BY GARRICK FELDMAN
PUBLISHER
Pedophiles are in the news these days. Maybe there aren’t more of them out there, it’s just that more children are speaking out and prosecutors are handing down more indictments.
These cases usually boil down to a child making an accusation against an adult, and adults on a jury would rather believe one of their own sitting in a suit at the defense table than accept the world of a child, who has no reason to lie but has come forward because she can no longer keep the hurt inside and told someone what happened that night when she stayed over at a friend’s house while a guy started “wrestling” with her in their den.
Adults have abused children from the beginning of time and got away with their crimes because for too long their behavior wasn’t even considered criminal.
Kids are defenseless against adult predators, who think they can beat and threaten and molest children and make all kinds of excuses if they’re charged with a crime: It was all innocent “horseplay,” they were just “wrestling” and there’s nothing wrong with picking up a child by the crotch because that’s how they pick up their grandchildren.
They not only violate children sexually, they threaten them with more violence if they tell adults what happened.
The predators are often stepparents who think nothing of violating a child who is not their own. A few years ago, we wrote about a monster who raped his stepdaughter almost daily while his wife was at work.
The little girl was too scared to tell her mother. It wasn’t until years later that her teachers realized she was an abused child and offered to help her.
She finally told her story, and her stepfather was charged with rape and is still in prison.
He had been tried several years earlier for fondling a little girl who was spending the night with his stepdaughter, but there wasn’t much evidence against him, and the jury let him off so he could rape his stepdaughter for a decade or more.
Almost every day we hear reports of abusive men taking advantage of children. Some get long prison sentences, others plead guilty and get reduced sentences, while others get off. But even those who go free eventually get caught because they’re serial abusers, although they’ll hurt many more kids before they’re sent to prison.
The human mind is capable of all kinds of depravity that most people can’t even imagine. But as more cases of abuse are reported, we’ll tell our readers about the problem in our communities and warn predators that they, too, could go to trial and serve long prison sentences.
In other words, they’d better watch out.
