Unicorns (And Why I Should be Medicated)

Some days I really have no fucking idea what is wrong with me. Most of the time I know exactly what my wrongness is all about and shit and nothing about it really surprises me anymore. Yes, I sleep with stuffed animals and occasionally suck my thumb and am fascinated by serial murderers and psychology. I joke about drop-kicking infants but can’t even listen to someone talk about hurting animals in jest. I have no moral objections to murdering people before 10am. There is so much incongruity in my head that to write it all down would probably take me a week and an entire prescription of Ritalin. (Oh, there’s another one—I have a drug problem I’m completely blasé about but would never in a million years pick up a cigarette.) None of this can be explained away as anything even broadly in the realm of neurotypicality but in the end it’s my normal and at least I know how to deal with it. I understand it’s incredibly strange but nothing about it surprises me. If that makes sense.

It’s fucked up, but it’s my fucked-up-ness, dammit!

Every now and then, though, it’ll occur to me that I have something going on in my head that, upon further thought, turns out to be so completely out of left field and resoundingly bizarre. Like, even I can’t figure out why it ever occurred to me to think some of the shit I’ve thought. Even if there does actually turn out to be a reasonable reason to think about it, it’s never a reasonable conclusion I’ve drawn.

Long story short: sometimes it occurs to me that something has occurred to me that should never have occurred to occur to me in the first place and that I’ve managed to take it so far to its illogical extreme that it could reasonably be assumed to be a symptom of, like, schizophrenia or something. When even I manage to think it’s weird, you know something somewhere has gone deeply and irremediably wrong.

Which is how I ended up looking at unicorns. I don’t remember how we got on the subject but I ended up referring to virgins in a conversation with the boy as ‘unicorn bait’, which made me think of a specific facet of my fascination with unicorns.

I never grew out of unicorns—I still have a six-year-old girl’s loving fascination with unicorns. My VHS copy of ‘The Last Unicorn’ was played so much the tape wore out and broke. I have way too many kid’s books about unicorns since they tend not to make grownup books about fantasy creatures that aren’t sparkly vampires. I have plans for a unicorn tattoo that will take up my entire side from my breast to my thigh. And none of this embarrasses me in the slightest. I freaking love unicorns.

But you wouldn’t think that if I told you what my incredibly fucked-up old theory about unicorns and virgins is. Bear in mind, I’ve had this floating around in my head since I was about twelve or thirteen so it isn’t something I came up with on a drug-fuelled madness binge a few years back. This is something I came up with as a child. God knows why. Like I said, it’s even weird by my standards.

Since I used to fancy myself a fantasy writer, I tended to read all I could about mythical animals so I could put together mythologies of the fictional universes I was creating. (I never did end up writing much of it though—maybe that’s for the best.) So a love of unicorns combined with an excuse to read about them meant that unicorns got a lot of attention. One thing most people know about is that unicorns, in certain versions of the stories, can only be tamed by a virgin girl. Other variations say a unicorn can only be tamed by a ‘young girl’ or can only be tamed by a woman regardless of her age or the status of her hoo-hoo.

There are other variations still that have the unicorn not quite so discriminating and capable of being ‘tamed’ by a female monkey, or even a boy or a man in a dress.

So how discerning and intelligent your unicorn is depends on your specific mythology. But in the end it comes down to, a unicorn isn’t going to go quietly for something it doesn’t think is a woman. Now why would that be?

My response to this was: there are no female unicorns. No mares. Only stallions. They’re more docile for women and girls not based on their virginity but based purely on their sex—since there aren’t any girl unicorns for them to go for, the unicorns have to pretty much go for a willing female of any species. Since unicorns are all magical and shit (and also because at the time I came up with all of this I was twelve and my understanding of genetics was less than stellar), they’re capable of making a baby unicorn with any other species. Yes, even humans. Yes, it involves girl-on-unicorn sex. I’m not saying this is at all okay, I’m just saying that this is what I came up with.

