The child sex craze

Nicholas von Hoffman

The new population figures show that life expectancy in the United States is longer than ever before, but you'd never know it by what comes out over the airwaves. Murder, kidnapping, rape or some other awful end would seem to be in store for American children growing up in what the authoritative voices of social work, journalism and government paint as a frightfully dangerous time for our younguns.

The other evening the ABC television network put on the year's third movie on teenage suicide. News shows, expert panels and call-in discussions on this dreary topic are to be seen in every city at any time of the day or night. They are inter- spersed with shows about missing children. This too has become a stable subject for professional and amateur alarmists alike. The Hawthorn Melody Dairy, serving the Chicago area, has taken to printing the pictures of missing children on milk car- tons; the transit authorities in several cities have announced they will be putting wanted notices of missing children in the buses and subways; the federal govern- ment has established an office in the Justice Department for finding missing children.

Kids who don't kill themselves and make the mistake of staying at home are likely to be sexually molested by their parents or their teachers. In communities of all sizes and points of the compass adults are being accused of committing the grossest forms of immorality on the nearest grabbable kid.

The mental health people in America have turned off the gas in the oven which the wicked old lady used to roast Hansel and Gretel; the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood has been deranged. All the satis- fying, horrible old-time stories about chop- ping up children and putting them in shepherd's pie have been irremediably sweetened by the pro-paedia lobby but, if a healthy society is one that must have its quota of dreams about throwing the kiddie cutlets into the stew pot, then perhaps there is a reason for this never-ending tale of terrible things happening to the wee ones. The television tales are even more fun than the fairy story because we believe them.

And why not? The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at the Justice Department attests to the fact that the gypsies are out stealing every baby in the country who isn't, as they say, moni- tored around the clock. Not long ago the Center's executive director, a Mr Jay C. Howell, held a press conference to tell the 'world that he estimates that 1.5 million children are missing from home each year. That is a lot of kids, 30 times the number of men killed yearly at the height of the Vietnam war, 30 times the number killed on the highways every 12 months. You would think every American would direct- ly or indirectly know of a disappeared child, the way we do about people killed in auto accidents.

We don't, of course, and the reason may be that there are 45 million kids aged five to 17. If the government estimate is cor- rect, that works out at slightly more then three per cent of all the school-aged children and adolescents in America get- ting snatched or otherwise vanishing every year. Year to year that total keeps grow- ing. In five years there would be seven and a half million people wandering around the United States missing. In ten years that works out at 15 million people who have been murdered or somehow swallowed up by child predators. It's only a matter of time before we run out of milk cartons to put the pictures on.

The American missing children story will one day become a minor classic of Amer- ican journalism, like the dog food story of a few years ago, when it was universally reported that large numbers of impover- ished old people were living off dog food. At length an editor somewhere told some- body to go out and get him a picture of an 'What a pity Scargill isn't leader of the NUT.' old codger eating a handful of bow-wow biscuits; thereafter the story died.

A short conversation with Mr Mike Kelly of Sacramento, California, would send the missing child story to the bone yard. Mr Kelly is the criminal identification specialist with the California Department of Justice's missing/unidentified persons unit. He has found that 97 per cent of the missing return within 30 days. In Califor- nia, a state with more than ten per cent of the population, only about 700 children go missing for more than a month and most of them have been kidnapped by an angry parent in a divorce dispute. Projecting Mr Kelly's figures nationwide, you can esti- mate that less than 5,000 children vanish from the purview of both parents per Year' but it's too late now. We have built a whole industry on this myth, with offices in Hollywood, Washington and the inore important university centres for the study of crime and psychiatry. As yet there is no new office in the Justice Department for child molestation, but God save you if you are unlucky enough to be an adult victim in a child sex case. Hermina Albo of New York City's borough of the Bronx has first-hand ex- perience. Last summer this 62-year-0ld grandmother was working at the PraCa Day-care Center, as she had for the pre- vious 13 years, when the police swooped in and carried her off in handcuffs to a police station where she had to run the gauntlet of television cameras and lynch mob parents, after which she was charged with raping a four-year-old girl, fingerprinted and, thrown in a cell with a bunch of outrage° whores who gave Hermina a hard time too. Weeks later a grand jury, after hearing such evidence as there was against grannY, refused to indict her. She was freed, her reputation ruined, to try to pick up her life

hire her. a nursery school that would dare

A yet more famous sex abuse case has been running for over a year in the tiny town of Jordan (population 2,700) Min"- sota where 21 adults were arrested for having sex with their own kids and then trading them around among the neigh- bours. When the first of the parents were brought to trial the state's case fell to earth with the admission by one of the victims that he'd made the story up. It was a lurid yarn too, about murdered and mutilated children. Yet, though all charges against all the defendants have been dropped, a number of these parents are still fighting to get their children back from foster homes and custodial institutions where they had been taken when the charges were first made.

