When I swept my office door open and caught the look on Abigail’s face, I knew something was desperately wrong. Her beautiful acnefree, freckle-pasted face was puffy and red from hours of crying. My heart quickened and my mind instantly created a list of possibilities for her pain: her mother had died, she was pregnant, she broke up with her boyfriend, or she was kicked out of school. “Abigail,” I started, “what’s wrong?” I stroked the back of her auburn hair. “Oh, Dr. Meeker,” she sobbed, “I don’t want to talk about it.” I let Abigail cry a bit and sat patiently in front of her. In my 20 years of seeing children and teens, I still find myself thrown off balance when teens don’t want to talk. Crying I can handle, but it’s the silence that makes me crazy. But that Wednesday morning, I knew Abigail would talk. She had to. She was backed against a wall that would not move and no one, except me—she believed—could help her. Minutes passed and Abigail grew comfortable enough to speak. “It was so stupid, so dumb.” I knew it. She’d impulsively had sex and was afraid she was pregnant. I’d heard the story a thousand times if once. I waited again, staring at the “X” her arms made in front of her stomach. Finally, she quieted. T “OK, OK,” she began, as she unraveled the whole story. Two months earlier she began dating a guy whom she’d eyed for many months. He was large, athletic, handsome and kind. They began dating and early in the relationship he’d pushed her for sex. She told him, she said, that she didn’t want to have sex. She wanted to be a virgin when she got married. Besides, she said, there were lots of diseases and she just didn’t want any. At first he complied, but after several weeks, began pushing her for oral sex. This was a compromise, he convinced her. Abigail gave in. “I hated it,” she told me. “I thought it was gross, but then I told myself it was better than losing him. And besides, I knew I wouldn’t get pregnant or any diseases. But now, Dr. Meeker, I just hurt so bad.” I learned that Abigail contracted one of the worst cases of genital herpes I had ever seen. Her pain was physical and I could help that. But I couldn’t kill the herpes—it would return for the rest of her life. After Abigail learned of her herpes, she left my office with a few packets of pills to deaden the sting of the disease. But that wasn’t the worst part. She told her boyfriend that he had given her herpes, and then he told (what felt to her) the entire world. Her peers made fun of her. His friends dubbed her “Miss Herpes” and even her close friends stayed away from the infected girl. After six months of rejection, Abigail went home after school one day and in the quiet of her bathroom swallowed a bottle of Tylenol.
*Her Problem Is Our Problem*
If Abigail’s story were rare, I would not write today. But it isn’t. And the number of Abigail’s in your office and mine has skyrocketed over the past 25 years. Why did she allow oral sex one day? And why did she try to kill herself afterward—even though she kept her virginity? The reasons are complex and the answers not for the weak-hearted. Abigail is a child victim of a toxic sexual culture, which you and I have created. We—those who gave momentum to the sexual revolution of the 70’s—have unleashed a horror of physical, emotional and spiritual pains upon our children. And we must do something about it. Abigail’s problem is our problem because she is a child with incomplete cognitive maturity and cannot fix the ills of such great magnitude. We must do it for her.
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