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Annie Fox, M.Ed., is an internationally respected parenting expert, award-winning author, and a trusted online adviser for tweens and teens.

What do you tell your kids about rape?

February 15, 2011

Last Friday, Lara Logan was doing her job as a journalist covering the Egyptian revolution. The 60 Minutes correspondent and her crew were in the midst of unprecedented joy overflowing in Tahrir Square as hundreds of thousands of anti-Mubarak protestors celebrated a new reality. We are free! WE ARE FREE!

Every TV journalist reporting from the scene used the word “jubilant.” Strong word. Intense emotion. But not hyperbole. Jubilation is precisely the word to describe liberation from oppression. The end of living in fear.

Lara Logan must have felt it too. How could you be there and not feel it? But then Lara Logan’s jubilation became something very different, when according to this statement from CBS News “…she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into frenzy. In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.”

About an hour ago I read about the rape… enough of this “sexual assault” stuff, let’s call it by it’s most vile name. Immediately anxiety kicked in and I felt a sickly cold heaviness. I feel it still. If you’re a woman you exactly know what I’m talking about. Even if you’ve never been raped, you know. If you’re a man who’s never been raped, you can’t know this kind of fear… not the way women know it.

My thoughts are with Lara Logan and her family, her friends, her colleagues and her crew who couldn’t help her… God what they must be feeling!

Lara’s our sister and because of what was done to her we are all suffering. We are all feeling less jubilant. Less liberated. Less free from fear.

What do you tell your tween and teen daughters about rape? What do you tell your sons? What’s that? You say you’ve never had one of those conversations? What are you waiting for?

Filed under: Parenting — Tags: , , , , , — Annie @ 5:34 pm
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