Turn Around and Face the Barking ‘Black Dog’
Turn Around and Face the Barking ‘Black Dog’
Become aware of the huge harm to children, families, and society of pedophilia and the ripple effect it causes.
Returning home from a walk many years ago at Lake Winnipesaukee, I cut across a yacht club car park. I paid no heed to a dog barking from a nearby house until it sounded much closer. Turning around I saw a large black dog running up behind me. “Go home,” I yelled, and continued on my way. But a fearful chill swept up my spine when a little voice said in a commanding tone, “Turn around and face the dog.”
The dog was only a few meters away when I turned around. The hair on its back stood straight up. Baring its teeth with a vicious guttural growl, it lunged at me. I kicked out to fend it off and again commanded it to go home. I saw a man pull into the drive where the dog had come from and called for help, to no avail. The dog lunged at me again in a barking frenzy. I kicked out again and again to repel the dog before it suddenly turned and ran off to greet its owner.
My heart pounded all the way home. I knew that that if I had not turned to face the dog I could have suffered terrible injuries in an attack from behind I did not see coming.
The reason I tell this story is that collectively we need to find the courage to fend off an attack from a ‘black dog’ that is doing unthinkable harm to our children that will scar them for life. I am speaking here of the atrocious crimes of child sex trafficking, grooming and forced sodomy from pedophiles, rape, incest, and indeed any form of sex abuse performed on children. Such crimes cause endless suffering. Until death. I am not exaggerating. I am a witness to many first hand accounts of unspeakable abuse.
Sexual abuse damages the child psychically, emotionally, and often physically as well. It is an acute betrayal of trust. It destroys boundaries and makes children easy prey for other abusers – especially because they dissociate and freeze instead of fighting back or fleeing because they are prevented from doing so. The abuse can be so severe and overwhelming they can bury all conscious memory of it. Amnesia is a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – something you may think only happens to soldiers in combat. It is truly that horrifying to a child.
Rape and sexual abuse are high risk factors for developing PTSD. It can cause a lifetime of unremitting anxiety, where a person will often self-medicate with alcohol and/or drugs, engage in self-harm, in risky behavior, criminal behavior, and they may even commit suicide or murder. It can lead to insomnia, depression, promiscuity, eating disorders, and other behavior that is puzzling, including homelessness. With chronically raised adrenaline and cortisol in the body, the immune system starts to break down and a person’s health is compromised. Relationships can suddenly fall apart. Anger and violence can become a way of life, leading to domestic violence, and poor employment prospects.
As a counselor, I worked with many victims of child abuse. One night my phone rang at 1:00 a.m. A twenty-four-year-old student, I’ll call Simon, was working late struggling to complete the final project for his university degree. He was calling from a public phone and asked if I would listen to a song he’d written to help him deal with anger that was consuming him.
He had come to me strangely agitated over his girlfriend’s news that she had been sexually abused as a child, and wanted to know how he could help her. Instead we made the gruesome discovery that his father had anally raped him as a three-year-old during an overnight visit after his parents’ divorce. Working through the anger it brought to the surface, I encouraged him to use writing, art or music to help release it. So here is part of the song Simon sang to me that night from a public phone. It will give you some idea of the acute agony a young child locked inside himself all those years ago through this horrific betrayal of trust, and the secret he was forced to keep.
You murderous bastard
You deflowered my soul
You ripped me in half
before I was whole
A fragile flame
beauty then still
collapsed into the night
with the collapse of your will(chorus)
What are these emotions
These feelings inside
that erupt through my skin
like they've nowhere to hide;
that erupt from my skin
and fall to the floor
must I pick up the pieces
and make me once more?
After a long talk that night Simon was able to complete his project, and went on to gain his degree. But his problems were far from over, for here is the ‘black dog’ we collectively need to turn around and face.
What happened to Simon is not an isolated incident. It could happen to any child, even your child. Maybe it happened to you. Everyone needs to develop this awareness, for pedophilia is rife within our families and communities. And it is tearing our families apart from within. No one is safe. It was not strangers, but family members, extended family, or family friends who were the abusers of all the people I counseled. I am therefore very grateful that Simon trusted me enough to tell me his story – the rest of it – for it might just save the life of many children, including yours. But you have to be willing to face the ‘black dog’. If you do nothing else. This is what Simon told me.
He said he felt so much anger over what his parents had done to him (his stepfather had also psychically abused him for years), but feared confronting them because he could lose the financial support he needed. Therefore he was caught in a double bind. He said he wanted to make his parents suffer, and at one stage even considered failing his degree course to spite them. Because of the anger that now overwhelmed him seeking release, he no longer trusted himself around children because he felt the urge to do to them what was done to him. His attitude towards women also markedly changed, for he said that all he wants to do now is "f**k" them.
If you met Simon you would be shocked that he entertained such thoughts. Never would you suspect that such anger existed within him. He is softly spoken and comes across as intelligent, articulate, and caring. He feared that if he raised his voice it would let out all the anger he is struggling to hold in. Severe toxic shame consumed him, leaving him feeling worthless and undeserving.
