February 13, 2009

¡ASK A MEXICAN!

By Gustavo Arellano

Dear Mexican: What is the deal with Mexican denial when it comes to dealing with child sexual abuse? I know counselors who tell me that it’s a big problem trying to get Mexican families to admit and confront this. In my own experience, I have seen my Mexican relatives be more concerned over the fact that their son is CERTAINLY NOT GAY than over the fact that there is a strong likelihood that he suffers repeated exposure to an abusing adult. Why the secrecy? Sometimes, I wonder why pedophiles just don’t focus on Mexican children, since with them is the least chance that their parents will acknowledge the problem. Is it a class issue? A marginalized-people issue? Or something especially acute in Mexican families?

Chester the Non-Molester

Dear Wab: It’s not just Mexican denial, Chester—or are you so clueless that you haven’t heard about the Catholic Church pedo-priest scandal in the United States, and the silence of the faithful when it comes to their leaders’ role in the rapes of innocents? It’s near-impossible to find accurate stats on child sexual abuse of any kind, and Mexico is no different. Cicely Marston, a lecturer in social science at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, wrote in a 2005 paper examining child sexual abuse in Mexico City that it was “extremely difficult to find any published information about [child sexual abuse] in Mexico, and information that exists appears in potentially unreliable newspaper reports,â€