An Act of Indecency

PREFACE:

Some may find this piece disturbing since it deals with a very powerful
social taboo. Prepubescent sexual encounter, for very sane reasons,
remains one subject we find so emotive that it is very difficult to see
'what actually happened' - as a drama involving several uniquely driven
people, including a child - and not just from the polarised position of
an abuser and an abused. This is an attempt to look at it from several
points of view.

It is important to stress that this is only one unique story and set of
circumstances - one fly-on-the-wall account of what happened to a group
of ordinary people with their own separate motives and predilections -
and that all stories are very different and affect those involved
differently. It is not intended to convey any licence or
justification.

Whatever the facts, child abuse, if it is 'abuse', remains what it is,
an encroachment, over a forbidden boundary the crossing of which always
impresses upon a child that usually leaves them with a dysfunctional
personality, all in the pursuit of a selfish pleasure driven by self
interested motive.

I wish to thank the family to whom this occurred who allowed me to
submit this piece. I hope it is helpful to those who may have walked a
similar road.

AN ACT OF INDECENCY

Once upon a time there were two young hippies who had travelled the
East in search of happiness, made music in fascinating places, smoked
some interesting wild-growing weed and finally returned to England to
settle down and have children. Without much effort they had four
between them, one at a time - two boys and two girls and they were
lovely children with numbered but unwritten blank pages to be filled
with life.

But, for reasons on which we can only speculate, the father, though he
was a good musician, was not a good father in that he found it
impossible to show his children affection and demonstrate his love for
them - if he had it in him to love them at all. But the mother was
devoted in her way and though her choices in life, including her
husband and the father of her children, were not the wisest she loved
and cared for the children as well as she might.

Children are remarkable in being able to survive the rigours of a
childhood found lacking - though not without bruising - but they also
bring with them their own dramatic possibility that in itself distorts
the prevailing portrait still drying on the family canvas. And where
one child will be touched lightly by a drama in a family, another will
be devastated and carry it through their entire life, during which span
it blights everything they touch. And children, being born without the
ability to tell the difference between the perfect life they might have
had and the imperfect life they have attracted, yearn blindly for what
is missing without knowing exactly what it is that drives them or that
their peculiar behaviour is due to their seeking something that they
sense instinctively as missing.

The two boys were somewhat wild and undisciplined and their story is
the subject of another tale, and the youngest girl was quite
self-contained and hers is yet another story still, but Saffron, the
first girl and third in line, the one sandwiched in the middle between
two boys and a younger self-assured sister, grew to long for affection
so that by the time she was three the pages of her book were almost
empty of parental affection still waiting to be written. Empty because
the mother was suckling a baby sister and the self-absorbed father was
incapable of demonstrating any affection towards his daughter at all.
As it is with many males he had children because they came along, not
because he wanted them but to satisfy his woman's yearning not his own,
and finally the mother grew tired of his lack of support and
ineffectual parenting and looked elsewhere for affection.

So it was that the young mother met Steven - a father with two young
sons attached - a man who also worked in the music industry and who had
his own complex story to tell. But he was kind and gentle and
emotionally malleable - very different from the man with whom she had
had four children. He was completely unsuspecting that what he carried
as poor sexual boundaries would mix like indelible ink with the
existing dramas of this now well thumbed family already thick with its
own subtle imbalances and that the combination of all their
complexities would eventually lead him to a prison sentence.

When Saffron met Steven she recognised him as an affectionate man, and
with that na?ve practicality of children, thought that he could replace
her emotionally distant father to become the idealised father that
would fill her emptiness. A man who demonstrated in his love for her
mother his capability to love her also and give her the affection she
sought. Hence at three and a half she started to long to be with this
replacement father to such a degree that she would ask her mother when
she could take her furniture to his house and adopt him as her 'daddy'.
In the end, exhausted by the conflict, the husband left and the new
father was introduced, emotionally adopting all four children as his
own, supporting the mother as best he could.

Things were not easy, since life was made complicated as each child
struggled to come to terms with the new rituals and, most
significantly, young Saffron was not happy to share Steven with her
mother, although, still locked inside a feeling world limited in
language, she could never have voiced it even to herself. Quietly this
tension lay dormant; a player in full costume, lolling in the wings
like a strung puppet ready to make its dramatic entrance. Meanwhile the
two slightly older adopted brothers - themselves bereft of motherly
affection - in those lonely moments when their guardians were busy
doing other things to each other, discovered their new sister's only
distinct biological difference and she theirs, and like millions of
children before them each played with each furtively under the
blankets; in the disguise of fathers and mothers and of doctors and
nurses - but never wicked stepfather because the stepfather was not yet
wicked.

