And now Tori

So first we have Karissa Boudreau, and now Tori Stafford. We can only shake our heads and ask, “What kind of a world are we living in?”

Is this sickness something new? I think not. That’s both good and bad. If it were entirely new, we might expect it to be growing, which I certainly hope it isn’t. I suspect this kind of thing happened throughout history, but one reason it’s in our face every year or so is the media of today—we live in a much smaller world. While in 1960 we might not have been presented the story of a situation in Woodstock, Ontario, in 2009 it gets delivered to us daily until it’s over (and then some). There may be some argument that with the Internet and other such things, child pornography has grown and triggered this kind of crime. I don’t know. Often investigations of such relationships indicate that while it might seem more blatant today, it was unfortunately always there.

Eight year old Tori Stafford is apparently dead. Police seem to have an indication, probably from Terri-Lynne McClintic, the woman arrested in the case who seems to be cooperating with police, that Tori was dead within hours of being abducted. Logically, unless for some reason this pair had a vendetta against Tori’s family members strong and twisted enough to warrant killing their little girl, Tori was likely sexually assaulted as a motive for the crime. I say, “logically”, and look at the foolishness of that word. What in the sane mind is “logical” about sexually assaulting a little eight-year old girl? The rest of us struggle with that, and can find no understanding. Certainly people committing that kind of crime are on the very fringes of our society. Incarcerated, they require protection from even the most hardened criminals, whom we would normally feel have little in the way of morals. The man who assaulted and killed Tori would not live a week in open custody in our prisons.

Our news is not brought to us only in papers and magazines that we can hide away from children. Certainly they see these stories on our televisions, and hope in vain with us as the searches go on for the lost Karissas and Toris. Families with children meet with others and hold candles, make cards, march through the streets. How do these children react to the terrible news of the deaths, sometimes the tortures and assaults?

Connolly Love, whose yard backs onto Tori’s home, has two daughters — one 11, the other 12. “I’m, I’m, I’m lost for words.” He said to the media. “I don’t know what I’m gonna tell them. I can’t promise them it wouldn’t happen again. Just times we live in.”

My training in the area of children and psychology tells me that a child’s awareness gradually expands outward from its own little world to include the parents and caregivers, who are studied, scrutinized, and then trusted, to an eventual embracing of the outside world and how it relates to them. Growing and developing is a fragile time, and the child gains an understanding that the parent or parents, or the caregivers, are there to provide for it. Eventually, it understands that there are also things not wanted in this world (initially like hunger, thirst, and cold) and that the caregiver will protect it from these things. The child need not fear.

There is a time, more usually in the teenage years, when the child develops contrary notions (though we try hard to suppress them!), scurrilous beliefs that the parent actually does not know everything, cannot do everything, and most important, that they really can’t protect them from everything. At that stage, most children are capable of handling this dire news, fortified by enough self-esteem that they believe that while the parent is fairly incompetent in many areas, the adolescent fortunately now knows all and can do all.

Eight years old, and even older, watching the search for Karissa, the search for Tori on the family flat-screen TV, they are not ready for this secret that creeps into their minds: their parents, their houses, their schools, the police, whatever else is out there assigned their protection, cannot do the job. There are actually no guarantees. People can take them away when they are walking home from school and do terrible things to them, and then kill them. As in one British Columbia incident a few years ago, they even can take you from your bed while your parents are still in the house. In Karissa’s case, the extremes pushed to the limits, the parent who you thought would protect you chases you down and strangles you in the woods.

What does this do to a child? Certainly, with most children it does not completely destroy the foundation of security they have built up over the years, but it must poke some very good holes in it. You can’t trust people– at times it seems not even your parents. You can’t trust your safety to be maintained as you explore the world, as you go to school, as you go shopping, even as you lie in your own bed. The scary prayer we push on our little children suddenly takes on a clearer meaning: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should…”

When these security props are pulled away, or at least weakened, in desperation children have to turn to the only people they can fully trust—themselves. Tentative and flimsy though they might be, some walls go up. They respect others a little less. They respect parents a little less. They seek to control their own lives a little more. They are less open. More suspicious. More defensive. The feelers that should be reaching out to embrace and explore this amazing world are pulled back a bit. A protective shell is created.

Some would say that this is good. That this world is full of strange and sick people, and that the trusting, open child is in danger. That certainly might be so. But what protection is there for an eight year old, what control do they have? We tell our children not to go with strangers, but in demonstrations, time and time again, they do.

Certainly in nations like Canada we have maintained, rightly or wrongly, a notion of a safe world that many children in other countries have never enjoyed. But while dangers from insurrections, from political unrest, even from natural disasters like flood and storm are terrible things, they seem, even the fighting, to be somehow “natural”. These are causes that we can get a handle on, can understand– and we’ll try our best to protect our children from them.

Men abducting little girls for sexual purposes and then killing them, mothers chasing their own daughters into the woods and strangling them, the mind balks at these. The mind’s filing cabinet for these situations is an empty drawer. We cannot understand this, and without that understanding we have no way to see it coming and protect our children, or the children of others. We listen to Tori’s mother saying, “But why did it have to be my child?” and are thankful that it wasn’t ours.

We watch the little children playing, and though we see the faults of selfishness, bickering, and scrapping, these pale in comparison to these acts that make the news. On the whole, we can appreciate the innocence of children, but we look close to see if there is wariness in their glances as they look up.

There had better be.

2 thoughts on “And now Tori

  1. When the Karissa thing happened the kids I know were all worked up, then as the months passed they forgot about it. Now just awhile ago when a child molestor moved to this area one little girl said she wouldn’t dare to leave the yard as she didn’t want “the raper” to get her. They remember for a short while that those things could happen to them, but then are so busy playing and being kids that they forget, until something happens again.

    And those sick freaks shouldn’t get any special protection in jails.

  2. So sad, so sad. And little Scottish Madeleine McCann, and so many others. …….this has always happened and is hard to understand or to forgive. Remember the babes in the woods, and evil stepmothers. It is the dark side of our human nature. All we can do is be careful for them, be kind, try to think straight and to avoid taking evil or violent images into our minds.

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