involved will not edsocinialrhweorekaesers evidently will

admit that in their eagerness to find the necrotic tissue of mental disease every where and in everyone, they blew the case and blew it badly. Whatever the reason, many of the kids are not home yet while the suspicion hardens that shrinkologY is playing the devil's own role in these cases. An assistant prosecutor in a West Virgi- ma coal-mining county says that there have been 12 sexual abuse indictments by the grand jury in her jurisdiction over the past • year and she is appalled at the weakness of the evidence and the part psychologists Play in bringing charges. They're not sadistic but they're stupid. Of course there is that lusty tone of voice When they call to say we have a new sexual abuse case. They keep saying, "Kids never he about sex." Ha. I have a three-year-old, don't tell me little kids won't lie or make Up stories or whatever you want to call it about sex or anything else. Tye watched the tape of a psychologist questioning a three-year-old boy, using the sexually explicit dolls. The psychologist Showed him the penis and asked him if he had one and the little boy said no; then the PsYehologist asked him how he went pee- Pee and the little boy said, 'I don't do Pee-pee.' And they want us to use kids like that as witnesses in cases where people could be sent to prison for 25 years. I've noticed the psychologists always hand the dOils to the kids in the missionary position. I3e: you think that means anything? They brought in a case against the father of a big 16-year-old girl. They said she was traumatised by being forced to have sex with him. I asked her, did he beat You? Did he threaten you? How did he force you to have sex with him? She said he Promised me a new car. I asked what Would have happened if she had said no and she told me she wouldn't have gotten the car. A nice victim. She wasn't trauma- tised.

'In one case, all it took to get an indictment was to bring the "victim" into the grand jury room. I thought what was really going on was the mother of the child was getting at the father, but this was a cute little girl, blonde, curls. They brought her in and I could hear the jurors sigh and say, "Oh look at that little angel." 'What was their evidence against the father? That he would get up and give the baby her three a.m. bottle. They said he was probably fondling her. I don't think much of most men as fathers but I'm sure there are a few of them who love their baby daughters enough to to get up and give them that bottle.

There was one little girl who was sup- posed to have been a sexual abuse victim but she would not stay still for a pelvic examination. They were all set to put the kid under a general anaesthetic so they could look at her. Finally she let them look at her and they found out she had tricho- monias which they said was a sexually transmitted disease. It isn't. Little girls can even get it wiping themselves the wrong way. Now they wanted to examine the mother. If she had it that would prove she got it from the father. 'I say evidence and they don't under- stand. A paediatrician told me that he could testify that a little girl, three years old, had been abused. I said how and he 'said that when he had asked if her father had put his penis in her mouth, the little girl had looked away distracted by her toys. Distracted by her toys. If the parents don't believe the child has been abused, they say it's non-therapeutic and the mother shouldn't be entitled to visitation rights.'

This prosecutor has noticed in her long jurisdiction charges of child-beating have dried up. It was not so long ago that the television networks were doing movies on parents who use their offspring as punching bags, but that particular social problem has, seemingly, been licked. 'It used to be dirty house cases, phsyical abuse,' she says. .`All those parents who used to beat their kids now screw them instead, I guess.'

A couple of weeks ago preliminary hearings were held in Los Angeles in a rather splashy sex abuse case involving 41 children and seven defendants, all teachers at a kindergarten. Before the first witness, a seven-year-old boy, was brought in to testify, he had a little talk with a most arresting figure, a large, muscular black man, with a Mohawk hair cut, wearing combat boots, army fatigues and 20 pounds of gold chains on his chest. This was Mr T, the hero of a prime-time television series called The A-Team. Mr T was on hand to encourage the little boy to speak the truth, and what more down-to-earth figure could be found to dampen the imaginations of children, their psychologists and the repor- ters who cluster about them?