Mars is leaving behind the mists of Pisces and heading towards fiery Aries to join forces with Chiron, the wounded healer and the Black Moon Lilith, the dark feminine in July.
Lately I have been reading about global child pornography rings that are being uncovered from the dark web. In October 2019 arrests took place in the US, the UK, South Korea, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Brazil and Australia. Over 300 Australians were arrested for watching footage that depicted sickening sexual abuse of children as well as extremely young children being raped.
More recently in February 2020 NSW police uncovered what they called the biggest and “most horrific” child-exploitation ring ever uncovered in Australia. Police say 14 children have been saved from harmful situations and it is alleged the men met on the dark web and communicated via an encrypted app. [1]
‘Darknet sites that profit from the sexual exploitation of children are among the most vile and reprehensible forms of criminal behavior,’ said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. [2]
I don’t know about you, but as a woman and mother, I feel such rage and despair, when I hear about the absolute degradation and abuse of these children by mainly men, but where are the women, the mothers? The “Me Too” movement has seen the profile of offenders and the sexual abuse of adult women be exposed but what about the children? Where is our roar from the mountaintops for our kids?
Something is seriously wrong with a system where children can be so easily exploited and every one of these children must have or had a mother, an aunty, a grandmother who saw their arrival into this world. Why are we so powerless in the defence and protection of these children? Where is the love that binds? What about an “Our Children Too” movement so that we can bring them with us on the road to justice?
What has been hidden has to be revealed and we have to love and protect our children at all costs to stop the cycle of abuse. We have to reinstate the female warrior to her rightful place. Recently I read about a Japanese photographic exhibition of female Samurai Warriors. Preceding the all-male samurai class depicted in Clavell and Kurosawa, the onna bugeisha “learned to use naginata, kaiken, and the art of tanto Jutso in battle”. Rather than pay mercenaries to defend them, as the terrified townsfolk do in the movie Seven Samurai, these women trained in battle to protect “communities that lacked male fighters.” [3]
What struck me about the photographs is that beyond the armour they are still very noticeably women, they are not trying to be men. This is not a commentary on gender rights but about the biological fact that women give birth and have the ability to breastfeed children. As the Aboriginal women I have worked with have often said to me relating to men and women “same same but different” and there is no shame in this fact, it is just a fact in which we have different roles at different times in our role in caring for children. The age of the children being exploited is young which means that they still need a nurturer in their lived. But at the same time we seriously need to own our responsibility to find own feminine ” bad ass” to form a warrior class and a united front that can stand up and fight against child sexual exploitation.