Vulnerability at School

by Cate in IL

I think we all need to come to grips with a genuinely ugly truth. There are people who like hurting children in our world. Such people will be drawn to work in school
systems. Some of them hurt children through sex. At least that is recognized and illegal. Still difficult to reveal and prosecute, however.at least it is illegal.

Just as ugly are those who have lost all patience and will not assume responsibility for their choices to hurt children. They blame the child for their actions the way a pedophile claims the child was the seducer. There are also sick individuals who just like watching a child's pain. There are all kinds of twists in the world,but those who hurt children want access to them.

There are also what I call bureaucrat-sadists . They love to find ways to follow the rules to actually torture people (especially children) while completely ignoring the intent of the rules to protect anyone. Our children are more susceptible to these last than most because there are so many rules to protect the square pegs (typical children) that were never intended to hurt our round peg-children but hold that possibility. It is supposed to be "unimaginable" for a pedophile to work in a school. Well, sometimes they are there. There are notbackground checks for the rest of the twisted folk who want to hurt children in other ways. They are clearly there too.

It is hard to get the public to move past that inherent trust our parents had and we want when we send our children to school. Some of our parents' trust was misplaced. However, our children did not join the public school systems en masse until 1975. That was when the door opened a couple of inches, and we have (and continue) to shove a few more inches at that door in all its forms every year since.

However, our children are the most vulnerable in any school. They will draw abusers. We cannot afford to pretend otherwise. We have to be vigilant as parents more than any other group of parents affiliated with the school systems. Some of our teachers are wonderful. But we cannot afford to trust anyone without building that trust as individuals.