the end of the innocence

We didn’t have a care in the world
with mommy and daddy standing by.
- Don Henley/Bruce Hornsby

Five years old.

She isn’t old enough yet to think that boys are “icky.”

She isn’t old enough to question the motives of the people she encounters.

The people she encounters are all considered her friends within minutes if not immediately.

And yesterday, while playing on the inside play area of a fast-food chain, she was accosted.

Two nine-year-old boys were apparently bullying around the younger kids. They were up in the upper reaches of the structure, where their voices would be muffled and there was no way to see what was going on.

My daughter tried to pass by them.

They started pulling on her clothes.

They pulled down her pants.

She says they spanked her, but she seems a little confused about that. She knows what a spanking is – which makes me think they did something else.

Whether they did or not, I’m mad as hell.

Where on earth does a nine-year-old get the idea that it is acceptable to pull down a little girl’s pants?

Who taught these kids so little respect for others?

Why do I have to teach my daughter at five years old how to react if someone tries to touch her inappropriately?

Why did the dad, when my wife confronted him, insist that it must have been the other boy, his girlfriend’s son, because “that doesn’t sound like something my son would do” rather than just apologize and take both kids to the woodshed?

My daughter is a happy, friendly person. Why do I have to teach her to be wary this early?

I know, probably better than most, that it is a mean world out there. I sit in a room every week with guys who were abused as children, and some of them became child abusers. I get that this isn’t the world of Leave It To Beaver.

I just wanted another couple of years, a little more time, before this touched my kids’ lives.