Part 2 - I may be blonde but I'm not all together ... er, all together

Okay, so where were we when we were so rudely interrupted by an onslaught of gardening and at last count – 14 yards of mulch being moved around our gardens, front, side and back.

Did you know knees sweat? I didn’t either, but they apparently do.



So yeah, I shoplifted. No one caught me, no one inquired where these things were coming from at home and eventually the guilt got to be too much and it just wasn’t fun any more. So I stopped.

The only reason I started in the first place was because a friend dared me to. I didn’t have the now famous, “Winona Ryder”, syndrome of taking things and mass denial when caught. Wouldn’t you have more respect for her if she had just stood up and admitted she had some psychological flaw that she just couldn’t help herself, but she’s sorry and is seeking help? I would have.

Here’s the thing though. Without help or incarceration she will be out there still unable to stop herself from doing it. However, no young girls will be missing and turn up dead and buried in Winona’s back garden.

Which brings us to Marc Dutroux, a 47-year-old Belgian pedophile. I’m using him only so we don’t forget that this is not a problem that is ours alone here in the States.

In 1989 Dutoux was convicted of raping and abusing five young girls and was sentenced to 13 years but was released in 1992 on good behavior.



Um, well yeah, because there are NO young girls to abuse in prison for him to pray on.

Oy. Who makes these decisions?

Shortly after his release, young girls began to disappear from nearby neighborhoods where Dutroux owned houses.


In August of 1996 two girls, ages 12 and 14 were found alive in the basement dungeun of on of Dutroux’s houses. They had both been raped repeatedly. One of the girls had been held for 80 days while the other had been there for 6 days and they were the lucky ones.

They found the bodies of two eight year olds buried in the back garden of one house and the bodies of two more girls ages, 17 and 19, buried in the back garden of another house.
The older girls were repeatedly raped and beaten before they were drugged and buried alive.

Vanity Fair published an interview with actress Teri Hatcher in their April 2006 issue. She had recently published her first book, Burnt Toast, and in it revealed that she had been repeatedly molested by a trusted uncle from the age of five, until she was around eight or nine. She never told anyone until she heard about a 14 year old who put a gun to her head in 2002 and left behind a note identifying the same man as her molester.

If not for Teri’s testimony the man would still be free and would have happily moved on to his next young victim.

Recently, Mark Hayward published an article in the Manchester, NH, Union Leader about the studies that have been done to assess the risk of sex offenders repeating their crimes. He found that the studies that have been done often contradict each other in their findings.

In the article, New Hampshire State Representative, David Welch, is quoted as saying,
“… about one in 30 sex offenders are predators that society has to be very concerned about.”

Well, if we do the math with the previously cited 563,000 registered sex offenders, that works out to be 18,767 highly dangerous known sex offenders out on our streets. Divided by 50 states, that’s 375 per state in the union. In our towns. Your neighborhoods.

Are you scared for your children yet?

Well then, did you know that a judge in Lincoln, Nebraska, just last month, chose to sentence a convicted sex offender to probation instead of jail time because the man was 5-foot-one?

10 years probation instead of 10 years behind bars because the man is short and the judge thought he’d be at risk from the larger inmates.

Hold up. Didn’t this man use his size to dominate, terrify and violate his young victims?

Yeah. I thought so.

So that judge decided that this man’s welfare and risk of bodily harm in prison was more important that the risk of the young girls he preys on and their bodily harm and – tad da -- he is on the streets, free.

Are you more than pissed off yet?

I am. So forgive me if I think we have better things to be fighting for in this country other than banning gay marriage and petitioning for the removal of harmless Macy’s window displays that are supporting the tolerance of gays in our society.

Gay couples who are working for a living and paying taxes just like you and me. Gay couples who are willing to adopt the cast off children of our society and raise them in loving, safe, albeit differing environments than you may know as, “normal”.


©2006 Dawn Marie Kelly, all rights reserved.