I once had a friend who was sexually molested as a child. My best friend, in fact. I was 14, she was a year or two younger, when she told me about it. It had happened years before and she related it with a sort of detachment.

I don’t believe kids really grasp the severity of that kind of violation unless they are the victim of it. To me, hearing about the atrocity was like listening to a horror story around a campfire.

The fiend was big and dark and snarling. The victim was small, shy and frightened. Dreadful things were done to her in a dark and dreadful place.

There were screams and threats and horrible deeds. There were tears and whimpers and pleas for release. There was shame and guilt and confusion.

I was 14 and nodding a lot, astounded by the story but high above it. All I knew was it was an appalling revelation, and I was glad my friend had survived.

Scars that don’t show

It was like she took a really bad wipeout on her bike, or escaped from a house fire. It happened, she lived through it and that was that.

I once knew a kid who rode his bike down the steep face of a hill and skidded the last 60 feet or so on his face. He wore scars into his teen years and had to answer questions about them every time he met someone new.

My friend didn’t have those kinds of scars. In fact, her face was round and pretty and flawless. Wide eyes, smooth skin and cheeks like apples.

Tough girl, too. Physically strong to a freakish degree. I’d seen her thrash older girls out there in the projects where she lived. I’d seen her wrestle guys and leave them tapping out in embarrassed astonishment.

Tough as nails, this friend of mine. But she was emotionally brittle.

Sad movies made her cry. The plights of stray cats would leave her gloomy for days. And her mother, well … Her mother was divorced and dating. Many strange men came to my friend’s home, and she despised them all. They were all big and powerful and threatening to her.

Without so much as an unkind word or a raised voice, these intimidating men would leave my friend shaking and sobbing and dashing from her home.

Scalding tears

I’d find her trembling in the woods, pounding her fist against her knees and crying the kind of tears that seemed to burn down her cheeks.

I tell you, kids don’t understand the trauma that comes with that kind of violation. I thought maybe my friend was maladjusted or having trouble toddling into her teen years. I used to scoff at her and chide the dramatics.

She’d shove me away and go on crying, and I’d wander off to find a pickup baseball game.

She was my best friend, but I had no idea that something inflicted on her years ago was still drawing blood.

I’ve since had the miserable experience of seeing admitted child molesters sent away with teeny, tiny jail sentences or none at all. Don’t get me started on the 81-year-old man who admitted to sexually abusing four girls he baby-sat.

The old creature stood in court and admitted to violating girls 3-, 8-, 12- and 15-years-old over the course of a year. Two or three times a week, this ogre engaged in fiendish acts too horrible to describe.

Yet prosecutors sent the old man home to serve probation instead of jail time. They cited his age and ill health as reasons for the sentence.

What you didn’t see in court at that particular hearing was the family of the victims. The mother of the girls, in fact, was charged with allowing the nastiness to continue. She was accused of encouraging the behavior and sent to jail.

They sent the old man home, though, while the kids he mistreated have gone on to various foster homes and various emotional problems.

That one is documented, as well as numerous other cases in which admitted child molesters were set free. You can look it up in the court records.

Kids who are molested are not like kids who get punched or kicked by bullies on the playground. Victims of sexual assault don’t scream in pain and then shake it off.

My friend … She went on mistrusting grown men and hating her life in general. She was sent away to another state to live with a man who yelled at her and dominated her at least emotionally.

I was maybe 16-years-old when I got the phone call. My friend had pulled a rifle from her macho step-dad’s gun rack while the house was otherwise empty. She loaded a slug, hooked a toe around the trigger and aimed the barrel at her face.

With a bang she likely never heard, her pain was over.

The whole time I’d known her, she was dying from the kind of anguish I can’t ever imagine. The kind of anguish I didn’t fully understand until the first fistful of dirt thumped down on her coffin.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.

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