Eight Strategies to Teach Your Children to Protect Themselves From Predators

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An eleven year old girl.   A predator.   Life as she knew it . . . a life that ended.   Her own.   Life is supposed to culminate at the end of a lifetime, if anything,in a peaceful death.   Jaycee’s ended that day in hell.   She encountered two predators, a male and a female.   “The gates of hell had opened wide, and she was swallowed up inside.”

Two years ago I composed an article about Serial Killer Hilton, “Don’t Become a Predator’s Prey.”   In that article, I talked about warning our children that there are bad people out there.   Bad people who look just like everyone else. They wear no sign that identifies them as bad.   If only they did. This little girl, Jaycee, would have known to quickly run away.   Perhaps before she could, she was swept up by a wave of evil.   A wave of evil that no child on this earth could have ever imagined.   Nor should any child ever have to imagine that which lay ahead for little, eleven year old, Jaycee.

Despite the futile, desperate attempts of Jaycee’s stepfather to save her, she was snatched away from him before his very eyes as he struggled to reach her in time.  Dear God, should any parent ever have to suffer such agony?   When I think about the minutes, hours, days that unfolded into years of torturous questions and nightmares her family had to endure, I wonder how these special people made it through.   When I think of the daily life of torture, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, rape, neglect, and imprisonment that Jaycee lived every day of the rest of her young life, I experience a shudder deep inside my soul.

This beautiful child who now, after being discovered eighteen years later, is raising two children conceived during two of her countless rapes.   Two more innocent little angels victimized by unspeakable evil.   The never ending, ongoing effects of acts too horrendous to imagine, committed against an innocent little girl, will live on for many generations to come.   This precious family is left to gather the remnants of what once was their life, and mend it together again into some form of family unit that makes some kind of sense.   An undertaking not manymight be up for.   Thankfully, this family will undergo years of professional help.   Even so, will Jaycee be better off once she realizes how straight out of hell her everyday life really was?   She is bound to compare that which she is now experiencing as a normal life, with that which she must have had to have convinced herself was normal in order to have managed to survive such horrors.   Will she be able to come to terms with the heinous brutality she experienced as her “normal life” during the last eighteen years?   How will her psyche survive the blow of finally comparing the two ways of [her] life and realizing fully the depth of the horrors she endured?