How Child Molesters Harm Us All

By Todd Richissin

On Thursday, readers of Patch Facebook pages received a link to this story about a man in Virginia who works with children and was charged with child pornography and sexually assaulting a girl in his care who was under the age of 13.

I wrote the blurb sending people to that story, one of two regional Facebook posts we do daily and which appear alongside many more local posts.

And I’m glad to have raised a few issues. It’s opened up some spirited conversation of just what the post meant, which allows me to draw even more attention to the impact that adults who abuse such positions of authority have not only on the kids involved, but on all of us.

What I’m not happy about is any interpretation of the post that any kid is to blame in any such case, ever. Or that any allegation that the child in this case—or any child who says he or she was abused—should not be taken seriously. Or that sexual predators should not be charged. Any misinterpretations are on me.

So, let me be clear: No kid is ever to blame, ever; all allegations of child abuse should be taken seriously (sexual abuse is actually under-reported); sexual predators should not only be charged but should also be atop the priority list for prosecutors everywhere.

Now, let me take responsibility of what many saw as clumsy language—and also take advantage of it to draw even more attention to what in many ways is a hidden result of such cases: Not how this impacts the kids involved—that’s obvious to anybody with a brain and a conscience—but how we, as a society, are impacted and why sexual abusers need to be prosecuted energetically and punished severely.

I’d discussed this very issue recently with a friend of mine who was once the youth sports director at the West Des Moines YMCA in Iowa, where I was living at the time. An aquatics instructor there had just been charged with sexually abusing a minor, allegedly using his job to enable the crime he was charged with.

As someone who was working with kids, what did my friend think?

Yes, yes, he told me. It casts a shadow on everyone who works with kids. What were their real motivations?  Is he one of those? He was convinced, and I am too, that many adults who want to help kids because it’s a noble thing to do have become increasingly hesitant because of just that kind of questioning.

And that questioning is brought on by those who would harm children.

Another friend of mine, this one in Ohio, once told me how he had filled in as a third base coach in little league baseball. When one of his players hit a homerun, he slapped the kid on the backside as he rounded third base. Immediately, he told me, “I thought, ‘Oh, God, watch the cops show up at my house.’”

Obviously, the vast, vast, vast majority of people who work with kids do so for all the right reasons. They make this world better.

Those very few who would harm a child, though, are causing problems that go beyond the obvious damage they do to their victims. These predators also harm noble programs and the kids left out of them for lack of adult volunteers. They harm noble adults who are doing God’s work with our most precious commodity, our children. They harm all of us. That’s my point.

And I think that’s a point worth making. And certainly worth making more clearly than I did in Thursday’s post.