Obviously it doesn’t end well for a girl knocked up with a unicorn—but, he who has no available alternative can’t be picky and it’s fairly easy to seduce a human girl because they’re so enamored with unicorns and thus the easiest targets. Still, it never ends well. There’s just no conceivable way for a human woman of any size or shape to successfully bring a unicorn pregnancy to term so she doesn’t survive the pregnancy. She dies giving birth or shortly before it, but even given the inevitable early death there are still good reasons a girl might sacrifice herself to bring a unicorn into the world. For one thing, unicorns are still magical and rare and massive status perks as well as bringing good fortune on anyone lucky enough to actually have one. So if, say, her family is extremely poor she might see it as a worthy sacrifice to make so that they can prosper. Princesses and noble girls facing an unwanted arranged marriage are known to take this route occasionally, as well—bizarrely, getting knocked up by a unicorn is one of the more honourable ways to illegally back out of a marriage contract. (Plus there are all kinds of tragic love stories of a princess or a duchess who loves a poor boy but is betrothed to a man better befitting her status whom she doesn’t love at all; she takes the unicorn route and wills the unicorn foal to the man she couldn’t marry, saving him from poverty and giving him the chance to find happiness.)

Mostly it’s poor girls, though, and the girls who do go through with it are held up for their noble sacrifice to their families rather than anyone dwelling on the fact that they had to commit a little bestiality in order to do it. Unicorns are unusually long-lived creatures (a hundred years is not an uncommon lifespan), so the unicorn foal stays in the family for a good long time and is more than enough to bring the poorest of peasants out of poverty. There is always the question of what you do with it once it reaches sexual maturity, but you can always breed it like a normal horse and turn it on a horse or an ox or something and see if you can get another unicorn out of it (more on that in a minute). One thing you definitely can’t do is castrate a unicorn stallion. Well, okay, you can, it just stops being a unicorn. You either have a unicorn stud, or a very pretty but very ordinary (and hornless—no balls, no horn) gelded horse.

It’s not like there are girls walking around all over the place bearing the illegitimate result of a unicorn-bonk. They’re unicorns, after all, and not exactly common. Plus it’s not like they only ever go for human girls. They’ll go for anything female that will hold still long enough. Deer, horses, donkeys, cows—they’re all much better unicorn-incubators than human girls and they tend not to die doing it. (So he can come back and get it on again!) And unicorns don’t have tremendous libidos—once every five to ten years is about all a standard unicorn stallion will mate.

Make your own ‘horny’ joke here.

I told you—this is so completely fucked up. Remember, I was only about twelve or thirteen when I came up with all this crap. It made sense that I was wondering about unicorns if I intended to write a fantasy universe, but nothing about that implies that the inevitable outcome is unicorn-on-girl rape and death.

There is no way in hell I can try and make this sound less fucked up than it is. It’s just not humanly possible.

It’s just all so completely weird. Even I think it’s beyond fucked up.

None of this is a part of my personal unicorn lore or anything, but the fact is that I still thought it up to begin with. At thirteen!

I mean seriously. My mind worked like that before drugs. I shudder to think what I’d come up with now but I don’t think I could outdo myself so I won’t be trying. I can’t think what would be worse—if it turned out I was unable even at my age to surpass what I came up with as a child, or that I might indeed successfully outdo myself.

Not Alone

Without going into uncomfortable and painful details, the circumstances of my upbringing were something significantly less than rosy. Mistreatment caused me to either develop substantial mental and emotional problems or aggravated pre-existing ones—or maybe did both—so I have an awful lot of issues with which I have to deal and accommodate on a daily basis. As a result, I’ve developed a whole laundry list of coping mechanisms for my various states of mental instability, all ranging from reasonably effective to completely-fuck-all-useless. A lot of them are pretty straightforward and natural and make a lot of sense—like looking up pictures of kittens and puppies and baby bunnies to pull myself out of a state of depression, or reading or watching something funny to calm myself down when I’m angry and frustrated. Others, however, seem a little sideways.

One of my rather more unusual strategies is also ultimately one of the more effective ones. When feeling very lonely and completely isolated and cut off from the world, the most obvious solution would be to spend time with friends, but that doesn’t work for me—for one thing, I’m almost completely socially retarded, and for another I have very few friends. Instead, I do something a little weird. I look up and read the personal missives from the distant past.

By and large, the diaries and journals, essays, and letters of people living hundreds or even thousands of years ago do generally depict a world almost totally foreign from mine, even when they originate from my country or culture. Often even the very words on the page, even in a language I know, have changed so immeasurably and drastically over time so as to essentially be another language all together now.

So how does this help me?

Because even as the world has changed and language has evolved, the sentiments behind the words—whether in Latin or Old English or ancient Greek—have hardly changed at all. For all that the past is far removed from us, we are still much more like our ancestors than we realize and our minds work almost entirely the same.

And I think that’s marvelous.

