Condemned At Birth

Sometimes when you read a story about a particularly heinous crime, you might start to wonder if it’s just an isolated incident or part of an on-going or brewing epidemic. However, there’s a third category that incorporates a little from column A and a little from column B. While checking the usual round of news sites I came across such a story that is both a personal and an example of a societal epidemic.

A man and woman have been jailed for raping a 12-week-old baby and photographing the abuse.

The couple were supposed to be babysitting the child for a single mother who needed help while moving home.

Alan Webster, 40, was jailed for life after pleading guilty at St Albans Crown Court to rape, indecent assault, permitting indecent images to be taken of a child and making indecent images in February and March 2004. The judge said he should spend a minimum of 12 years in prison before being considered for release.

His girlfriend Tanya French, 19, was jailed for five years and given an extended licence period of five years after admitting the same charges. Webster was also found guilty of indecently assaulting a 14-year-old girl who was a regular visitor to the home he shared with French in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Continued

The silver lining in this terrible case is that these villains were caught and jailed, seemingly in an appropriate manner. Some would say that rape of a child warrants the death penalty but that is a debate for another time.

Instead, what I’d like to point out is that the story doesn’t really end here. The human body, even one as defenseless and fragile as an infants, is more resilient than I think many people realize. The victim lives. Barring any more unseen calamity’s, she will progress through the physical stages of development like any other child. Unfortunately, because of the above-mentioned monsters, she will be condemned to carry a burden. That burden is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is something of an invisible epidemic. The events underlying it are often mysterious and always unpleasant. It is certainly far more widespread than most people realize. For example, a prime cause of PTSD is childhood sexual abuse. About 16% of American women (about 40 million) are sexually abused (including rape, attempted rape, or other form of molestation) before they reach their 18th birthday.

Childhood abuse may be the most common cause of PTSD in American women, 10% of whom suffer from PTSD (compared to 5% for men) at some time in their lives, but many other types of psychological trauma can cause the disorder -- car accidents, military combat, rape and assault. Symptoms of PTSD include intrusive memories, nightmares, flashbacks, increased vigilance, social impairment and problems with memory and concentration…Recent studies have shown that victims of childhood abuse and combat veterans actually experience physical changes to the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in learning and memory, as well as in the handling of stress. The hippocampus also works closely with the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that regulates our emotional response to fear and stress. PTSD sufferers often have impairments in one or both of these brain regions. Studies of children have found that these impairments can lead to problems with learning and academic achievement.

Other typical symptoms of PTSD in children, including fragmentation of memory, intrusive memories, flashbacks, dissociation (or the unconscious separation of some mental processes from the others, e.g., a mismatch between facial expression and thought or mood), and pathological ("sick") emotions, may also be related to impairment of the hippocampus. Damage to the hippocampus, which processes memory, may explain why victims of childhood abuse often seem to have incomplete or delayed recall of their abusive experiences. Continued

Thankfully now there are social service agencies that provide the kind of therapy she’ll need to overcome this horrible attack on her young person. Maybe she will not only survive this ordeal but actually with the help of therapy and medication, go on to have a fruitful life. If there is a merciful god in Heaven, I believe she will. But if re-read the above statistics, it states that 40 million American women will be the survivors of childhood sexual abuse. That is 40 million women, with us right now, who may have never received treatment, suffering from a wholly treatable mental health disorder. And that’s just in America.

South Africa is reported to still be leading the world in child rape. It is estimated that 41% of those raped in South Africa are under the age of 12. In Meadowlands, Soweto, police say 90% of rapes are of children younger than 12. It has also been reported that there isn’t enough resources to treat nearly all of the victims that very much require immediate attention, and that’s just those whom report the attack. Just as in America, many South African children, and in fact many youngsters around the world will suffer their abuse in deafening silence.

So what is the bigger picture here? Why does this sort of thing happen. There’s a myth out there that in South Africa, it is believed that having sex with an infant will cleanse you of AIDS.

"The idea that having sex with a virgin cleanses you of AIDS does exist in South Africa and there have been reported cases of this as a motivating factor for child rape, but the predominant evidence suggests that this is infrequently the case," Dr Jewkes says. She quotes Mr Luke Lamprecht, the manager of the Teddy Bear Clinic in Johannesburg, which is the referral point for all child sex abuse cases in the metropolis. According to him, he has only seen one child rape case where the perpetrator believed the myth. This happened some 4 years ago - and the child's mother agreed that the HIV-positive man could rape her 4-year-old in exchange for cash.

"According to another report on child rape which investigated injury patterns, management and outcomes, there was a 1% sero-conversion rate.* This was, for most cases, in the absence of anti-retroviral therapy and therefore suggests that this myth is not an important cause of rape. If it had been, in view of the extensive injuries common in child rape, a higher rate of sero-conversion would be expected," says Dr Jewkes. Continued

If it isn’t crazy ideas on what prevents AIDS then one must take the next step and examine why else human beings would commit such a horrendous act such as child rape. The answer, as it is with many issues, is complex. There are many factors that set up an arena for attacks on children. Those factors are, lack of employment opportunities, lack of institutional support from police and judicial system, general tolerance of sexual assault within the community, settings that support sexual violence, weak community sanctions against sexual violence perpetrators, poverty, societal norms that support sexual violence, societal norms that support male superiority and sexual entitlement, societal norms that maintain women’s inferiority and sexual submissiveness, weak laws and policies related to gender equity, high tolerance levels of crime and other forms of violence.

In addition, this sort of crime tends to be generational in that those whom are victims in their youth may grow up to be perpetrators themselves.

This is more than just a human-interest story. We as a society, which is getting smaller every day, have to start making decisions collectively about where we want to go. Do we want to have a generation of children who will grow up and carry forward the advances we’ve created or shall we continue to condemn them at birth to devolution?