Saffron now learned by habit, unmindful of the grief such actions can
bring in their wake, that this was a way to get affection because
suddenly those she now perceived as her brothers were interested in her
and would even seek her out with some peculiar and flattering insistent
urgency, which was all she had ever wanted. To earn this affection all
she had to do was touch them on their flaccid pre-pubescent penises and
especially allow them to touch her. Thus the weeks passed until this
imposture of happiness became part of her normal world as a means by
which she could satisfy an insistent longing. Then one day, just as it
started, the attention stopped, and the boys, losing interest where
hormone-driven-sexuality did not constantly replenish their desire,
went off to play football and climb trees, as boys will, leaving
Saffron bereft of attention once again and needing to seek other ways
to satisfy her emptiness, not realising that all the attention so far
had not filled her empty vessel with so much as a drop of
fulfilment.

In isolation children are seldom capable of manipulating anticipated
complex events to get what they want, despite the movies that imagine
the opposite. Their actions seldom consider events beyond what they
want and even when they are trying to fill some gap in their experience
they will not hatch 'a plot', as an adult might; a plot in which they
could imagine the outcome of a long and complex scenario that demanded
planning free of the combination of being intelligently and emotionally
driven. It cannot be that this young girl, now seven, thought that by
climbing into bed with Steven she would get affection - she just did it
as if by instinct, because that's what she wanted and that is how it
had worked for her before - by touching penises and why not? Had life
not taught her that this was normal?

There was no 'grooming' on Steven's part, no premeditation beyond
passing shadows of vague sensual observation that flashed by as quickly
as a winking eye, like soaring crows passing across the sun. Had Steven
not been abused in his own peculiar way when he was a child - had he
not, on one traumatic occasion, been locked in the garden desperate for
the toilet, too embarrassed to pee in public, whilst his mother lay
inside fornicating with the milkman; had it not been he who, in his
innocence, had inadvertently revealed the secret to his father on that
father's return home from work, as an explanation for his distress and
of his having wetted his short trousers, thus causing the family to
shatter and split apart like a glass being dropped on a stone floor -
then his boundaries would not have been set where they were.

His reaction to Saffron's fumbling, incurious touch, made only in her
attempt to gain his singular attention as she might tug on her mother's
sleeve, was not the one that instinctively rejects as one would flick
off a large spider found ascending a limb. He did not instinctively
recoil, but withdrew into passive non-resistance allowing her across
the threshold of a taboo boundary. A boundary she pushed against and
yet was hardly there where it should have been, save perhaps the
ghostly insubstantial boundary of guilt arising from the ambiguities of
a Christian social morality. The line drawn in his world existed in a
different place. And in a moment when each stood at a sharp and
decisive fork in the road, he carried her willingly down the path that
led to a dark grove and not along the one that reached up into the
sun.

So time passed and occasionally she touched Steven when the opportunity
arose but not so often, until driven by reason and caution, Steven
withdrew his intimate offering that she misread as affection and after
two years that too ceased, as it had with her brothers. The beast
however did not decay to dust but only slid away to slumber. Saffron
was now nine.

Four years passed, and in those years an awakening took place in the
child and her mother at forty-five had another baby boy, tipping her
hopelessly into post-natal depression. In Saffron where there was once
innocent longing there was added the urgent impulse of sexuality, and
thus she began to dream her complicated dreams: dangerous interwoven
fantasies now driven by intelligent, near adult, desire and, unmindful
of this awakening and what it might bring, Steven allowed the distance
of time to smother the events of the past foolishly and hopefully
thinking them forgotten. And so it might have remained had not Saffron,
with her now complicated sexuality, naturally awoken infatuation and an
unconsciously driven need to possess. To do this she proposed an act of
indecency that would drive off her mother with disgust leaving her to
feed alone on the remains of their love.

All this was not a clear plan but a waking dream in the thirteen year
old's unworldly mind. Thus one night whilst Steven sat late at his
computer tinkering with lost words and collapsing programmes she
slipped out of her bedroom and crept down into the room where he sat.
Finding him alone, and her mother asleep in the next room with a
one-year-old babe still at the breast, she sat upon his lap where
condescendingly his difference swelled to meet her expectation. Then
for some reason he left the room and in those fleeting moments whilst
he was absent she removed all her thin hippy clothes and lay down
prostrate so that when he returned she was naked and waiting; legs
apart and nubile. She was certain that she wanted him but had no
conception of what drove her. What possessed him to steal her
virginity, though freely given, if a child of thirteen can give such a
gift freely, defies reason; certainly his reckless incaution courted
disaster and carried him over a precipice into the waiting arms of
criminality.

That it happened only once suggests that, for her at least, it was not
fulfilling in its promise and that it would have been better left as a
dream. Though now in possession of a tantalisingly powerful story,
instead of fulfilling her longing for affection it left her feeling
sullied and confused. This was not how it should feel; not how she had
imagined it. None save those two can say what they really felt
afterwards. Whether racked with guilt, silently remorseful or
hopelessly disappointed, both must have known that they were now
inextricably and disastrously entangled, like two accomplices
implicated in a murder. And thus Saffron's dream of happiness shattered
and ebbed away in disappointment and there was no way back; no divide
they could withdraw across and put between themselves and their
shameful secret.