I always choose personal writings over scholarly ones for one simple reason: personal writings are much more true-to-life, more candid, and ultimately offer a more accurate view of the past than do the pomp words of intellectuals in ivory towers. That’s not to say I see no value in their work—quite to the contrary—but in the end the best way to feel connected to the past is through people who lived and worked and played just like everybody else. Conventional knowledge and entertainment have changed, but our thoughts have not.

The Romans had a practice of utilizing—for lack of a better term—‘cursing wells’. It was a bit like a modern wishing well, except that the Romans would scratch a ‘curse’ onto a small lead tablet and throw them into the water. Because the words were carved into metal, a good many of them survive to this day and offer a rare and tantalizing glimpse into the daily life of average Roman citizens. In the 1980s near Bath, England, the remains of a cursing well some 1600 years old were found and the words etched into them are surprising.

One tablet says, ‘Docimedes has lost two gloves and asks that the person who has stolen them lose his mind and his eyes.’ Another similar one by a woman named Saturnia demands that, ‘…he who has stolen it [a linen cloth] not know rest until he returns the property to the temple.’ Yet another expresses the desire for, ‘…he who has taken my Beatrice from me should turn into ice and melt.’

Sound familiar? It seems that even the people in Roman Briton were just as troubled by petty thefts and personal vendettas as we are today.

Even more telling—and much more amusing—is a seldom-mentioned aspect of the famously preserved city of Pompeii at the base of Mount Vesuvius. Everybody knows that people in their homes and animals in the street and even food on tables were covered in ash and preserved, but not many people know of something a bit more interesting that was preserved. Graffiti. And lots of it. Not only have people been defacing public property with writing for millennia, but the words have not changed much in three thousand years.

‘Antiochus hung out here with his girlfriend Cithera,’ and ‘Saturna was here September 3^rd’ and numerous other similar statements appear all over the city. Others are declarations of love—‘Secundus says hello to his Prima, wherever she is. I ask, my mistress, that you love me’, ‘Marcus loves Spendusa,’ and ‘I don’t want to sell my husband, not for all the gold in the world’ sound very much like the sorts of things that you might find written on the cubicle walls in the bathrooms of high schools.

More scribblings still are of a rather more raunchy subject matter and a perennial favourite: sex. ‘Phileros is a eunuch!’ appears in one doorway. ‘I screwed a lot of girls here’ and ‘I screwed the barmaid’ appear in two inns. Another states, ‘Secundus likes to screw boys’. ‘Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog.’ (One wonders what, exactly, the dogs and girls of Pompeii were getting up to.)

A good amount of Pompeii’s graffiti is just plain funny—‘Epaphra, you are bald!’, ‘The man I am having dinner with is a barbarian’ (this sounds rather like something a woman might write in the ladies room of a restaurant if she’s on a particularly apocalyptic date), ‘One who buggers a fire burns his penis,’ and ‘We have wet the bed, host. I confess we have done wrong. If you want to know why, there was no chamber pot’ all induce a hearty giggle. As do the surprising number of references to poop. ‘Apollinarus, doctor of the emperor Titus, defecated well here’ is written against the side of a house; ‘Anyone who wishes to defecate in this place is advised to move along. If you act contrary to this warning, you must pay a fine. Children must pay silver; slaves will be beaten on their behinds’ is found in a water tower, and one man apparently had such a, ahem, ‘moving’ experience that he wrote ‘Secundus defecated here’ three times in a public latrine. (But in favour of Secundus, at least he wasn’t doing it outside a stranger’s house.)

There is even a bar tab preserved for posterity, showing that someone owes money for, ‘Some nuts, 13 coins; drinks, 14 coins; lard, 2 coins; bread, 3 coins; three meat cutlets, 12 coins; four sausages, 8 coins; total, 51 coins.’ (Does being roasted in volcanic ash excuse him from paying his tab?)

It’s all good fun to have a laugh over, but except that the names are all quite obviously Latin and Greek in origin and occasionally make reference to gods no longer worshiped, without exception they sound very much like the kind of graffiti found today. Perhaps in the restrooms at a truck stop, or in alleys between buildings, or on desks in schools. It hasn’t changed.

We haven’t changed.

Some people might be rather offended by the insinuation that they think very much like people who lived long ago thought. But I don’t see it that way. Knowing that, for all the drastic changes in the last few hundred years, for the rise and fall of empires, for the evolution of language and government and technology and science… we are still fundamentally the same people. More than that, we have more in common with everyone else in the world—whether separated by a thousand miles or a thousand years—than we might ever have known.

