Dylan Farrow has moved the American conversation on silence and impunity for sexual abuse. In an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, she describes how her stepfather, film director Woody Allen, groomed and raped her when she was seven years old.
She says, “this is not a ‘he said, child said’ situation.” This happened. Farrow wonders why Hollywood stars, like Blake Lively, who spoke out against Harvey Weinstein and child sex abuse, continue to work with and thereby protect Woody Allen. She details how Kate Winslet, Greta Gerwig and others benefit financially and professionally by staying silent about Allen’s rape and diminishing the credibility of a child-rape survivor and her mother, Mia Farrow.
Men, overwhelmingly white men in positions of power, who rape children continue to be protected in the United States. As Farrow notes the #SilenceBreakers #MeToo revolution against impunity for abuse has been selective. Children and child rape are being ignored. In Epidemic: America’s Trade in Child Rape, my newly-released book, I document the context that allows predators like Woody Allen to get away with these crimes against children.
We are sustaining crisis-level numbers of seemingly normal, often powerful and successful, men involved in America’s illegal child sex abuse industry. It does not matter if the perpetrator is on the demand-side, with an incessant appetite for brutal child rape to achieve sexual gratification, or the supply-side of raping children, often their own or those of friends and relatives, and trading this abuse online. Both supply and demand of child pornography, which almost always intertwine, have reached epidemic proportions and too few are talking about it.
The rape and torture of thousands of children in America is shared every day in videos, photos and live-streams. Men, and some women, are raping children, including infants and toddlers, and distributing evidence of the crime on the internet in epidemic numbers. These offences against our children are flourishing, in part, because we refuse to move beyond our collective denial that this criminality, often called child pornography, has reached catastrophic levels in America.
The problem of child sex abuse and its cover-up is real. A generation of American children are being destroyed. If you think this happens to someone else’s children and your children are safe, you are mistaken. Your children might be enduring sexual abuse right now while you remain dangerously ignorant. America’s appetite for child pornography puts all our children at risk. Your children and mine.
This is America’s wake-up call about a subject few want to acknowledge. We have become a country that protects, in many ways for many years, child rapists like Woody Allen. Not only has Woody Allen avoided jail for his crimes, he further abused Mia Farrow, Dylan’s mother, by dragging her through a destructive legal battle attempting to gain custody of her daughter; the child he was raping.
This is common practice for child predators. Patricia Mitchell, of Patricia’s Children, explains how United States family courts have become criminal enterprises in her recent Huffington Post articles. Family courts are known secure-supply lines for paedophiles to obtain control over, and unfettered access to, children. They are trafficking children.
Dylan Farrow said, “I told the truth to the authorities then, and I have been telling it, unaltered, for more than 20 years.”
My daughter, like Dylan Farrow, told the truth. I have told the truth. Medical professionals told the truth. My daughter, confirmed for rape at two years old by her father, and I have also been ignored. My daughter was placed in the sole custody of her father. I wrote Epidemic: America’s Trade in Child Rape for my daughter and all child survivors like Dylan Farrow.
So, children would be believed. So, America would stop protecting men who rape children. Men like Woody Allen. And so many more. Why is the #MeToo #SilenceBreakers movement ignoring child rape survivors?
Don’t children count too?
Dr Lori Handrahan has been a humanitarian and academic for over twenty-years. Her Ph.D. is from The London School of Economics. She may be contacted on her website: www.LoriHandrahan.com