Pearls before swine

This morning I made an error ruinous to my peace by skimming the Daily Mail headlines and then reading an article by a former sex counsellor (and now YA author) Holly Bourne. (Update: She originally wrote her story for the Standard.)

To summarize as quickly as possible, for two years Bourne received daily emails from teenage girls as young as 14 confused and hurt over what they thought were unpleasant sexual encounters and Bourne identified as rape. Bourne blames hardcore pornography, and she had a hard time writing professional responses when boys wrote to her to ask why the girls they had violated were now acting so strangely. 

My intellectual response to the horror was to think about these children's parents. (My emotional response was fear for teenagers I know.) After all, these boys and girls almost certainly live with adults who are responsible for them and must be at least fond of them. The majority of these adults will be  parents--a mother and father, or a mother, or a father--and when not parents, grandparents. The parents (or parent or grandparents) will have made many decisions, guided by love, towards the well-being of these children, and yet these decisions will have led to 14-year-old rapists and victims. 

How is this possible? 

First, it is possible parents have no idea how much pornography and violent sex is a part of teenage life today. When I was a child, only kids living with adult porn consumers had access to dirty magazines. Kids couldn't buy them in stores, and they were presumably hard to shoplift as they were kept on the highest racks or shelves. To watch a pornographic movie, kids would have to go to an area of town their parents or friends would have warned them was dangerous, and they would have to get past the ticket seller. If they managed to get past the ticket seller, they would find themselves in the company of "perverts"--as we called all solitary salacious men back then. Video shops sprang up when I was a teen,  of course, but the porn was kept in a special section where kids weren't allowed, and again there were clerks running interference.

When I was a teenager, the culture still believed that elementary school children should be innocent and not know more of the sexual realm than how babies were made, if even that. I went to a Catholic high school with a large population of girls who more or less believed that if they lost their virginity before marriage (and got caught) their Italian immigrant parents wouldn't love them anymore. The public morality of the locker room veered between "It's okay if you love the person" and "If he loves you he will never suggest such a thing!" If there were girls who truly believed in sex-for-the-fun-of-it they didn't announce it in the hallways.

There were also rumours of wild weekends, of pregnancies, and of abortions. These were, however, absolutely the exception and not the norm.

The morality of the boys' Catholic schools and the (post-Protestant) secular schools, I can only guess at. 

And this, by the way, is something I value. I am an inveterate enemy of co-education. I simply cannot understand why teenage boys and girls are locked up together for six hours a day to their mutual distraction when they should be concentrating on their studies and/or vocational training. It may have worked when society had comparatively strict standards about the way boys and girls related to each other (i.e. before 1963/4), but I cannot see that it works now. 

So my first (and most charitable) thought is that too many of today's parents simply do not understand how dangerous and dirty the world has become for even the most privileged children. The internet is not the Encyclopedia Britannica; it is a Metropass to every nook and cranny of a dangerous port city. There is no affronted cashier to stop kids from looking at the dirty magazine or renting that video. There is no ticket taker frightened of police involvement.  

My much less charitable thought is that too many of today's parents just keep doing what is easiest. It's just easiest to give into children's demands for smartphones or their own computers. It's just easiest to send children to the nearest state school. It's just easiest to let them do whatever they want and to take non-answers for answers when asking them where they're going. Or so I assume, not being a parent myself.

But I was a teenage girl, and ever since then I have firmly believed that teenage girls are as beautiful and valuable as they are vulnerable. Teenage boys seem to me more complicated, mysterious, and alarming than girls, but they are also valuable and vulnerable. Why on earth are they left so open to moral and physical attack? 

"Am I really beautiful, or am I just young?" I shouted at my mother about 35 years ago. 

"It's the same thing," yelled my mother, who was younger than I am now. 

And, you know, it's true. It doesn't feel true when you're a teenager unless you're one of the minority who are told their whole lives by everyone that they could be models or movie stars. But it is objectively true. Today's children and teenagers are beautiful and precious pearls rolled before swine. This cannot go on.