And I find that a comforting thought.

The world becomes smaller—and a little less lonely.

The Young and the Stupid

I think that, at one time or another, we all take a look back at some of the things we did as children and adolescents and are completely shocked that we were that stupid, and equally surprised that we actually survived our own stupidity. There seems to be a direct inverse correlation between one’s intelligence and one’s ability to survive accidents. This explains how idiots routinely walk unscathed from spectacular train wrecks and people of renowned talent and promise die slipping in the shower. (To whit—Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, died at fifty after a cold became pneumonia became heart failure; Lindsey Lohan snorted an entire Colombian drug cartel and didn’t even hiccup.)

I remember clearly discovering parachutes when I was about eight or so, and immediately taking this to mean that I could float serenely to earth from any height simply by holding any reasonably good-sized piece of fabric over my head by the corners—a theory I tested by (I swear this is true) jumping off the roof of the garage with a sheet. This is not something I did just once and got hurt or in trouble over it and then never tried again—I did it on a number of occasions, and continued to do so for a remarkably long time. (I also did it with umbrellas of various sizes to see it they worked, too.) It goes without saying that this doesn’t work at all, in any way—it doesn’t even come close to working—but repeated failures did very little to deter me from continuing with my experiments.

Amazingly, my parents knew what I was doing but did absolutely nothing to try and discourage me. To this day I don’t know why, but they knew I was extremely stubborn and not predisposed to following unsolicited advice no matter how sound it is, so I suspect they figured I’d stop on my own once I suffered a severe enough injury, like a broken leg or death. Either that or there was some kind of entertainment value in watching their daughter climb onto the roof and jump off again and again, each time sincerely expecting a result other than impacting the ground like a retarded little meteorite. No, actually, that’s not really fair—meteorites don’t climb back up into the atmosphere and jump again.

Eventually I did stop doing it, but it took an embarrassingly long time for me to figure out that it wasn’t working. Not that I’m taking my good fortune for granted here, but I really think I should have been killed doing that. Fortunately—in case you were wondering—I didn’t die. I didn’t even suffer anything worse than a few scratches; I was hurt much worse than that the time my dad and my uncles threw me out of my grandpa’s pool onto the bocce-ball court. (This is also true.)

The point is that, as children, we do things that make our adult selves cringe in horror at the risks we took. ‘What was I thinking?!’ seems to be a common mantra among people recalling childhood stupidity. The answer is pretty straightforward: you weren’t. None of us were. Scientists have deduced that nobody has the ability to think anything through until well into their twenties. Really. I swear I’m not lying.

I mention all of this so I can segue into my next anecdote. Since winter is on its way and the air is starting to get just a touch frosty, I naturally began to think about snow and all the memories I have associated with it. Most of these memories involve miserably digging my car out and losing boots in big snowdrifts, but some of them are about the fun things I used to do in the snow—back when getting cold and wet and courting certain death counted as ‘fun’.

When I was little I didn’t live in New York—unlike Long Island which is completely flat, this place was extremely hilly. The area where my parents live is really uneven, to the point where the property developers had to accommodate the wildly variant lay of the land by building a lot of the houses with basements that are subterranean on one side of the house but come out at ground level on the other—sometimes the slope is so big that they also had to build stairs going down to the ground because the basement door is still several feet above it.

There are still some places where it was just flat-out impossible to build a house. One of these areas is about a quarter of a mile from my old home, between two houses. It’s a stretch of empty land some 200 yards wide and the whole thing is one enormous hill far too steep to build anything on. Level ground extends only a little past the edge of the sidewalk, whereupon the ground takes a massive plunge straight down at an almost completely vertical angle before it levels out again about sixty feet below and fifteen horizontal feet from where it started.

This sounds like hyperbole, but it really isn’t. I’m not exaggerating in the slightest. It actually is that steep.

And that was the neighbourhood sledding hill.

Looking back on it, I’m really astounded that our parents let us all play on that hill because absolutely nothing about it even remotely suggests it might be a safe place for children to play. On such a dramatic slope, small children on plastic sleds pick up an enormous amount of speed very quickly—I think a few kids might have broken the sound barrier—and braking was almost impossible. You just had to wait until you ran out of momentum, but even that didn’t really work out well because just a few yards beyond the bottom of the hill is an ancient and rusted barbed wire fence leftover from when the builders marked off the edge of the development during construction. It was presumed among us children that any contact with the fence was a guaranteed trip to the doctor for a tetanus shot, so there was always a certain sense of urgency and a lot of frantic scrambling to slow down followed by a dramatic emergency escape from the sled by leaping off of it at several times the federal speed limit.

