I had never touched a girl either. We kissed again, this time opening our mouths, allowing our tongues access. I could feel her mound as my hands explored the little girl’s privates. It begged me lower and it wasn’t long before I felt my hand caress her supple slit. I can’t remember when I realised the disturbing intentions of his action. Maybe it was when I discovered porn by accident. Maybe it was when I studied Chapter 4 of Science in Form 3. Maybe it was during “girl talk” with my guy friends in school. On the other hand, I’m relieved that they didn’t. I can’t imagine having to face the embarrassment and the humiliation. More importantly, I also can’t imagine handling the rejection if they all knew but still did nothing about it. Or worse still, didn’t believe me. Sometimes it’s a silent one, not because they are unafraid, but because they are confused, unaware, and simply just don’t know any better. Image Credit: Huffington Post

This week One in Four, an organisation that provides therapeutic support and advocacy for adult survivors of child sexual abuse, said that it saw 178 new and 485 ongoing clients in 2015, of whom 43 per cent were men and 57 per cent women.James and Sophie's names have been changed, but Bill Kenneally is real, a convicted abuser who has featured in recent news reports. Kenneally was 36 when he started sexually abusing teenage boys in Waterford. Over three years he abused 10 victims. To keep them quiet he took photographs of the boys and told them that if they reported him he would claim that they enjoyed what he did. Creator of this archive is unknown. An archive of original illustrations, sketchbooks, and erotic stories, depicting transgressive sex acts including (but not limited to) lesbian and heterosexual sex, incest, pedophilia, sadomassochistic behavior, and copulation with objects as varied as sex toys, produce, and household appliances. The stories and illustrations appear to be the work of a single individual, with nearly all narrative told from a female's point of view. Also includes some amateur pornographic photography and magazine clippings. Uncle Jim is married to a woman named Rhonda, whose hobby is crochet. No, not “hobby,” exactly: her crocheting is a compulsion, perhaps some kind of illness. Rhonda crochets cozies not only for the extra toilet paper rolls, as I’ve seen in some of my friends’ bathrooms, but also for the phone and the phone book and the dog and my uncle’s guns and both of their toothbrushes. This cozying does not make the objects look cozier; it makes them look ashamed.

Can we please separate these issues? Someone seeing you nude in a place you know there are other people is not a violation. Through the peep hole, yes. In a public rest room, no. It might be because it’s hard to hate someone who’s been dead for at least 10 years (I don’t keep count of the exact number). There’s only so much hate that you can give to a dead person because you can’t really do anything about it.Before bedtime, Uncle Doug told us both a bedtime story about a werewolf who howled at the moon in the bitter cold of winter on top of a snowy hill, just like the hill outside the window over the sink in Uncle Doug’s kitchen. He could do these pitch-perfect character voices, and in that way, he was charismatic and appealing to children. The werewolf would howl, he said, his thirst for the blood of children relentless, until one night he came charging through a window of a house trying to catch the little girl inside. The broken glass pierced his throat, and then he was dead, his head hanging over the sill, blood dripping down the wall to the floor. I have pretended to be someone else with a different experience, but looking at my life, I realize my therapist is right. As I’m sitting on his couch, something unclenches in me when I call my dad’s behavior by its proper name. My father was abused as a child, terrorized by authoritarian parents who gave him no words for his emotions or safety to experience them, instead teaching him that to be a parent means to cause pain. My dad then communicated that to me. Such trips were always a challenge. First, because we all worked odd jobs with odd hours. Second, because none of us owned a car and the nearest movie theater was 40 minutes from our rural Maine town. And, for me, because though I had known these boys since preschool, I had gone away every September for the last four years to a prep school. And also because now at 17 I was, for the first time in my life, a boy.