But rather, to be permitted to an incredibly sensitive field of study, where there must be a high degree of care for who is allowed into it… they should be tested especially for the number one danger that is posed in this system. We do see versions of this in medicine, therapy, in government jobs, in the military, in fucking dog training, even startups do psychological assessments all the time. Any person who is serious about working with children, needs to understand the risk of pedophile attacks, understand their gravity; and be willing to participate in the process of child safety by undergoing evaluation that considers the REALITY that PREDATORS will be trying to gain access to children via the hiring process.
Otherwise… there’s your answer right there.
Defense. Doesn’t. Work.
We need OFFENSE to find these fucking people and remove them. Period.