The neighbourhood had all been built up in the 70s, when the area was mostly former farmland and quite empty, but in the twenty-odd years between that and my sledding days, a huge sprawling forest had grown up on all sides. The effect was rather like living in ‘Hansel and Gretel’. You sort of expected to see a gingerbread cottage. A lot of this forest was located right at the foot of the sledding hill, producing yet another energetically hazardous situation, because if for some reason the barbed wire didn’t stop you (there were gaps in it), then you would end up rocketing through the woods where you would quickly get helplessly lost and have to live the rest of your life eating tree bark and sleeping with the pack of wolves who adopted you.

At least, that’s what we thought would happen.

Right after the trees thinned out, there was yet another big hill. Depending on the angle at which you went down, you could end up in one of two places: a large reservoir or the highway. Even though both outcomes were potentially lethal, it was commonly agreed that the highway was the lesser of two evils. Yes there was every chance we could have been flattened by a truck, but there was a vague sort of hope that at least drivers would make some kind of attempt to swerve to avoid running us over—whereas piranhas weren’t known for being quite so forgiving. We had no reason to believe this other than simply by virtue of the fact that we were all children and therefore mind-bendingly stupid, but somehow we all came to the belief that the reservoir had piranhas in it. And piranhas are one of those real-world animals that take on mythic proportions to children—like sharks and lions and dinosaurs—and we believed them capable of total annihilation. Getting a toe in the water with piranhas meant certain doom and they would devour you completely and there would be nothing left for your parents to bury. The fact that residential drainage ditches are not typically known for being infested with Amazonian fish didn’t seem to occur to us.

(Ironically, years later there really did end up being a legitimate bodily threat in the water all over the state through the sudden population explosion of an invasive species of horror-movie caliber fish called snakeheads. Up to three feet long and sometimes even longer, extremely aggressive, and full of sharp teeth, snakeheads will eat anything they can rip chunks out of and are capable of leaving the water to hunt on land. Reports abounded of innocent fishermen and happy vacationers taking an innocent romp along the water only to end up minus one limb, beloved family pets reduced to just a bit of disassociated fur. It was not a particularly fortuitous time to be renting lakeside property. No one knew where they’d come from or how they got there but eventually the National Park Service hypothesized that the fish were bought illegally from international grocers—the snakehead is a popular food in Asia and Africa—and then for some reason were dumped alive into various bodies of water, where they had no competition and began having lots of snakehead sex and making evil snakehead babies.)

Sometimes when I go to visit my parents, I’ll walk by the old sledding hill and take a look at it. During the summer it doesn’t look quite so bad, but covered in snow it becomes clear how dangerous it was. In childhood it seemed so benign, but as an adult I just see the whole thing as a lot of potential bloodshed and broken bones just waiting anxiously to happen. Of all the stupid things I did as a child, it seems like the worst ones were things my parents not only allowed but actually encouraged me to do. (Remind me to tell you about my dad teaching me how to catch snakes bare-handed when I was eight.) It wasn’t even just my parents, either—everyone’s parents let them do this. After all, close encounters with mortality are well known to build character, aren’t they?

Actually, even decades later, I am not entirely convinced that this wasn’t some attempt on their part at culling the herd.

When the Best of Intentions Backfire

At the risk of revealing my age, I lived through the 80s and 90s with all of their appallingly-acted and ultimately completely misguided Public Safety Ads and programs oriented towards children to teach them how to stay safe from the evils of the world, like drugs and pedophiles and mysterious grownups who wanted to kidnap us for no reason. Oh, and against evil people who poisoned Halloween candy just to kill kids.

Here's the thing though: those programs didn't work. They actually did the opposite of work. The D.A.R.E (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program was discontinued some years ago and subsequent follow-up studies on children who went through the program--as well as those who didn't--revealed that not only were graduates of the program not any less likely to end up involved in drugs but that sometimes they were actually MORE likely to do them. D.A.R.E portrayed drugs as something the 'cool' kids did--I remember that pretty clearly, that the basic message was 'SAY NO TO DRUGS, even though you're totally gonna have to go against all the most popular people in school and will grow up socially isolated and treated like a leper BUT DON'T TAKE THE JOINT, KIDS!'

Aside from drugs--which have been done to death in every quarter--the other big issue we kids had to be schooled on avoiding over and over again was 'Stranger Danger'. And that's the one I want to talk about.