We worked for some months to release his anger before I moved to live in another country, so I will never know if the deprogramming was sufficient for children to be safe around him. I do know that he would have to continue to keep working on himself for many years, and seek emotional support and help to be free of his urge to do to a child “what was done to him.”
The question I want to ask here, and I want you to consider, is this: If Simon had not been sexually abused by his father, would he have developed the urge to sexually abuse a child, giving him the label of ‘pedophile’? I would suggest that no, he would not. His preference to that point was to date women. What I clearly understood was that he was driven by an impulse to repeat the trauma he experienced, like a Freudian ‘compulsion to repeat’ in order to gain mastery over it. By becoming the perpetrator of abuse, he would free the victimized, traumatized, and angry child within him. Unfortunately, this rationale takes a person down a dead end street to become a victim of their compulsion to repeat, which leads them deeper and deeper into the very shame from which they seek to escape. Somehow. Like an alcoholic, they need just one more drink to feel okay about their drinking problem and what has caused it.
And so a sexually traumatized individual may seek out another child to abuse, and from that one abuse event as a three-year-old, it can lead to a monstrous ripple or multiplier effect of several abused children. And if each victim responds in the same way and feels the urge to do unto others what was “done to them,” one single act of sexual abuse can lead to a ripple effect that can eventually involve hundreds if not thousands of children.
Are you starting to see the picture, and the ‘black dog’ that has emerged as if out of nowhere to attack us from behind?
Find the courage to open your eyes and turn around to face the barking ‘black dog’. The whistleblowers trying to share the most unbelievable stories of vile things done to trafficked children, of which Lara Logan has tried to make us aware, is that voice that spoke to me when chills went up my spine, “Turn around and face the dog.”
John Bradshaw, former family therapist and television host of Bradshaw on the Family, correctly called the physical and sexual abuse of children “soul murder.” This scourge upon the whole of the Western world will not end until you ‘face the dog.’
However, it alarms me that there are those among us who do not believe that sexual abuse causes children harm. Detective Sargent Gary Wean knew otherwise. He was involved in investigating serious criminal child pornography, molestation, and child trafficking where they were sold as slaves to wealthy people in Beverley Hills in the fifties and early sixties – until he was fired for doing so. His anger over this made him further his investigations quietly in his own time. He wrote in his Notices and Reports to the People:
In the Jews’ Talmud, in the section called Sanhedrin, 54a -55a-55b: the rabbis preach that "Pederasty (sodomy) bears no guilt as long as it is performed on boys less than nine years old and sex is permitted with girls less than three years old."
In another section of this horrible, slimy document is the Kethuboth, 11a-11b, the rabbi says, "when a grown up man has intercourse with a little girl it is nothing, for when a girl is less than this it is if one puts the finger in the eye (7) for as tears come to the eyes again and again, so does virginity come back to the little girl under three years." And the filth goes on and on for hundreds and hundreds of pages.
Think about that for a moment.
Alfred Kinsey, in his 1948 Rockefeller-funded Kinsey Report, promoted the idea that “children can be unharmed by sex with adults” and that children are sexual beings from birth. I beg to differ, for I have counseling files full of proof that child sexual abuse has done irreparable harm to many, many children of both sexes. And, after working with hundreds of children of all ages as a teacher, I can categorically say that children are not, I repeat, not sexual from birth. They do not become sexual beings until the hormonal changes of puberty. Although three-year-old-girls can sometimes appear coquettish as a normal part of their girlish development, generally speaking, if children come across as ‘sexual beings’ to you it is because they have been sexualized through abuse and/or pornography, mass media, flagrant displays of adult sexuality in their homes, or are abused by other children who themselves have been similarly abused.
The Kinsey Report, comprising the publication of two books in 1947 and 1952 respectively (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female), is responsible for the sexual revolution in the sixties and the major changes in our sex lives that have been destroying our family foundations for decades, and sending our whole society into moral decline. Understand that Alfred Kinsey was a pedophile. As such he was instrumental in normalizing pedophilia and changing laws around the world to accommodate his own fetish – perhaps developed as a result of sexual abuse as a boy, possibly when he was in the Boy Scouts: an organization notorious for attracting pedophiles.
Judith Reisman, who exposed the sexual abuse that took place during the making of Kinsey’s report, said that the fallout of child sexual abuse is “massive, pandemic, and its global.” From what I have had the misfortune to witness and experience, I agree.
Children are beautiful, delightful, innocent and trusting human beings. They look to adults to lovingly guide them and keep them safe as they orientate themselves in the world into which they are born. To keep them safe, my heartfelt appeal is this: Please, turn around and face the barking ‘black dog’ and fend off this attack by those who mean us harm.
I will leave you to interpret Arthur Boyd’s painting, Kneeling Figure with Canvas and Black Can.
Further Information
Learn more of what Judith Reisman had to say about the Kinsey Report in the following interview (click below to watch on YouTube), or buy her book, Sexual Sabotage.
Learn from the following article how child molesters operate so you can keep your child safe:
In The Mind of a Child Molester
Read earlier posts from Juliet at Different Perspectives.