Child predator forces parents to shatter child's innocence

Guest column

March 12, 2010

By Jennifer Atkinson

Yesterday, I let the Boogeyman out of the closet.

I have to say, he was a real killjoy, too. Shortly thereafter, I had to lull my 5-year-old daughter into a false sense of security so that she could to go bed and actually sleep, nightmare free.

Today, while she is at school, I look at my daughter's two most cherished things, her soft white (or at least it used to be white) "Bun-bun" and pale pink side-kick "Blankie", and I see her in them, the sweet, adorable baby who has been with us for five incredible years.

My husband and I have spent those years loving our child more than we could ever have imagined possible, nurturing and enriching her with our tenderness and experience while ensuring that she maintains her innocence. We have carefully filtered out of our daughter's life any knowledge that we deem inappropriate for her age. We are her protectors after all. It is our job as her parents to choose wisely all reading and viewing materials, activities and discussion topics. We firmly believe in the term 'age-appropriate'.

Despite our efforts to protect our daughter from life's uglier side, her imagination blossomed so that by the time she was four, her mind could create some pretty unsavoury characters, most of whom showed up in the middle of the night. Under the bed and closet checks still go on, but our tender little girl is, unfortunately, learning it is not the phantoms she thinks she sees that are the horrors of our world, but people.

Until yesterday, my daughter thought the biggest baddies out there were thieves, or as she calls them, 'stealers'. She was also aware of possible threats from animals, such as bears and coyotes. Now she is in on a much more frightening secret, one that I didn't want to have to explain to her, ever, and certainly not when she is so young - a real predator is a child-molester and/or killer.

Like most parents in the area, we received a letter from the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board's director of education, warning about a possible child-molester. The Peterborough and Northumberland County OPP have issued an alert concerning a person who has attempted to lure children into his/her vehicle.

There is no nice way of addressing with a child such a vile topic as child molestation and murder. This time, my husband and I knew that we could not shield our little girl from the ugly truth. We talked with her and watched her face grow confused and worried. We listened to her questions. "What would that person do to me?"; "Will he come to our home?". We tried our best to answer and reassure her, but reassurances seem like lies or at best, half-truths, when they involve predators of children.

I felt like I had sent our daughter plummeting from her safe, innocent world into a nightmarish real world. Safety and preparedness, I tell myself. As her parents, we had to make our daughter fall from innocence. Why? To protect her.