I haven’t blogged as much this week as I would have liked to.
I usually start a blog post sometime early in my workday and work on it periodically throughout the day when I have time, but this week has been extremely busy making finding time to write a post even more difficult than normal.
There’s been the usual teenage drama coupled with dealing with a student who had been jumped by about 15 other students after school and then his grandmother and mother tried to break it up. Somehow one of the students who was engaged in attacking the mother’s child was stabbed with a box cutter by either the mother or the grandmother. He’s okay, but it made the news and they did their usual 60 second segment about bullying and violence.
The whole incident was caught on a residence’s security camera and you can clearly see two students being attacked, pushed down, punched and kicked by a mob of other teens. I am not condoning someone being stabbed, but in that instant, I can see why a parent or grandparent would resort to stabbing someone in order to keep their child from being beat to death. The whole incident is still under investigation, but as far as I know, all of the students are still currently on campus because the incident happened in the community and not at school.
I wish the news would have said more about bullying as it seems like these kids had been targeted by this group for one reason or another. I am also worried about the psychological affects this is having on the two students who got jumped and still have to come to school with the people who jumped them. The student that got stabbed was apparently the main instigator and from what I am hearing is a pretty big bully. His wounds are very superficial and I have little remorse for him. I am in the process of trying to work with both the bullies and the victims in this case, but until the investigation is complete I don’t have full access to them.
On top of that, I had another young girl sent to my office after she took a pregnancy test that came back positive. She’s 17 and a junior in high school. She wasn’t distraught and scared about being pregnant or becoming a mother, she was rather calm about that aspect leading me to think that she wanted to become a mom in the first place, although she denied that. She was more afraid of how her mother would react because her own sister, an 18 year old high school student, got pregnant and had a baby at 13, when she was just in middle school.
Her mother also gave birth as a teenager, so this is a cycle that her mom was hoping to break by not allowing her 17 year old daughter to date. She wanted her to focus on school, go to college and be different than her, her sister and other women in their family and community.
This however seemed to have backfired since her 17 year old daughter dated anyway, hiding her boyfriend from her mom and sneaking around. Because she was afraid to tell her mom that she had a boyfriend, this may have prevented them from having conversations about safe-sex and pregnancy prevention.
On top of that, psychologically speaking asking someone, especially a young girl, to be different from the people she loves and spends the most time with is very difficult. Most of the time, if even subconsciously, young girls want to feel connected with and similar to their female family members and peers. If they are all raising children, it’s hard for her to want to be different as being different would set her apart and perhaps away from the people she loves and identifies with the most. Which psychological makes sense that although this young girl had an opportunity to be “different”, she has chosen not to.
Also, this young girl has babysat her sister’s son, who she adores, for the past five years, since she herself was only 12, which according to Judith Musick, author of Young, Poor and Pregnant, may push some young girls into having their own child since they feel like they are already taking care of someone else’s kid.
The bottom line is, this young girl is pregnant by a 20 year old man who’s family she has never met and he has never met her family. Her family is extremely poor, her mother’s unemployed and trying to take care of not only this student, but this students sister and her sister’s son. Now there will be another child to include in an already struggling household.
The most time consuming and touching case I had this week was a young girl who started telling me she believed her sister’s husband, who lives with her family, had touched her while she was sleeping. She went on to tell me about several occasions over the past five years where he had molested or raped her, but she was too afraid to say anything. She was only now talking because her younger sister had recently confessed to her that had had been molesting and raping her as well, which broke her heart and made her feel guilty about not telling someone earlier.
I always take sexual abuse cases seriously, but also with a grain of salt because I’ve worked in this field long enough to know that people will lie about being molested in order to seek revenge or for other gains.
However, the level of detail and emotion in this young girl’s accounts made me believe that she was absolutely telling the truth.
I immediately walked her over to the school resource officer’s office so she could make a police report, and I also contacted child protection services. Her case is now under investigation and her sister’s husband is no longer allowed to be in the same house or near her during the investigation.
This same young girl I had been dealing with before for anxiety issues that at the time seemed generalized, but as she told me about the molestation and rape, her anxiety issues made more sense and dealing with this issue and the emotional scars that come with it is likely to help reduce her anxiety also.
I have no ideal what’s going to happen with her case. I’m anticipating being contacted by child protection service investigators and sheriff detectives any day now, but more importantly, I’m looking forward to helping this young lady get through this the best way she can so that she comes out of it psychologically healthy and stronger.
Licensed Mental Health Counselor 