All That Glitter Has Lost Its Sparkle

All that glitter has lost its sparkle, such is the story of a man that calls himself Gary Glitter. Gary Glitter, a former pop singer and is also known as Paul Francis Gadd, is a newly registered sex offender in the United Kingdom.

On the 22nd of August, he returned involuntarily to his native UK, 4 days after being released from a Vietnamese prison, where he served a 2 years and 9 months sentence for sex crimes involving two pre-teen girls. He claimed he was teaching them English and let them sleep over at his place because they were afraid of ghost, he was reportedly paid off the victims' family and thus avoiding a mandatory death sentence should he be convicted of child rape.

Gary Glitter is an indecent man who exploited children.

Glitter was perhaps unlucky enough to be a famous person that was caught and charged, there are others like him who are getting away with sex crimes involving children - ordinary people whose faces you see on the street with no names.

Some committed the offense by downloading child pornography, but the most commonly convicted offenders sexually abuse children by ways of exposing their genitals to a child, performing sexual activities on a child, or sexually molesting a child.

Unfortunately the world has heard too much about the predators and not enough about the victims, victims simply do not speak up publicly with the exception of Oprah Winfrey.

I often wonder how can a child trust again after such atrocious act happened to him/her? As children we were taught to trust adult, but what do a child do if the adult, supposedly a person of authority, a friend, a neighbour, or a relative, touches the child in a way the child knew he/she is not supposed to? Will the child report such incident to his/her parents or would the child feel too embarrassed to? To what extend such act affect the way the child is in the future? Sadly, I can only wonder and have no answers.

One thing I can do is to raise the awareness of this issue, I feel that we as adults should be the protectors of children and their innocence.

We can be observant to the behaviours of the children we come in contact with, be that your own children, relatives, friends' children, neighbours, students etc, if a child suddenly became withdrawn, it is best to approach the child gently and talk about it.

Don't be afraid to ask questions, but be discreet since this can be a sensitive issue to the child.

Don't over-react, children may think it is their fault and would rather remain silent about the issue than having an adult making a fuss over it.

Lastly, use your instincts, if you feel something is not right, it probably isn't.