Two and a half years passed but youth is so unwary. Where silence would
be wisdom, words foolishly slip out. And in the diminished in stature,
in whom bravado works to elevate and empower, nothing compares in
magnitude to a dangerous liaison. So she played her card,
conspiratorially seeking approval and wonder from her peers as her ego,
trying to repair itself and be free of its agony, stole its way to
stardom, but to her consternation received only horrified silence and
displays of disgust. For those she trusted had boundaries drawn in
places that protected their chastity, unlike her. Thus when they heard
her story - offered in fragments like leaves falling to the earth after
the first frost of autumn - they knew it was not right and that she had
been violated. So these leaves they gathered up and, carrying them to a
caring adult from a world that professes normality, made her an
offering of yellowing judgements.

If the psychology of an abused child is like gossamer, then the law is
a jackboot that would trample it. The law is clumsy and, however well
meaning, often brutal in its dismissal of mitigating circumstances,
devouring all like some many-headed beast in its seeking of justice and
righting of wrongs. But it was not justice that this child received.
The social workers - with their books and categorised definitions and
academic opinions about child abuse - had their own secret agendas
written in a heartless creed with only one story to tell. They could
not hear the truth because it was too subtle, too complex, too
interwoven, too unimaginable and because it did not appear in their
books, they had no means by which to judge it - and judge it they
must.

They took her aside and they whispered that she should trust them but
they, blinded by the singular objective of justice, betrayed her at
every turn and she, being only a child and unworldly, was abused a
second time. When she offered to them - shamefully, tentatively,
tearfully - that she had actually wanted to do what she had done they
were incredulous and did not believe her. Instead they convinced her
that she was deluded and encouraged her to shift the emphasis of her
confession and declare that she had been raped, because that is what
the law said it had to be, ensuring that at the last she should also
sacrifice her integrity. And once they had successfully rewritten her
story to conform to their view of the law whilst leaving her memory
intact, they promised her revenge and she believed them as by carrot
and stick they led her to his just trial and prosecution. He would get
life they said, and she, the victim, would get pieces of silver. They
divided the family and anything that was not broken by the unfolding
drama they snapped in two with their cold steel toe-capped boots, for
it was for themselves they exacted revenge, case upon case, and for
other crimes Steven never ever committed - assuaging their own pain not
Saffron's.

And as if life were honing its penchant for cruelty, fate had not
finished with this poor child yet. Some twelve months later fate was to
get her pregnant. Her already broken mother knew by instinct that her
daughter was 'with child', as any mother who has borne children knows -
as if by smell or sixth sense. So circumspectly the mother asked of the
boy whom she confessed to liking and whom her daughter had been seeing,
because she, the mother, secretly hoped that if she was pregnant it was
perhaps with his child and that he would then care for her daughter.
But instead her daughter screamed, as if fleeing from some dreadful
impulse she had involuntarily succumbed to once before, that revealed
the ghost of her past actions, hinting at her quietest secret and most
dangerous collusion, and about which her mother was still in mourning,
"But you wouldn't like him if you knew what he had done to me!"

And the mother guessed she was right about the seed in her daughter's
womb, and put to the child directly that she was pregnant, and the
child erupted with anger and indignation that her mother should guess
at her predicament and tears flowed down her adolescent, acne-spoiled
face like blood from an open wound.

But the bitterest pill of all was not what the social workers did to
her - how they lied and tricked and manipulated - or the pregnancy and
the termination that followed or that she was prematurely sacrificed to
lust or that her real father suddenly offered his indignant attention
or even that Steven only received a one year prison sentence of which
he served six months. It was that her mother did not reject Steven and
cast him aside especially now that Saffron, having replaced him with
others, no longer needed him. This confusing betrayal and complicated
twist of the maternal knife she could not comprehend and neither could
her conspiratorial social workers. For the harvest of Saffron's life
never whispered to her that her loving and caring passive mother - her
anger tempered by unnatural and disempowering, conditioned goodness -
might in some dark recess, where she was racked by feelings she would
rather not even sense, wonder why this daughter Eve had herself whetted
the blade and stolen her mother's pleasures, leaving her life in
twisted ruins.

And like all abused children Saffron, unmindful of the pain she so
innocently initiated, would carry the wound locked up in her child-self
through her entire life, during which span it may blight everything she
touches unless she determines to embrace her past and revisit the grave
of her childhood-longing to grieve. But such grief is not so easy to
embrace and such a past not so easy to comprehend.

Copyright - MDJH, UK. February. 2002. Version 9.