Chapter 11

When Kevin arrived at the flat later, the teens were still busy with their schoolwork. Not having many classes in common, only history and math, they were working separately. Amelia was working on a literature paper and Jeremy was studying Spanish.

Amelia looked up at Kevin as he bent down to kiss her. “Hi, sweetie, how do you feel today?”

“Good, Kevin. Going to school is fun again,” she sighed and stretched. “I think that’s all I can do on this essay now.”

Jeremy had looked up from his book. “Hi, Kevin. It’s strange learning a Western language. I know Korean and speak a little Chinese and Japanese. Spanish seems so weird. Like English but so different too.”

“Any news from school?” Kevin asked. “I brought some papers home for you.”

“The big news was in those tabloids, actually,” Jeremy grinned. “Oh, there was a telly crew in school; they got chased out. Maybe there’ll be a news item later. And you got the text about Saturday dinner, right?”

“Yep. We’re okay for Saturday,” Kevin confirmed.

“Jeremy asked me out on a date for Sunday,” Amelia whispered in Kevin’s ear.

He nodded. “Sure, have fun,” he whispered back. She glowed a smile at him.

Denise arrived a few minutes later and they turned on the TV news. The news basically duplicated the tabloid articles, then the reporter interviewed two parents from a London school which was running the Program; both parents appeared angry that their school would be continuing to require student participation and they told the reporter that their children would refuse if selected. The piece ended with a brief interview with Mr Hanford standing in front of Norwich Academy. His only comment was that the school’s governors were working with the National Program Committee to decide their next steps in adopting the Program. The report ended as the reporter mentioned that student resistance to the Program appeared to be spreading throughout the schools in the country.

Hearing that, Jeremy whooped with glee and Amelia clapped her hands.

Kevin grinned at Denise. “I guess that’s the difference between Brits and Yanks, sweetie. Remember, after our student newspaper article hit the press? The parents practically revolted against the Program. Here in Britain, it’s ‘keep a stiff upper lip’ and ‘keep calm and carry on.’ In public, anyway. I’ll bet that the resistance’ll grow, but it’ll happen more quietly here.”

Jeremy was grinning broadly. “But that was just the opening salvo in the resistance, Kevin, right? You said you had a meeting with our head teacher so maybe we can work our school’s resistance into the news again?”

Kevin laughed. “You’re thinking big, Jeremy; I like that. Yes, Mr Hanford wants to meet Monday afternoon. Denise can come and the two of you also. This is a team approach and I’ll explain what Denise and I came up with. Hanford needs something to hold the Program Committee at bay so we’ll give him an idea for a whole new way of having the Program operate. Besides preparing the tools to tear down the Program’s legitimacy. We’ll discuss it after supper—you can stay, I hope?”

“Yes sir, I made arrangements.”

On Friday morning, Denise was preparing breakfast when Amelia rushed tearfully into the kitchen and embraced her, sobbing.

“Amelia! What’s wrong, honey? Did something happen?” she exclaimed, alarmed.

“No, no, Denise,” Amelia sniffled. “I’m okay—that’s why ... I was just overcome ... I’m so happy that I’m crying.”

Denise relaxed. “Oh thank God. I thought it was something with your surgery...”

“That’s what it was, Denise. My pain’s all gone! I just realized! Well, not quite all gone, I still feel something that hurts in there ... but when I just took a pee and dabbed dry, it didn’t hurt! So I tried pressing near the bad spots and it didn’t hurt!” Her tears began again. “When I realized ... I just lost it then. All those years ... all that pain ... It must be my surgery, they must have fixed the problem. Oh thank you for taking care of me, I love you so much ... and Kevin too, for helping me.”

“That’s incredible news, darling. And your post-op visit is this afternoon. Dr Singh will be so pleased. He can check to see how it’s healed and we’ll talk about what happens next. I’m so, so happy for you! Can I let Kevin know? He’ll be delighted.”

