Vera Bell

First let me say, if you’ve come to this web site because you’re a paedophile and you get off on reading about children, you’ll be sorely disappointed. You may want to read on – I don’t mind, you might get an inkling of the ramifications of your actions. But I doubt that you’re interested. Does your mum know what you do in your room in the evenings? Do your brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins? Of course not. Even if they suspect, they’ll never say. And if they do say, then all you have to do is deny it and it’s worse for them than it is for you. Believe.

So those of you who have a genuine interest in this subject, do you think there are these kinds of taboos in families, in this day and age? You know there is. You know what I’m talking about. So many things are out in the open – you can choose to have your female secondary bodily characteristics removed or even your primary ones if you want – as a boy you can choose to have your male characteristics chopped off and you can take female hormones and you can lighten your voice. You can do all sorts. You can be gay or straight or L or G or B or T or Q or whatever all the other letters are, and you can tell your parents about it and they will nowadays, largely, say they understand and go along with you in the interests of modern liberalism. I’ll come back to all of this at some point, but not quite yet.

What I want to explore here, because I’m positive there must be others who have had similar experiences, is how you deal with sexual aberration in your own family, and where the line is drawn between liberalism and perversion. So much is unsaid. Did I tell my mother about the priest who sat me on his knee and caressed my private parts when I was 7? No – I hadn’t the words. But even when I had the words I didn’t tell her until I was almost middle-aged. Why not? Because it was too uncomfortable – he was the husband of a friend of hers. (I wonder, too, if that particular priest abused his own children – they were both very strange, destructive, oddly-behaved, prone to tantrums, screechy) And if my mother knew, what would she have said? Nothing. So while it’s fine to talk about these things in an objective way, and while child abuse is always a massive scandal in the news and everyone purses their lips and says, how disgusting, it’s much more difficult to bring these things out into the open in the context of your own family just because it’s that – a family..

You might say, nonsense, I can say anything to my daughter/son/mother/grandmother about her husband/lover/friend/child. We can discuss these things open and honestly and sensibly and she will consider her options. You might say that, and that would be the ideal situation. The chances are, though, that you won’t. And there are many reasons why. So what I want to do on these pages is simply to relate some of my own experiences and thoughts and see if any of you reading this have gone through something similar. So watch this space and each day I’ll relate a piece of my past (and present) or the family dynamics or the back stories and you’ll see here why there are so many things that, in families, you just can’t say, however distressed you may feel. I’ve called these taboos – it isn’t that we can’t talk about them impersonally, it’s just that addressing these issues directly, person to person, is fraught with complications.