TRIGGER WARNING: DISCUSSION OF SEXUAL ABUSE
I decided to do this one on video because it is complicated, painful, and easy for people to misunderstand. It is also at the heart of the new book I am writing.
As many of you know, I used to practice law. I did divorce and custody work for victims of domestic violence. Sometimes judges appointed me as a guardian ad litem, which meant I represented the child's interests in custody disputes. I sat in living rooms, shelters, courtrooms, and school offices and watched how the system responds when children say, “Something is happening to me at home.”
So when I heard Megyn Kelly say that the abuse of girls who are “almost teenagers,” fourteen or fifteen, is not really abuse in the same way as abusing a five-year-old, I heard something bigger than one woman’s ignorant comment. I heard a cultural script.
I heard the voice that has been talking over children for generations.
The Mother Who Chooses The Man Over The Child
What Megyn Kelly said lands so hard because that voice is familiar. It is the same voice many girls and boys have heard in their own homes, from their own mothers.
The mother who says, “You did it.”
The mother who says, “You enticed him.”
The mother who says, “Stop lying, you are trying to ruin this family.”
The mother who quietly admits, “Your dad raped me too,” and then does nothing.
This is not only white mothers or Black mothers. It is not limited to one community. It is what patriarchy trains women to do: protect the man at all costs.
Women have been acculturated to believe that having and keeping a man is more important than protecting their own children. The husband becomes the prized possession. The children become collateral damage.
So a mother will look at the child she carried and birthed and decide that the child is the problem, because that is the only way she can keep the man and keep the fantasy of the intact family.
Megyn Kelly’s comment is not a “slip.” It is loyalty to that logic. It is the public version of the private voice that has shut down countless disclosures in kitchens, bedrooms, and cars.
The System That Protects White Families And Exposes Black Ones
Now, here is where the roads diverge.
In my practice, I began to understand something: white children in middle-class, upper-middle-class, and wealthy homes were, to put it bluntly, completely screwed when it came to abuse in the home. There was almost no chance that anyone would intervene on their behalf.
If abuse was happening in a wealthy or upper-middle-class white household, people were reluctant to get involved. They did not call the police. School counselors and social workers hesitated or looked the other way.
I watched two different documentaries recently. One was about the I-5 killer here in the Pacific Northwest. The other was about a religious fundamentalist church group. In both, young white girls said they told a school counselor about sexual abuse. In both, the counselor called them liars and told them they were creating problems for their families.
That is how the system protects white families. Even poor white families, like those in the I-5 Killer documentary, are often ignored. But once you move into money, the silence becomes even more protected.
Now compare that to what happens when a Black or brown child makes the same disclosure.
If those girls had been Black or Hispanic, the counselor probably would have called the police immediately. The system is much more willing to jump into Black homes, homes of other people of color, and poor homes. Social workers remove kids, people are criminalized, and the court and foster care machinery comes roaring to life.
Is that intervention always good? No. It can shatter families and traumatize children in a new way. But it also means that the statistics we talk about are deeply skewed.
The system is far more willing to label Black families as abusive and to record those incidents as data. It is far more reluctant to see, acknowledge, or document the same behavior in white families, especially wealthy ones.
So when you see statistics that say Black women or women of color are more likely to be victims of domestic violence, you are looking at what has been recorded, not what has actually occurred.
When I did divorce and custody work, the majority of our low-income clients were white women. The question was never whether they experienced less violence. The question was: who calls the police, who the police decide to arrest, and which cases actually move through the system and show up as numbers.
The violence in white homes is often hidden, minimized, or never reported at all.
What The Data Actually Says About Who Hurts Children
When we talk about child sexual abuse, we tend to picture the stranger in the van, the creepy coach, the neighbor, the stepdad. The images we are fed are almost always external to the home or attached to blended families.
But that is not what the data says.
Department of Justice and criminal data tell us that roughly eighty percent (80%) of child abusers are the child’s own biological parents or other relatives in the home. Only about twenty percent are non-relatives.
So if eighty percent of the harm is being done by parents, siblings, uncles, and aunts, we are chasing the wrong dog.
We run around blaming immigrants, demonizing single mothers for “bringing men into the home,” criticizing blended families, and yelling about “fatherless households.” Meanwhile, the call is coming from inside the intact house.
Abuse happens to boys and girls. Abuse of boys is especially underreported. But the common denominator is not the scary stranger. It is the people children trust and depend on the most.
On top of that, I recently watched Tim Tebow in an interview where he said out loud what many do not want to hear: the overwhelming majority of the people consuming child sexual abuse material are white men, often upper-middle-class. The number is somewhere in the seventy percent range.
So when people ask, “What is wrong with young men and boys?” the answers do not start with women in the workplace or the loss of manufacturing jobs.