She nodded and hugged Denise again, then ran to her room to get dressed.

Amelia floated through her day, rejoicing in her awareness of being relatively pain-free. She still experienced twinges of pain and some dull throbbing at times, but her constant pain, which was so intrusive to all of her activities, was mostly gone. Her hospital visit provided even better news. The surgical wound had healed quickly and cleanly and when Singh gently probed the area, the pressure produced hardly any pain, only a dull discomfort and feelings of a tingling warmth that she thought felt weird.

Singh was very pleased. He told her that the twinges were likely signs of the damaged nerve fibers coming to life again while the throbbing was possibly a sign of improving blood supply, which could be a sign of scar tissue breaking down. And he thought her report of feeling warmth was a sign that her genital sensitivity would improve. Amelia and Denise were overjoyed with his report, happily discussing it as they made the appointments for her continued weekly therapy.

When Amelia returned home, she texted her father with the good news and then they visited by videochat for a while until Kevin got home. Hadad was concerned in a fatherly way when he heard that his daughter had a boyfriend, but after being reassured by Kevin that Jeremy was a long-standing family friend, he told Amelia to have fun but to be careful.

“Of course I will, Papa,” she responded with an expression that only teenaged daughters have learned to master so well.

Then Kevin and Denise celebrated with Amelia by going to an upscale restaurant and enjoying an excellent meal.

Saturday’s dinner with the Porters was epic; the families had a lot of catching up to do. They were delighted to meet Amelia, who made an immediate favorable impression. Of course there was a lot of interest in the unusual way that the teens found out that they were attending the same school, with Jeremy and Amelia describing exactly how they met. Then they were persuaded to relate the school events of the past week, although Amelia was reluctant to tell them any details of her assault by the Program security man. Denise made a mental note to talk to her in private later to discuss the healing powers of talking through bad memories.

“Oh, speaking of Program matters, I’ve got some news from State, guys,” Porter told Jeremy and Amelia. “They decided that the children of American diplomatic personnel mustn’t get involved in the Program here. That’s because it was declared educationally unsound in the U.S.”

“YES!” cheered Naomi. “That’s soooo great! Thanks, dad!”

Then Kevin described the parents’ meeting to the Porters and also about his meeting with Hanford and the upcoming planned meeting.

“So what’s this next meeting about?” Porter asked.

“Two topics,” Kevin responded. “First will be the arguments against the Program’s legitimacy on educational, cultural, and fairness grounds. The second is an idea that substitutes a different way of achieving the so-called Program objectives. That’s based on an Avery University study Denise and I were in a couple of years ago. Our friends were the study’s authors but they told us that hardly any school in the U.S. is doing their version; the Program gave any of these new social program ideas a bad rep.

“Hanford is being pressed to start the Program but he knows that none of the kids will agree to participate. So he’s stuck; he has to run the Program but no one will cooperate. He can’t force cooperation and any sanctions the government thinks that they can impose aren’t convincing the parents. I thought if he offers my idea as an alternate—it has the same objectives and actually works—it might take the heat off because then he can show the government that he’s trying and not ignoring the law.”

“Sounds like a tall order, Kevin,” Porter remarked. “Jeremy’s happy that you’ve included him.”

“Jeremy’s had some really good ideas and so has Amelia. They can help to deliver a powerful message.”

“Okay,” Porter said, “enough serious talk. Let’s annoy my son and Amelia and talk about their first date tomorrow,” he grinned.

“Dad!” Jeremy complained.

“Okay, Warren, let’s go eat,” Barbara winked. “Don’t tease the kids.”

The beginning of the first week following the abortive Program launch was uneventful for the Norwich school students, but behind the scenes, the school’s head teacher and governors were wrestling with the government’s educational authorities. By mid-week, Dr Abberle, the chair of the governors, had arranged for a meeting with National Program Committee members to discuss the impasse.