While reading a fashion-related Tumblr, I came across this video which appears to be from the very late 80s or very early 90s. It teaches children 'street smarts' on how to avoid dangerous grownups by avoiding people with candy or guys asking for help finding a puppy that doesn't exist. Obviously there's some merit to teaching kids to be wary of people they don't know offering treats--children have no real critical thinking skills and their trust can easily be earned with food much like a dog--but in every other way this video FAILS completely. So does every single aspect of the 'Stranger Danger' belief. While it's true that there are people who want to do horrible things to children, that child-molesters exist and children are occasionally taken, nothing ever discussed in lectures on avoiding strangers addressed the real danger. This video is no different.


The bottom line is, none of the scenarios in this video are likely to happen. It teaches children to be afraid of people for no legitimate reason, as well as teaching them absolutely NOTHING about the people who ARE a danger to them.

The majority of abductions are familial abductions--one parent taking the child or children from the other in a custody dispute, or some other family member deciding for one reason or another that they can do a better job raising the kid and spiriting them away. And most of these abductions are resolved within a few hours or a few days. While it isn't completely unknown for strangers to kidnap children, it's extremely unlikely. Statistically speaking a child is much, much more likely to be abducted by someone they know. What's more, if someone is truly and genuinely intent on snatching a child at random for nefarious purposes, THEY AREN'T GOING TO WASTE THEIR TIME TRYING TO LURE OR COERCE THE CHILD TO COME WITH THEM OF THEIR OWN ACCORD. People point to the Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapping as proof that children need to be afraid of strangers, but they're forgetting that Phillip Garrido (her abductor) did not lure her into his car of her own accord by promising candy or puppies or video games. He simply drove up next to her, grabbed her, and drove off. If someone's intention is to kidnap a child, it's quicker and easier for them to do it with a simple snatch-and-grab. No amount of 'Stranger Danger' coaching in the world can prepare a child to avoid that risk. You can teach them to say no to strangers with candy all you like but in the end it isn't going to do them much good if someone is THAT determined to take them.

The unspoken goal of the 'Stranger Danger' program is to help kids keep themselves safe from people who want to molest them--again, the misguided belief being that it's creepy strangers in windowless panel vans who pick kids up off the street at random and diddle them in parking garages. Like I said, it teaches children to be afraid of the wrong people.


I don't have any exact numbers on me at the moment, but I believe something like 80% or 90% of sexual abuse and molestation is perpetrated by someone close to the victim. You need only look as far as the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal to see that--who would be more trusted, and closer to the victim, than the parish priest?

Children--especially ones taught from infancy that strangers are inherently bad--aren't completely fucking stupid. If someone they don't know approaches them and tries to get their hands on them, most kids will scream and yell and fight like a wet alley cat. If they've been taught to be afraid of strangers, they not only won't trust strangers but will actively try to fight their way away from them. And guess what? People who want to diddle kids know this and know that if they want to get a long-term victim, they must first become a trusted part of that victim's life. Family friends, neighbours, relatives, babysitters, and priests are the people who molest children. And yet until recently this wasn't talked about AT ALL--parents ingraining a paranoid fear of strangers into their children's minds were at the same time all too happy to leave their children with Uncle Rick, who touches their no-no-parts when the lights are off. Not only this, but because of the close ties families usually have to the offenders it will often be ignored or swept under the carpet. It's easier to put the blame on a faceless stranger than it is to accept that the predator is one of your own, in your midst, and was there the whole time.

Speaking personally, 'Stranger Danger' didn't help me one bit. It did more harm than good. For so long I was told over and over again that people I didn't know were dangerous. This was always the insinuation: strangers are not your friends. I don't know how normal my reaction is or if there are very many other people who ended up the same way I did, but the fear instilled in me made me TERRIFIED to talk to people I didn't know. It made me scared for my life when I was in a situation where I had to interact with people I didn't know--all without any cause at all.

I'm an adult now. An adult who should know how to approach new people. By and large my people-judging skills are very well developed and I can usually tell very quickly when someone might be trouble. For the most part I trust my own instincts, as well, but I cannot (and may never) get rid of this deep-seated fear that has basically crippled me to the point where even as an adult I am completely terrified of people I don't know--even though I'm aware they aren't going to hurt me.


By all means teach children not to take candy from strangers.


But let's not forget that abuse begins where most everything begins: in the comfort and safety of your own home.