One In Ten

He kept her in his cellar.

No one knew.

For years, no one knew.

He had a family with his own daughter, it went on for years.

And no one knew.

Some people think we worry too much about child molesters and rapists. That we are paranoid about them, that we are hypersensitive to their existence.
Some argue we are, as a society, going through a McCarthyite or Witch hunter phase regarding the sex offender.

I don't agree. I think the comparison is flawed. Yes, we are panicking. But no, we don't face the appalling truth.
Our whole society is perverted at the core, what we see in cases such as the man pictured above, really is the tip of the iceberg.

One in Ten.
I didn't believe it when I first heard it.
I do now.
That's the estimated proportion of the UK population who have been the victim of sexual abuse or rape.

One in twenty people in the UK is non-white- and people worry about that.
One in twenty people are gay, and we are told they are a strident minority.

What about this silent minority? What effect does the long term damage to five million people in this country alone mean?

Some of you will be thinking that you don't know any abuse victims personally. Some of you will be thinking you don't know any sex offenders.
I'm pretty sure all of you know both.

I've never been an abuse victim myself. But for reasons I'm not going to go into, but some of you know, I did receive a fairly rudimentary training in hearing the problems of distressed people- and I was taught a certain way of getting people to open up and reveal ROOT problems, as opposed to the things that APPARENTLY were distressing them. Being a salesman by trade anyway, a certain part of me always listens as much, if not more, to what people are NOT saying.

Having spent time listening to people who were abuse victims (and incidentally discovering that actually, a high proportion of crime- ordinary crime, as opposed to sex crime- is actually committed by people sexually abused as children, as well a high proportion of murders), I can generally spot the signs fairly quickly, that I am talking to a sex abuse, or rape victim.

Time and time again, I come across people in ordinary society, maybe at a party, or maybe it's a girl I'm seeing, and certain things are said, which maybe others wouldn't pick up on, but lead me to asking an open question which ultimately means 'You don't have to tell me, but were you?'

And the answer to the question- on the occasions when I ask it, is always yes.

And more often than not, the reason why it still lies at the root of the person concerned, twisting them up, hanging like a thundercloud over the rest of their lives, is the lack of resolution.
In about half the stories I have heard, the perpetrator faced the consequences.

But in the rest, it is something that still lives on.

The twenty five year old man who still visits his Dad every month. Even received birthday money from him.
As if it never happened.

The girl who throws her body at every man she meets, hoping that enough sex, will wash away the stains of the night she said no, and no one listened.

I know both these people.

One of my ex-girlfriends had a father in prison for manslaughter.
He never did any time for taking her up the attic and playing with his own daughter's genitalia.



People don't speak out. They carry their shame inside, because they feel dirtied. Sex abuse is the ultimate infliction of power by one human being over another. To admit and deal with the fact that it was done, to say it publicly DOES take courage. To say 'I couldn't stop my forced submission'.
People who stand up and say what was done to them, are the brave ones.

But we don't know the half of it.
And the ones we don't hear about, are often the worst.

It's that family dynamic. I think a high proportion of the sex abuse that goes unreported, is by family members. It's that twisted logic of the victim loving the abuser. Step fathers seem to get caught out, I think real biological fathers or siblings, really do tend to get away with it. Because the victim feels loyalty to the abuser.
Because the abuser ruined them for ever.
But he also held out his arms to catch him/her, as they took their first steps.

People don't ever get over it. How can they? If this is your first introduction to human intimacy, how can your perception of human intimacy EVER escape from being seen through this prism?
How hard is it to love other human beings, when human beings you trusted betrayed you this way?

One in Ten.

At some point in the next twenty four hours, in a house within a mile radius of you, a child is almost certainly being sexually abused.
And it could be any house. Sexual abusers are not limited to class. Yes, if you go wandering round a council estate, it is probably true you will find sex abuse going on in a shockingly high number of households.

If you count women being raped by their partners and regarding it as a normal fact of life, I dread to think what the proportion is.

But it carries on in a cycle. If the abuse is uncovered and the perpetrator caught, yes, it's good he's taken out of circulation, but more importantly the VICTIM can be helped.
Because, certainly as regard the male victims, those who don't receive the help they need, are highly likely to become sex offenders themselves.

And the women, they need help just as much. Because though they won't become child molesters or rapists, the damage that has been done to them, will live on in THEIR children.

One in Ten.

It is a series of self perpetuating evil, a virus spreading down the generations. It is like a secret cult, that has lived in the underbelly of our society- not just in the UK, but everywhere.

Our fine steel, glass and concrete cities, shining in twenty first century technology hide the true evil that lurks inside.

And it warps us. There are so many causes of the ills that affect our culture. The causes of crime and social breakdown are not limited to one factor. Poverty, drug addiction, alienation, lack of belonging, lack of common social goals, yes, they all play apart. But some are symptoms, not causes.

Sex abuse, that lies at the heart of so many social ills. Of course it does. If one in ten of us have to deal with this trauma in their general human interactions, are we surprised things are so messed up?

We need to tackle this.
If any social ill needed being eradicated- and I think we can eradicate it, though it certainly won't be easy, this has to be top of the list. Because we are allowing the systematic warping of people, warping they will never recover from. We connive at people being wasted as socially productive individuals.

How much of this has been a product of our culture? A lot, I think. I think our lack of openness about sex, the treatment of sex itself as a dirty secret in our society, not to be talked about, created this social virus back in the dark years when no one talked about sex.
And now we are suddenly waking up to the scale of the problem that has created.

Now we are all a lot more open about sex, sexuality, sexual repression, now we no longer treat sex ITSELF as perverted, maybe we can really tackle the REAL perversions, sex used as a power tool, sex used to degrade.

With Sexual Freedom, comes Responsible Social Sexuality, it is part of humanity growing up a bit about sex.



With our liberalisation on sex, we DO need to start being way more draconian- and intrusive even- in other ways. I'm not sure we can any longer risk the attitude that we just let parents bring up their own children, and don't involve society as a whole in an overseeing role. To blanketly trust the care of minors to ANYONE the way we do, is asking for trouble.

And attitudes that still exist, such as that a woman's sexual history, or whether she was drunk, should be a mitigating factor in a rapist's defence, these ideas need to be knocked on the head.

Generally speaking, I don't see why any minority cannot happily co-exist with a majority. There IS, in my view something amazing about human diversity.

But One in Ten.

Here's one minority, we SHOULD be working to reduce.