I have been having a lot of sleepless nights since I had children, and even now that my girls are grown, I still have sleepless night. I have sleepless nights for (other peoples)children I see in bad situations where you can tell right away a child isn't being treated well, or in documentaries where children are sold by parents into sexual slavery. These things bother me so much. Oh, I do get sleep but I think about these things so often that sleep can elude me at times, and I even have bad dreams about them.

I have so many ideas about what should happen to people who molest children, but what is the right things to do to these people when they are eventually caught, what should be a punishment for them. The punishments they have had only makes them get back out of prison and do the same things, or simmilar things over again. Then sometimes they don't even get caught and the police know about them and what they do, and yet they don't try to stop them or do anything about the things they do.

These kinds of situations for kids like this is so sad and seems so hopeless. Why do things like this happen? Why is things like this allowed to happen? I know the answer, but I just want to push away the answer and believe there is a better answer. Sometimes I think there are many things that can be done and are being done so I can make myself feel better, but then I know that there is so much of it going on that not everything that can be done gets done, and not even justice is always thought of most of the time.

These is so much hopelessness in the world, and so many people who argue for terroist who are tortured and shout loud and long for the terroist. Then there are children in the world who are being tortured in bad situations where it seems like everyone only gives it a passing tug of guilt on their consciousness and then they put it out of their head quickly to forget it and think of it no more. Children in sexual slavery only gets a bit of attention on the rare occassion, and the men who go from the US to other countries to get into nasty situations like this are given just a slight bit of attention then they disappear from public thought. To go to the most popular worries of the misunderstood terroist who is being done a great misjustic by being tortured. This all seems so wrong!!!

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When a man sleeps in his bed, his soul leaves him to soar above, each soul according to its own way.......
The Zohar

I understand what you are saying. I was wondering while I was reading your post if it would help your sleepless nights to start a foundation or fight for the rights of children. If you decide to do this, let me know if there is anything I or this forum can do to help.

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Shylady


When my old friend Bettejo told me she was going to Iraq I was against it since she would be in danger. We agreed thopugh that war itself and its effects must be witnessed impartially by some in society to allow war to be felt for what it is. So Bettejo went to Iraq and fortunately returned. She had witnessed hopelessness and because it was part of her, she could pass the reality of it along to a reporter. She understood by experience what others only argued over.

Better Not

SOMETIMES IT'S BETTER
NOT TO HEAL
Journal of Healing – June 18, 2003
By Mary Koch

Three months in Baghdad, witnessing war while fasting for peace, took a toll on Bettejo Passalaqua. Weak and sick, she returned to the U.S. a few weeks ago.

Bettejo went to Iraq earlier this year as a peace activist. Before that, she'd served for six years as a pastoral assistant for the Catholic church on the Colville Indian Reservation. Now she's staying with friends in Okanogan

Resting and being with friends has been healing, she says, but she's not seeking full recovery.

"I'm not sure how healed I am at this point," she told me. "I wouldn't want to become so healed that I lose my my feeling for it. We carry these things with us for a reason."

Bettejo and I were having this conversation in a quiet backyard on a perfect June morning. A native of Florida, she set her lawn chair in the hot sun. A native of Minnesota, I chose a nearby chair under the shade of a large tree. She sipped what she called her "morning caffeine." I drank ice water.

Individuals have these small differences. But there was a yawning, gaping difference between Bettejo and me. For me, Iraq was a worrisome but distant problem. For her, Iraq is at the core of every waking moment.

"When I came back, maybe after ten days I walked outside and it was a beautiful day. I felt good for just a moment. It was maybe 15 seconds before I said, 'What's happening in Baghdad?' and broke down again."

A 42-year-old grandmother of six, Bettejo was not a stranger to hardship when she went to Iraq.

"I've worked in the South Bronx and I worked here on the reservation and encountered a tremendous amount of suffering among the people," she said. "But not so concentrated -- like going into a hospital with children dying. Then after the bombing, children paralyzed, no arms or legs."

Before the war began, Bettejo had participated in a vigil at the border of Kuwait. She'd traveled with the Iraq Peace Team across the desert, witnessing the devastation still visible from the Gulf War. Not as visible but omnipresent was the depleted uranium pollution of soil and air that remains from ammunition used by U.S. forces. Medical authorities in Iraq have been charting a dramatic increase in cancer caused, they say, by depleted uranium.

Bettejo worked in a Baghdad hospital, providing arts and crafts for children in a cancer ward.

"It was a diversion," she says, "this stupid white woman coming in with paper and crayons."

"Do you think it made a difference?" I ask.

She shrugs and answers, "Other people said it did."

That's the deepest wound from Iraq: "There's a feeling of devastation, a sense of defeat, of helplessness," Bettejo says.

How do you overcome helplessness?

"Maybe the healing I've experienced thus far comes from my feeling to do service, to be of service," she answers.

Bettejo doesn't know yet what that service will be. "The best I can do is to get people to ask questions . . . to ask, 'Is this right? Can we do better?'"

The day after we talked, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer carried a front page story about the problems hospitals in Iraq are facing, especially the problems of treating children with cancer.

Ordinarily I would have scanned the story, then moved on. This time, after reading carefully, slowly, I filed the story in my heart. I'd been with someone who'd been with those children. And now those far-away problems don't seem so far away.



(Mary Koch writes about health care issues and her experiences as a family caregiver. Her husband, retired newspaper publisher John E. Andrist, was severely disabled by a stroke in 1993. They welcome your letters at P.O. Box 3346, Omak WA 98841 or e-mail: marykoch@marykoch.com

That's a good idea LK.

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I wanna keep it in my heart whats ahppening to children and young teenaged kids. I feel like I'm betraying something if I forget about it all.

