© Desconocido
We've put up numerous videos now of very young children being stripped searched in public, touched against their will, and, in any other place and under any other circumstances, molested by TSA screeners.
Parents are counseled to tell their children that these "screenings" are a game.
The US news media's comment on this?
Deafening silence.
Instead they ask us if we aren't being "too sensitive" and tell us there needs to be a "balance between security and privacy." Children are being taught that anyone in uniform has free access to their bodies...that they can't say "no"...and that their parents are unable to protect them. In turn, parents are being taught that they cannot protect their children. The only word that comes to my mind to describe this enterprise is "criminal."
Did not the TSA, Homeland Security, and the White House (and the jackals in Congress that fund this insanity) anticipate this as an outcome?
There are two possibilities here: either this is official idiocy and arrogance of the highest order or this outcome was anticipated and deemed acceptable.
I don't know the answer...but I do know that as a governmenty agency that works closely with the CIA and FBI, Homeland Security and the TSA have access to hundreds of psychologists and psychiatrists, in their employ, under contract, and available at the drop of a dime.
I am not an expert in child abuse so I asked my friend and colleague Kenneth Wooden for his comment. Wooden is a former journalist and author of the chilling and important book "The Children of Jonestown."
His experience covering the Jonestown story and seeing the hundreds of children's coffins that came back from Guyana motivated him to create a training company that teaches children how to identify and protect themselves from predators. I asked him what he thinks of the TSA's policy of commanding its employees to strip search and conduct full body "pat downs" of small children.
I specifically asked him his opinion of the TSA advising that young children be told that these officially sanctioned intrusions of their bodies are a game.
Wooden's answer follows:
The TSA has crossed the line
As a national child personal safety expert, I submit the TSA crosses the line when it allows the patting down of children for security reasons, cloaked as a game.
The most recent Gallup Poll on childhood abuse revealed that in just one year, more than a million children were sexually and physically abused. Along the same lines, the American Medical Association has referred to the rape and sexual exploitation of women and children as a "violent and silent epidemic." Men increasingly reveal how they were sexually assaulted in their youth, by a rainbow of sexual predators, usually someone they knew.
Given that background - and the number of survivors that have been sexually abused and exploited - it is beyond comprehension how the Homeland Security Agency's TSA can conceive of such insensitive and invasive security checks on our children and youth. Even worse, they want to depict pat downs of children as a game! As an investigative researcher/reporter who has interviewed well over a thousand sexual offenders, I can document that one of the favorite ploys to lure children and youth into sexual abuse is to disguise it as a "game."
How can experts working at the TSA be so incredibly misinformed and misguided to suggest that full body pat downs for children be portrayed as a game?! To do so is completely contrary to what we in the sexual abuse prevention field have been trying to accomplish for the past thirty years. Such policy could essentially desensitize children to inappropriate touch and ultimately make it easier for sexual offenders to prey on our children. This policy is also incredibly insensitive to the countless victims who have already been traumatized by unwanted touching in their lives and could be re-traumatized by such pat-downs.
In my judgment as a lifelong journalist and child advocate, such unapprised actions by the TSA borders on criminal negligence and, legally speaking, "deliberate indifference to the future emotional well being of millions of victims and the potential for far too many more young victims."
Ken Wooden
Child Lures Prevention
What you can do
Please - if you think this information is important - share this far and wide.
As far as I know, this issue is not being discussed anywhere else in a public forum in America...not in Congress, not in the news media, not in the White House, and not in the self-justifying press conferences of the TSA.
The TSA, and the entire US government White House and Congress, has crossed the line here.
Think long and hard before you agree to allowing the small children in your care to be subjected to these searches.
Let the so-called public servants who conceived of and imposed this system - and now unashamedly defend it - know what you think.
"The only word that comes to my mind to describe this enterprise is "criminal."
It IS criminal. A child who is not capable of twisting their perceptions like adults do, cannot see how this "molestation game" is GOOD if done by one person, but "NOT GOOD" if done by another.
Both the child and the adults know that the child is being molested. The adults are the only ones capable of "pretending" it is something else, and the main reason they "pretend" is because they are babys themselves - too scared to say anything.
and YES, the child can see that too, as well as the parent's shameful impotence.
If this sounds harsh, look inside your own self.
Es ist wie es ist. It is what it is.