I received the news digitally, in a text from an old housemate, Kat. Just to let you know, the message said. I was curled up on my couch, twined up with the new lover, whom I was introducing to a trashy sci-fi series I’d watched in the months after my first stint in a hospital day program, when I still felt too fragile for the social world, too tentative in my new routines, my new thought patterns, my new skin, to expose them too frequently to the wider world.
There’s a hopelessness about child sexual abuse. We’ve criminalised it. We prosecute it. But we can’t seem to stop it. The terrible stories that tumble out of every inquiry, every institution when it’s shaken upside-down, are too similar to the stories that keep rolling into news reports. This stuff is still going on.