At Kevin’s meeting with Hanford, he had outlined his general plan and the governors decided to present those ideas to the Program Committee. One of the governors with political connections also was able to arrange for four MPs who represented Greater London, including their borough, to attend the meeting. Three were from the Labor Party and one was a Conservative. The meeting was arranged for the evening of the first Monday in December.

Jeremy and Amelia kept up their blog postings on The Realist blog, but they made a change in the blog’s web hosts. Porter had become concerned that the newfound publicity of the blog would result in Jeremy becoming identified as the author and his link to the U.S. embassy as a diplomat’s son disclosed. An embassy security expert worked with Kevin and Jeremy to check all of Jeremy’s uploads he had made to his blog and they were gratified to find that, except for a single case, all of his uploads had been made using the Tor network; his location having been masked by the anonymizing application. They knew that the original server which had hosted the blog was located in the U.S. and that Internet company’s policy was not to divulge the identity of its subscribers without a warrant for the investigation of a crime.

Kevin then worked with Jeremy to set up his blog on the server he had used for his anti-Program activities, just as he had done with Amelia’s blog a few weeks earlier, and the security person found that the software spawning the proxy server network was still running. Satisfied that any link between Jeremy’s blog and the embassy could not be found, the security person left Jeremy with the admonition to continue to be careful.

The following day after school, Jeremy and Amelia went to her flat to finish the moving of his blog to its new home. Jeremy copied the blog files onto Kevin’s server and deleted them from the old one. The two teens next took the summaries they had made of some of the FGM articles written by Amelia and her classmates, those which highlighted the human rights issues of the practice, and uploaded them to Jeremy’s blog.

Then Jeremy and Amelia posted their next article.

Human Rights: Mistreating Kids in the United Kingdom—Illegal and Legal Torture Too

The Realist has been exploring human rights problems which have been afflicting our society and we’ve recently been concentrating our reports on children, who are amongst its most vulnerable members. In an article last week, The Realist mentioned how a group of children took their own defence in hand and stood up for their individual rights, rights which were threatened by the adults who were charged to protect them.

A society where adults think that they have the right to inflict major harm, physical as well as psychological, on children, is an immoral society. Is British society immoral? The Realist believes that yes, it is, as long as its citizens continue to tolerate the harming of its children.

Our last posting was about a custom which causes one form of extreme harm to children; it’s a custom that’s practised in over 30 countries world-wide: female genital mutilation or FGM. This is a primitive cultural practice which is common in the equatorial regions of Africa, in Egypt, in some middle-eastern and Southeast Asian countries, and shockingly by some immigrant communities in Europe, America, and Australia. You can read more about this terrible practice in our last article.

The victims of these mutilations are almost always young children, aged from infancy to early teens. A significant number of victims even die as a result of the procedure, which is typically done under primitive, unsanitary conditions. But, you ask, how does this affect children in the U.K.?

When people in various cultures emigrate to new countries, they bring their cultural practices with them, and sadly, genital mutilation, or cutting, is one such practice. FGM is, to coin a phrase, “alive and well” in England. According to a recent report, over 100,000 females from age 15 to 49 are believed to be living with FGM in England and Wales. This number includes about 10,000 girls under 15 years old.

While The Realist hasn’t been able to find any reports of the actual genital cutting procedure occurring in the U.K., we have found many reports about girls who are sent abroad, generally to their cultural homes in Africa, to undergo the procedure. A law passed by Parliament in 2003 made it a crime to send a British citizen or permanent resident abroad to be cut, but to date it seems that no one has been successfully prosecuted.

In parts of London, there are many children who have been mutilated by genital cutting, and some boroughs have the highest proportions of afflicted children in the nation—almost 5 percent of the girls in some schools have been cut. For example, The Realist has learned that in all of the secondary schools in London, schools where the Program is running, about 2 percent of the girls have had the mutilation. In fact, both of the girls who were “allegedly” assaulted by the Program officials at the independent school we wrote about last week—refer to the newspaper articles which covered that travesty—had been genitally mutilated, and one was severely injured when she was forcibly stripped and the man forced his fingers into her genitals.

