Reader comments
Abuse hinders normal development

Thank you! This series should be a wakeup call for America.
We've had 20-25 young people stay in our home, anywhere from 2-3 days, to regular foster placement. In EVERY one of the situations, the child had been abused, usually sexually.
Most were from 'good' neighborhood families, or friends of our children. A few were temporarily unwanted by a step-parent or non-parent (read: Mom's latest live-in boyfriend).

We learned to expect that they were 'sexperts' far beyond their age level. Many had a vocabulary and experience in the 6th-7th-8th grades that most don't even know about until high school.

The biggest common denominator with each family was that sex was the accepted theme of the movies they watched, the rental videos, and the TV and cable shows. The children had no boundaries, no sense that what some adult or older sibling started doing to them was wrong, until after it happened.
Then everybody screamed bloody murder, and couldn't figure out 'how this happened.'

Slowly we figured out, to show/tell them in plain English the effects of watching today's soft-porn. They could connect the dots.
About half have mostly overcome their childhood problems.

Following your sex abuse series has been excruciating. A few times, the paper needed to be put away in anticipation of fear and an expectation of courage and hope for the future. Even seeing one of the e-mail address (Romboy) at the end of the articles invoked a twisted association rather than considering that it actually could be a person's name. How truly accurate it was described that "consequences how up in "insidious ways".