Note: This article below appears in the Lincoln County Leader, and I am waiting for the same rejoinder that the little county of Lincoln is running each Wednesday before my radio show, Finding Fringe, to appear on the Editorial page of a newspaper over 100 years old:
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any of the staff, programmers, board members and volunteers of KYAQ.
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I had the pleasure recently of talking to many people on my trip from Waldport to Manzanita with a few camping nights at Bar View campground, near Rockaway Beach, where a music festival was held.
Interactions with women on this trip highlight the reality of misogyny and sexual assault unfortunately active in rural Oregon.
One woman near Cloverdale is an amazing entrepreneur, and we talked about her Monkey Puzzle tree nursery, a spiny tree from Chile and parts of South America.
It’s endangered there, but Cindy is raising thousands from seeds dropped by the 50-year- old female which is next to the male tree.
This species can grow for more than a thousand years.
We talked after she gave me the tour of her Oregon-based business. She opened up about her previous life, as an auditor for human and health services. Years of seeing all the horrible lives of people living with developmental or mental disabilities and so many in foster care caused her vicarious trauma.
The conversation then came around to her own life in San Diego.
“I was molested when I was five years old. I am a survivor, but there are many I have seen in those files who were raped as children but ended up living lives in and out of prison and treatment.”
Her own 41-year-old daughter is in her second drug treatment program, an in-patient facility in Portland. Cindy hasn’t heard from her in a few months, but again, she admitted that her daughter was sexually abused at age 13 by a grandfather.
I know the stats since I worked for several programs in the tri-county Portland area involving homeless folk and foster children.
- 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys will be sexually abused before they turn 18 years old.
- 34% of people who sexually abuse a child are family members.
- 3% of girls were age 10 or younger at the time of their first rape/victimization, and 30% of girls were between the ages of 11 and 17.
- 96% of people who sexually abuse children are male, and 76.8% of people who sexually abuse children are adults.
- 325,000 children are at risk of becoming victims of commercial child sexual exploitation each year.
- The average age at which girls first become victims of prostitution is 12 to 14 years old, and the average age for boys is 11 to 13 years old.
- More than 90% of juvenile sexual abuse victims know their perpetrator.
Moving onto the music festival in Rockaway, I talked with several people who told me about their own struggles with addict children; one in fact, a woman about Cindy’s age, 66, has a daughter in her late thirties also struggling with addiction.
She’s raising two of her grandchildren. Her second husband of 23 years also has two children, one of whom is a woman who has major drug addiction issues. Rape is the common factor with both addicts.
This is the reality of America: young women and men are abusing drugs.
The consequences of that sexual abuse are immense:
- Abused children are 25% more likely to experience teen pregnancy.
- Abused teens are more likely to engage in sexual risk taking, putting them at greater risk for STDs.
- About 30% of abused and neglected children will later abuse their own children, continuing the horrible cycle of abuse.
- In at least one study, about 80% of 21 year old’s that were abused as children met criteria for at least one psychological disorder.
- The financial cost of child abuse and neglect in the United States is estimated at $585 billion.
- Children who experience child abuse & neglect are about 9 times more likely to become involved in criminal activity.
- Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) childhood trauma impact on mental health.
And these citizens living along the coast, in these rural settings, are more anti-Trump than one might imagine. They have money, are financially stable, and have somewhat conservative values.
But hands down, four people I spoke to who all have experienced sexual abuse are not Donald Trump backers.
Calling Trump an unrepentant racist and narcissist seems to get people worked up as if this convicted felon is some god-chosen dude.
He espouses misogyny, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. Remember almost 40 years in 1989 when Trump paid for a one-page advertisement in the New York Daily News calling on the state of New York to execute the Central Park Five? These were African American and Latino teens wrongfully accused of raping and beating a jogger.
For someone like me who is deeply read, educated and traveled, when I confront those who seek to present Trumpism as some aberration in American political history, I give them the elevator speech on how American society has always been a racist and narcissistic one.
Summer’s over and school hallways will be packed, but what in fact will be taught? Not these sexual assault stats.
Will African American sociologist and historian WEB Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction be discussed in high schools?
This book delves into the behavior of southern plantation owners and the corrosive effect of slavery on their psyche. It concludes the following:
“It tended to inflate the ego of most planters beyond all reason; they became arrogant, strutting, quarrelsome kinglets; they issued commands; they made laws; they shouted their orders; they expected deference and self-abasement; they were choleric and easily insulted … “
Much of what Du Bois described coincides with what modern psychology has identified as the attributes of the narcissistic personality disorder.
Power, and even outside the corridors of the rich and powerful, the sexual abuser is both a narcissist and misogynist, even abusing his own pre-teen granddaughters. Tough lessons in the land of the not so free.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.