And that brings us to the point of this article. FGM is a violation of children’s human rights. It’s torture under any definition; it’s also a permanent, life-altering mutilation. In a significant number of cases, it’s fatal. Girls who are mutilated cannot enjoy a normal life; their lives are afflicted with pain, infections, difficult childbearing, and higher infant mortality rates for their babies. The Realist urges that anyone who has the ability to do so, to do whatever they can to help stamp out this primitive practice.

Another abusive practice affecting children is happening right here in our country. Just like FGM, it’s a form of child torture too and must be eliminated. This home-grown abuse is known as the Naked in School Program and it’s actually a “legalized” form of torture. How is the Program like FGM, which has been made illegal in numerous countries, and how can it be called “torture”? Simple: both practices are imposed involuntarily on children by adults; they both affect only children. They’re both a form of severe abuse, rising to the level of torture, both physical and psychological. FGM is performed without benefit of anaesthesia and its pain and aftereffects last a lifetime. The Program produces severe psychological “pain” in many children whose effects may also last for a long time, as well as significant numbers of physical injuries through genital trauma or infections. Read past articles in The Realist if you need to be convinced of the psychological damage as well as some physical damage inflicted on children by the Program. Being driven to suicide seems to The Realist to be sufficient proof of its bad effects on vulnerable children.

Finally, a major advertised objective of the Program is to force a child to accept a one-size-fits-all idea of sexuality; typically it’s the most invasive, abusive, and non-consensual form of sexual activity. Think about it—both FGM and the Program are intended to affect sexuality in children, but operate in opposite ways, the first one completely eliminating sexuality and the second, legally forcing kids into extreme forms of it, but the end result of both tortures is radical, profound, and unhealthy.

Readers of The Realist can’t do very much individually to affect the FGM problem other than to contribute to organizations which are attempting to eliminate the practice, but they certainly can influence whether their own children are hurt if they are told that they must participate in the Naked in School Program. The children at our now well-known independent school showed us how to protect them. They told us: “Just Say No!”

Amelia turned to Jeremy after the article was displayed on their screen.

“Wow, that looks so good! But how do we tell people how to find the new server?” she asked.

“Kevin had an idea; he was going to ask his expert contact in Jakarta,” Jeremy said. “He thought that there might be a way to redirect visitors to my old URL. I’m also going to send an email with this article to the newspapers who covered our first blog post and give them a link to the new blog. I found this email service where you can send anonymous emails; that will protect our identity. They limit it to sending to ten addresses to prevent spamming ... Ummm ... Amelia? What are you looking at?”

“Ah, you, Jeremy. You get such an intense look when you’re passionate about something. I love how you get all caught up in doing this work. Uh, Jeremy? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“‘Cause you’re gorgeous, honey. I love looking at you all the time...”

Their hands found each other’s and then their lips. Soon they were in an embrace, kissing passionately, tongues dueling, breaths panting, as the flat door opened and Denise came in.

“Oh!” all three exclaimed; then Denise laughed while the two teens blushed furiously.

“Erm ... We ... we ... it’s just...” Jeremy began while Amelia buried her face in her hands.

Denise went to Jeremy and hugged him, then Amelia. “It’s fine, it’s fine. Don’t even think about it. You both care for each other, right?”

Amelia nodded, sniffling, while Jeremy said, “Oh yes!”

“Kevin and I see your care for each other all the time when we’re with you. So it’s perfectly okay to express your feelings of affection. In public you need to restrain yourselves, but in private, one of the best ways to show your affection is by physical contact. So don’t let me stop you, kids!” she chuckled as she went to change her clothes. “Jeremy, you’ll stay for dinner?” she called as she disappeared into her bedroom.