The difficult topic that pains many

Sexual molestation is an evil everyone recognizes and may be negatively affected by in some capacity. 

Only a month ago, I visited some relatives to watch an old Alfred Hitchcock film neither of us had seen before called “Blackmail.” It had a lengthy scene in which a painter escorts a young girl into his studio and attempts to coerce her into his bed. 

I was uncomfortable because I could predict what would happen and I was watching it with my preteen relatives who were completely in the dark about this character’s intentions. “Why is he taking away her dress,” “Why is he dragging her behind the curtain,” “What is he doing to her,” they asked, scared out of their minds. 

To which their parents would reply flatly, “He’s being a jerk.” That was only putting it mildly. This may have been scary for them to see the implications of this abuse in a fictional situation, but it is far more terrifying when it happens in real life. When I was their age, I was affected without knowing it.

When I was younger, I attended Lake Park-Audubon Elementary School in Minnesota. While there, I was close friends with a classmate whose mother was a teacher and whose father was the coach of the girls’ basketball team. 

In 2010 his father and an assistant coach pleaded guilty to allegations of fondling two girls. I was not involved with sports, nor did I meet the perpetrator aside from once at a school fair. I did not know what crimes he committed, nor what punishment he received at the time, but his actions did affect me. 

My friend’s mother divorced his father after he pled guilty and left the district with their son; their reputation ruined in the wake of the father’s actions. I had not believed my friend’s father was capable of such an act based upon my friend’s praises of him. I was not the only one.

It was only years later when I was at a gathering where a former player of the coach’s Basketball team expressed how one of the victims was her best friend. This player may have not been a physical victim of abuse, but the fact that she could have been caused her to grapple with an emotional breakdown. 

She was conflicted with self-hatred and hatred towards others having lost faith in many she had considered friends. Though she explained how she eventually found the help she needed, it greatly troubled me to see how she had been hurt like this.

 I had never seen her being so honest about how she could feel this way. Learning this helped me to learn that I was only one of the many affected by the crime of the coach, however slight it may have been.

 Sexual molestation doesn’t just involve the rapist and the victim, it affects everyone. When someone is so corrupt as to take advantage of another, they betray everyone and everything involved in their life as well as the lives of their victims.

As for me, I can only be thankful that I was not a victim, but that does not change the fact that my life was altered in some small way. I feel sorry for those not as lucky and wish the best for their swift recovery.