"Raping" a ten year old

at school?  I was "talking" to a complete stranger in the library yesterday.  I had been peacefully reading a completely different article in another paper I don't get when I heard her trying to hold back tears. It had been an automatic reaction to look at her. She shook her head and pointed to the short article.

Three eleven year old boys had reportedly held down a ten year old girl "in the rape position" and one had proceeded to "beat her up" and threaten to "rape her properly" if she didn't provide them with pornographic pictures of herself. She refused. The boys have apparently been trying this for some time but she was more vulnerable than most.

I had seen the article on line and felt more than disturbed. I felt angry and sick.  The main perpetrator reportedly was suspended for five days. The others for a day. That was it. The girl has apparently received some "counselling". 

What in the heck is going on? At that age we didn't even know about such things. We might know something about "how babies are made" if our parents had decided to tell us but that was about all we knew. Now children seem to know far more than that - and they are all too often abusing that knowledge. 

This doesn't start in secondary school like it did for us. It is starting in preschool years when children are also being taught about all sorts of same-sex and transgender issues. I only knew something vague about homosexuality because, for several years, we lived next door to a male couple. My mother wouldn't let us even talk to them. Such a relationship was illegal back then. From my vague memory of them the couple in question was, as is the usual case, very kind and completely harmless. I am very glad such relationships are no longer illegal.

But do three and four year old children who have only a general idea that there are "boys" and that there are "girls" really need to know so much more? I am not suggesting we should hide these things from them as my mother and others of her generation did. What I am suggesting is that we need to drastically reduce the emphasis on all sorts of issues around gender and sex. Children need to know that there are behaviours all right minded people consider abhorrent. Do they need to know so much that eleven year old boys can demand pornographic material from a ten year old? Do they need to know that and then get away with a short holiday from school?

I nodded mutely at the other woman. We looked at one another and then she walked rapidly off. I saw her wiping her eyes as she went through the doors. The story had obviously distressed her even more than it had distressed me. I wondered what had happened to her in the past.

I went off to knitting group but I didn't say anything. I couldn't. Perhaps I should have. I still feel angry and upset and just a bit sick.