I'm trying to choke down the lump that's rising in my throat, the one that always seems come right before tears. A little ten year old aboriginal girl raped by ten young guys who have since shown no remorse and received no sentence. They're walking the streets this very evening.
I want those boys to die, plain and simple, and I want it to be unpleasant (that's the ladylike way of saying it). I don't love them, I don't want to. A child feels worthless, filthy, unloved, like she has no value at all and not only could it have been avoided but afterward there could have, and should have, been consequences, justice.
The reasons the judge gave for letting the boys off make about as much sense to me a wearing a parka in Townsville. She said that after interviewing each one she saw that they had no remorse for their actions and did not even seem to understand that what they did was wrong. So she let them go with the condition that they get rehabilitated. Rehabilitated. The word tastes like dirt in my mouth.
Ten years old, forced to have sex with every member of a street gang, each of them with a criminal record as long as a city block, each one of them from first class dysfunction. It wasn't her first encounter with them either, she was attacked and physically abused (her tiny body probably not serviceable to grown men back then), she was beaten. She had been in foster care in a better town and family on the other side of the continent, the state insisted on giving her real family a chance to see her despite admonitions from everyone against it, so she went for a visit and refused to leave because of the same old, same old- she was promised that things would be "different". It wasn't two days after she was "home" that this attack happened, her parents were absent from her life as before, probably in a drunken stupor in a pub or at home.
Why does this happen!? Why does the "state" always win and in winning, in all political correctness, leave a smeared, bloody trail of lives that will never be the same again. Then they throw money at it. I hate it. But more than that I hate how hopeless it makes me feel.
I want to believe that I can help some of these kids heal. I want to think that I can send them into the rest of their lives not fearing the drive home. I want to believe that I can love them enough that the unlovely things fade even a little. But as I'm sitting here reflecting on this child's story, I doubt, with every part of me I doubt that there is enough love in all of the world to restore her heart, her emotions, her outlook, her self-image. I want to hold her, to show her an embrace that shelters instead of shatters. I want to never let go. And I want to take them all, just like that. All the precious infants, broken before they get to start.
Why is this my passion? Why do I NEED to reach THEM? Why do their stories and faces fill me with this grave determination to achieve the impossible?
I about took the head off a guy in the lecture room today as we were discussing this. He played the mercy card. He was trying to communicate a valid point, that people commit crimes but they aren't the crimes the commit. The concept of separating people from the things that they do is something that I struggle with. If I was labeled with everything I've ever done... I still wouldn't have ones that said "Rape of a child", "Murder", "Assault", "Battery". And that's where my thoughts tend to end, I still would match up like a saint in comparison and I'm no angel.
What makes matters worse is I know the answers to my own questions in this. I know that if I love these children they will at the very least be given a powerful tool called hope. Hope that their value doesn't rest in the filthy hands of those who have broken their spirits. Hope that love though not necessarily a happily ever after can be attained and not at the cost of the selling of their souls.
This knowledge however does very little in the way of encouraging me at the moment, because right now somewhere in this country, a little girl unnamed by the media is probably fighting nightmares and tears, or worse, no emotions at all, sleeping like the dead seared completely of all feeling. Tonight I can't help her.
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