The problem is a society that quietly accepts and normalizes the sexual abuse of children in the home, and then pretends the crisis is something else.
The Home To Exploitation Pipeline
We talk a lot about the school-to-prison pipeline. We do not talk enough about the home-to-exploitation pipeline.
Virginia Giuffre described alleged sexual abuse in her home long before she ended up in Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit. Her father has denied it, but the pattern she described is not unusual: early abuse in the home conditions a child to accept exploitation when they leave.
If home is the first site of betrayal, predators outside the home are just the second act.
There was an article in The Atlantic about how DNA testing is revealing the prevalence of incest. Feminists in the sixties, seventies, and eighties were telling the truth when they said incest was far more common than society wanted to admit. Now the science is starting to confirm what they said.
And remember, those are only the cases that result in a child being born. That data does not include abortions, miscarriages, or the many acts of abuse where there is no pregnancy at all. Which means we are almost certainly undercounting.
Yet this is not treated as a central, national emergency. It is not the lead story every night.
Why? Because to look that truth in the face would require us to do something.
We would have to decide whether we are willing to put fathers, brothers, and uncles in prison at a scale this country has never seen. We would have to decide whether we are willing to pull children from homes that look “respectable.” We would have to confront the idea that the “good family” we have been told to protect at all costs is often the exact site of the worst harm.
A Country Built On Sexual Exploitation
When people ask why something like Jeffrey Epstein could happen, I almost want to laugh from the bitterness of it. Of course, it could happen. Our entire system was designed to make it possible.
The United States was built on physical and sexual exploitation. Slavery was not just about forced labor. It was also about forced sex.
I am literally sitting here as proof of that. My Scottish, Irish, Scandinavian, and other European ancestry did not land in my DNA by accident. It arrived on the backs and bodies of enslaved Black women who had no say.
Slave owners regularly raped the women they enslaved. They fathered children with them. Then some of those men raped the children that resulted from those rapes.
This is the legacy we sit on, and it lives in our family trees, in our skin, in our features, and in our silence.
So when a woman like Megyn Kelly draws a line between the abuse of a five-year-old and the abuse of a fourteen-year-old, she is not just sharing a bad take. She is helping maintain a system that has always depended on unfettered sexual access to powerless bodies, especially inside the home.
We Are Sick From Our Secrets
When I volunteered at a homeless shelter for teens here in Oregon, a pattern emerged very quickly. The majority of the kids were there for one of two reasons:
They were LGBTQIA, and it was not safe to stay in the home.
They were fleeing sexual abuse or severe violence.
That is it. Not video games. Not “wokeness.” Not laziness. Not a lack of manufacturing jobs.
The kids on the street were just the ones who ran. Think about how many never make it out.
We are sick of our secrets. We are not at stage one of this illness. We are at stage four. We have normalized so much violence and so much denial that we can barely even name what is killing us.
That is how a public figure can sit on camera and casually dismiss the abuse of a fourteen-year-old. That is how a politician like J. D. Vance can say women should stay in the home even if there is domestic violence, because the idea of preserving the family is more sacred than the safety of the people inside it.
The single mother is not the problem.
The blended family is not the problem.
The video games are not the problem.
The missing factory jobs are not the problem.
The problem is that the place we are told is safest, the home, is often where the deepest harm begins.
How White Supremacy Hurts White Children Too
I often say that white supremacy hurts white people. This is one of the clearest examples.
The same system that is overpolicing Black families and tears them apart is the system that refuses to see abuse in white families at all. White supremacy culture trains us to presume innocence and respectability for white families, especially those with money.
So white children are left to endure unreported, unacknowledged physical, psychological, and sexual abuse in silence. There is no intervention, no record, no statistics, no help.
At the same time, Black families are pathologized and punished. Children are removed more quickly. Parents are criminalized more aggressively.
Nobody wins in that setup except the people who benefit from maintaining the hierarchy and refusing to deal with the real source of the violence.
What Megyn Kelly’s Comment Protects
So what did Megyn Kelly’s comment reveal?
It revealed a culture that:
Treats the sexual abuse of older children as negotiable.
Trains mothers to prioritize men over their own children.
Protects white and wealthy families from scrutiny, even when children are screaming for help.
Blames single mothers, immigrants, queer kids, and poverty for outcomes that actually begin with abuse in intact, “respectable” homes.
Refuses to face the historical truth that this country was built on sexual exploitation inside the home, not outside of it.
Her comment was not just an opinion. It was a defense of the silence. It was a defense of the system.
And until we are ready to tell the truth about what really happens in our homes, in our families, and in our past, we will keep producing generation after generation of people who are trying to live with trauma they never should have had to survive.
This is the work I am digging into for my next book. Because if we are serious about understanding what is happening to young men and boys, to women and girls, to all of us, we have to be willing to walk straight into the secrets that are killing us.
