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by Kalvin Saelee
Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in We’Ced Youth Magazine Issue #2
[dropcap]Did you [/dropcap] have a childhood? What if that was taken away from you? I’ve found out that is sucks. I am a victim of child molestation and my childhood was taken from me. I felt as if I had to grow up faster than all the other kids. I think everyone deserves a childhood and just because there are sick-minded creatures out in the world, a few of us don’t get a choice.
I was only about four or five when my mom and I had moved out of Merced to Sacramento, with my aunt. My mom worked all the time so my aunt mostly watched me but she also had duties of her own. My aunt went out and about to run errands often, usually taking at least two hours or so because she didn’t have transportation and everything was across town. In the meantime, my distant cousin watched over me.
He was about 15 or 16. At first we didn’t do much, I watched cartoons or went to play outside, though I remember it being hot most of the time so I would choose to stay inside, and he stayed in his room doing who knows what. After a few months he started to come out of his room more often, almost like he was observing me, which that wasn’t unusual since I wasn’t really a well-behaved child. He started to come out to watch cartoons with me while my aunt ran her errands, and that’s when everything turned and twisted.
[pullquote_left]“We shouldn’t be watching this, we’re going to get in trouble,” I pleaded. “Stop tripping, nothing is going to happen, I always do this,” he replied.[/pullquote_left]
I remember one day that wasn’t as hot as usual so I headed for the door when suddenly my cousin told me that I couldn’t go outside and play because I needed to stay where he could see me. I did as I was told. I stayed inside, no big deal, I thought. My cousin said he was going to watch something and he was making popcorn for us. I was excited because we only ate popcorn when we were going to watch a really good movie that barely came out. Instead of a movie though he started changing the channel to the locked channels. I really didn’t care because none of us knew the code, but boy I was wrong, he did know the code. It was the code to unlock the pornographic channels.
“We shouldn’t be watching this, we’re going to get in trouble,” I pleaded. “Stop tripping, nothing is going to happen, I always do this,” he replied. I felt a little safer thinking I wasn’t going to get in trouble. We started off watching regular pornographic movie male and female. It was pretty interesting but I would have rather watched cartoons to be honest (even to this day, I prefer watching cartoons over anything). So it continued, while my aunt would run errands he would turn to the locked channels, but there was no more popcorn. As we started to watch it regularly I started to get a more uncomfortable. This was only the beginning of a terrible era in my life.