Thanks for telling me about your friend, she sounds very nice. I know and fell like I need to do something, only I don't know what. I feel so incapable, unskilled, and lost as to how to go about doing anything. I still do feel like it needs to start somewhere, like somebody needs to do something.

The sex slave trade even happens in Iran, and mabye even Iraq as well. Sex Slavery New Face of Oppression of Women in Iran; Sex Slavery - Indonesia Matters; CNN.com - Sex slavery: The growing trade - March 8, 2001; Global Sex Slavery

I myself was a runaway, as a young teenager on up until I was 18, in one way or another. I didn't meet any men who were good and moral men and helped me out out of the goodness of their heart. This is right here in the US, in Tennessee, Chattanooga where I grew up. Men weren't worried about helping me out, or any girl, all they wanted was to get what they came for. Oh, some offered to help me go home, and did, but not before they'd taken what they wanted from me first. Some wanted to take me home with them. They were always worried about me being in the terrible neighborhood, but they weren't detered from their mission they were on to get to that neighborhood they so dispised me being in. It was a black neighborhood, and pimps where like bees on honey with any young innocent girl, foolishly came into their scope of existence.

Even on the interstate where I sometimes ran away to to get away from even the pimps, there never were any men who would give me a ride for free, and always made that dreaded stop at the rest area. If I didn't have sex with them I'd be back out walking when I was exhausted if I'd even get into their cars. I didn't hich-hick didn't stick out my thumb, I just walked. But when I became tired I'd get into any car that stopped. Usually if I wasn't tired I'd say no and walk on. This is how it all went though, there was never a break of meeting up with some nice guy who treated me like a fatherly figure. If any did treat me as a fatherly figure it wasn't in the way of my/an Ideal fatherly figure.

When I was 15 I got my first real boyfriend, and I'd run away to go to his home, and skip school, my mom would send the police after me and sometimes they found me and sometimes they didn't. My boyfriends mom had been a retired madam (lady pimp) and she ran a goodtime house out any appartment she rented. So she'd sceam with her son and they'd talk me into, or pressure me to have sex with certain men for money. When I didn't my boyfriend would make me leave him and send me walking to my home with my mom. I was so starved for love and I thought I was in love with him, so every once in a while I'd do what they wanted, if the man didn't look too disgusting to me, and if he did the love went out the window and I'd walk home. And so this is how it went until I was 18 years old.

Then I met a drug dealer pimp, whom I was to ignorant to know what he was and I thought I fell in love with him, and even had my oldest daughter by him. He beat on me when I didn't sell myself, but he was always happy and in good moods as long as I did sell myself.

I thought I was stuck in the worst place in my life when I turned 22 and had a 2 year old, and looked at my life. I longed to get out of it all and get my daughter and the baby I got pregnant with a gooder life than I'd had. I didn't know what to do. I thought I was ugly and I knew I was no good. I thought I was the lowest scum of the earth for being a whore. I wasn't addicted to drugs, but I did them because my boyfriend did them and to help myself to forget that I was doing something I knew that God hatted and I was living the way God hated, so it was easy for me to give up the drugs when I finally had to.

I lost my kids to the child protective services and thats what made me forget the man whom I thought I couldn't live without, when he wouldn't straighten up with me and help me do what I needed to get our baby back and the new baby that belonged to a married man. I knew I loved my girls more than anything else, and so they made me get my life together. And the married man whom I'd been pregnant by was divorced by his wife who'd found out about us and the baby, and so he married me. He never expected me to do the things other men had expected me to do. He worked and didn't even want me to work, he just wanted me to stay home and be a wife and mom which I was perfectly content to do. It was the normal life I'd always dreamed of and never had thought I'd get it or the real love of a man.

FRONTLINE: sex slaves | PBS

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When a man sleeps in his bed, his soul leaves him to soar above, each soul according to its own way.......
The Zohar

Shylady

I'm terribly sorry to read this. All i can say is that all men are not like this. Frankly I don't understand how any man can get an erection from a woman in physical or psychological pain let alone a child. I know I can't and men that I know and respect are the same. The need to help is just too strong.

Yet I know what you are telling me is true. I know what Bettejo went through as well when sshe was young and it is a horror story. I really think for a while you should help others but not directly with those having endured sexual abuse. The pain is still too strong.

Why not first get involved with an organization like Operation Iraqi Children. It was begun by the actor who played Forest Gump and seems on the up and up. I know there are a lot of phony organizations but this seems legit.

Operation Iraqi Children

Perhaps there is a branch in your area. The bottom line is that in a legit organization you would be helping kids even if on a volunteer basis. Once you became a little hardened to what you would learn about the suffering that goes on, you can feel you are playing a part in making things better.

You will meet nice people and perhaps some of them will also be involved with organizations that deal with the sexual abuse of children. By this time you could cope without cracking.

Sincere volunteers are always needed and you would be surprised the opportunities that can come to sincere volunteers.

I was on the list to receive emails by Bettejo from Iraq. She was with a peace group called "Voices in the Wilderness." The second paragraph of the following letter tore me up and I wasn't even there. But she did good for the kids, the driver, and those that dealt with her when she returned. I just don't know if I could have looked at those kids and the way they looked at her without cracking. Bettejo told me that some reporters came by but didn't stay. They couldn't take it.

You don't have to be like a Bettejo to start but simply beginning with volunteer service to practice experiencing and dealing with the suffering so you can help rather than crack.

The bottom line is kids suffering from whatever and from no fault of their own need help from those capable of providing it in whatever form

I truly wish you the best.

It is so good to hear about groups like that. Thanks for the name of the other one. It is kinda hard just trying to find places where you know you can help organizations that are for real.

__________________
When a man sleeps in his bed, his soul leaves him to soar above, each soul according to its own way.......
The Zohar