It’s just one more

Her status was not just determined by the inability of her ethnicity and wealth to coincide though. She was taller than most of us — a tragedy in itself — and was the only girl in a family of boys, her mother having died when she was younger. Her father we didn’t know much about, except that he wasn’t the type to notice when school skirts needed replacing and hair needed brushing. She carried her motherlessness like a banner on her shoulder that anyone could see. She didn’t fit in with the rest of us whose hair was always slicked back and secured firmly with baubles and red ribbons. And the boys didn’t want her. So she skulked around the school yard during recess, during lunch, trying to fold her tall frame into a less conspicuous size.

She also didn’t fit in because she was being sexually molested. We all knew it, to varying degrees, even those of us who didn’t know the words or what they described. We just vaguely knew it had to do with the touching of "piggies" and "poonkies" and firmly belonged in the realm of the adult world. We knew there was something wrong with the relationship she had with her father. She had a precocious knowledge of what men and women did at night, a knowledge that, far from impressing us, disturbed us immensely and made us shun her more.

She would sit in class for hours on end rubbing herself back and forth against the edge of the bench until the teacher grew disturbed and shouted at her to stop. We were all disturbed by this monomania and by the stories another classmate who lived next to her told, stories she’d overheard from adults who spoke of the "poor child" and the "nastiness of white people." We looked at this victim of "damn slackness" who was being "interfered with" and even though we didn’t know what it was, we knew instinctively that it was terrible.

In secondary school too there were girls who were being "interfered with." Problem girls who drank and cursed and quiet girls who spoke only when spoken to and ate lunch silently at their desks, all of them sufferers of the same fate. Once again we picked up the attitudes of the adults around us and only rewarded with friendship those who managed to conceal. In the world of the convent that prepares you for entry into a perfect life one has to learn to pretend that one’s life is, already, perfect.

As an adult I’ve met guys, dated guys, am friends with guys who’d had broken relationships with girls who had been abused. It’s never spoken about the way it is on TV or in the movies, with the terrible hushed expectancy, the tears and unbridled horror at the revelation. The boyfriend, husband, lover doesn’t swear vengeance on their behalf. It’s sad, but it’s a commonplace sadness. There’s always someone who’s had it worse. You’re always luckier than somebody else. There are always blessings to be counted.

And looking back, my primary school self, my secondary school self and even my adult self had no idea what should have been done or even what could have been done. There were no ad campaigns, no adult spoke to us about this terrible thing that infiltrated all our lives, only in differing degrees. If it had happened to any of us, we would have had no idea what to do.

The experts all say that you should tell an adult you trust but many times the adults already knew and, in subconscious consent, chose to ignore. Some were the perpetrators themselves. And in the case of Dane Andrews and Akiel Chambers, in fact, in the case of most victims of abuse, it’s someone you know and trust whom you follow willingly to your own destruction.

And now the villagers are tumbling over themselves to speak about what everybody knew about before but no one chose to speak about. And what about the children who aren’t killed and so no one ever speaks about them because they’re just one more in a world where there is always one more?

So another child has been raped and murdered. Another family cries as the child no one thought they would outlive is buried. And we all wait to see if once again, another child who has been destroyed because of ignorance and silence will go unavenged.

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