Currently, no matter where one is in the world, photos of beautiful women float across the screen when reading the news.
Please see these press releases naming the late Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump and Sean Combs as essential alerts regarding where we are as a culture. Then consider the feminine components as part of a family; a child who is loved — or not.
Too often we dissociate a beauty from her humanity when she’s surrounded by beasts. Even though we agree that “slut shaming” — as our kids may refer to the way a girl is treated in seventh grade because she developed early — is wrong, still, somewhere in the recesses of our proper minds we think, “She shouldn’t have gone to that party if she didn’t want to meet a guy like Epstein.”
We keep blaming the girl.
Before the laws regarding harassment, I recall a certain recommended dermatologist. This doctor was famous as the best, had his own clinic at Stanford, and enjoyed taking advantage of his status. Appointments were an ordeal and often proved to be hazardous.
Finally, he was arrested at the direction of a client. It made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The men in our tennis group were shocked and refused to believe it was true even though I assured them it was.
Graduate school was worse. These professors have power over your career. And they use it when a person shows disdain for their advances.
One professor in a required class with about a dozen students in attendance, played with my hair — among other intrusions — twirling it around his finger or even thrusting his hands into my rather afro-like curls.
When I left his class and headed home, I’d scream for a good five minutes. Sitting through those two hours feeling powerless and mute left me slightly mad.
He was a popular professor; predators are often most charming. When I asked a classmate if she’d noticed anything, she said, “What?”
This happened to me when I was well into maturity and even then, it was traumatizing. Try to imagine what a child experiences in a situation of uninvited touch with someone older and more powerful.
For the sake of my own sanity I’ve tried to deconstruct the puzzle of feeling paralyzed: it was the opposite of centrifugal force, throwing one’s energy out with urge to move quickly away, rather, it was a centripetal force throwing one’s energy inward. Anchoring me to the spot.
Author Morgan Steiner says there’s a parallel with being in the mafia. “You really feel like everywhere you turn is this real danger,” she says. And all the rest of the people stand by, follow orders and allow that danger to become reality. (New York Times International edition editorial, July 5-6)
Those children Epstein’s girlfriend invited to his house may have thought that if they comply this once, then they’ll get a chance at a singing, acting or modeling career. But that’s not how it turned out.
David Boies, lawyer for many of the defendants in the Epstein trial, recently told Katie Couric in an interview that from 2008 to the present, every administration had the opportunity — I would say the obligation — to investigate this vast sex trafficking operation that affected thousands of children. They didn’t do it. Why?
He added, “This was a bipartisan failure to protect the most vulnerable people in our society and to hold to account the people who abused them.”
Here in my neighborhood in Paris, Le Bastille, I see beautiful little ones rushing along with their parents. Yesterday, two by two, holding hands, 3- and 4-year-olds returning to day care from the park: laughing, bumping along, bracketed by their caregivers.
Wherever I observe them I trust there’s someone who cares enough to notice how the world around them is being conditioned for their presence.
Is anyone giving them structure that teaches values, demonstrates what caring-for really means by showing them tenderness plus a firm guiding hand meaning don’t-go-there? When one learns these lessons early they are applied by recognizing their presence and their absence.
Our children also need to comprehend what’s fake and what’s real. Discernment and conversations in the home or at school that include the meaning of the day’s headlines make a difference for lifelong understanding. Growing into eyes that see the world unshaded demands the full attention of at least one caring adult.
There was a kind mentor in graduate school, too, a man I could absolutely trust. He congratulated the kind of thinking that parsed out fact from fiction, chose another option, and was bold enough to stand apart from the crowd. It was he who said, “You must write.”
All of us have the opportunity and the accountability to stand by our young.
It is essential to elect officials who possess a moral compass and use it. Then let them know we expect them to be public protectors for our children.
Whether in our homes, churches, sports teams or neighborhood we must prove who the predators are and make sure they are not the ones being protected.
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