I was molested a few times at the age of 5 by another child at daycare who was also 5.  He would ask me to hide under an office sized desk with him that was in another room, away from everyone else and he would touch me inappropriately.  One of the incidents that makes me cringe the most when I think about it is how he actually attempted to put his private inside of me.  I think about this sometimes because I remember feeling so much shame and guilt that day when my mom came to pick me up from daycare and as much as I wanted to tell her what was going on, the words never came out.  I know that his inappropriate behavior was most likely caused by someone sexually abusing him on a consistent basis, and I often feel sorry for him when I think about the incidents because although he chose to act out inappropriately towards me, I remember seeing him around the neighborhood as we got older, during our teenage years and he looked like someone had sucked the life out of him, like he was most likely being abused on a regular basis.  When the incidents were taking place when we were 5, I never talked about it with anyone.  I never talked to him either when we grew older and I saw him around the neighborhood,  but I'd always wonder if he remembered what he did to me and I would hope that he didn't hurt anyone else.  At first when I started remembering these incidents,  I remember not talking about it because I felt like no one would understand that although I followed him and went along with what he told me to do and we were the same age,  it was still sexual abuse.  I thought that I would get in trouble for what my family called, "being fresh."  I started talking about these incidents, first with some of my friends, who brushed it off as not being a big deal and then with my mom who was disappointed that I never told her about it when it first started happening, and then I talked to my older sister about it, who to my surprise had her own story about being sexually abused as a kid by some of our cousins who were around the same age as her when she would get dropped off at our grandmother's house to be babysat on a number of occasions, I realized that being sexually abused as a child by someone around the same age as you is not that uncommon and that this type of sexual abuse is rarely reported because unfortunately a lot of adults that I've come across tend to brush this type of behavior off as a, "normal" part of children playing together.

I didn't realize how much all of this has affected me until I became a parent myself.    Anytime that I am not able to be around my son, I feel uneasy because I worry about how he's doing and that at any moment that I'm not around him to protect him could be the moment that somebody, anybody could steal his innocence by touching him inappropriately, or showing him something inappropriate.  The only way I ease my nerves about this is by praying that he is safe when he is not with me and by checking in with him once he is back home with me.  He's almost a teenager now and although he seems to have made it this far without experiencing any serious trauma or abuse, there have been a few incidents that he's hinted to me about that I find disturbing and for a few years after he entered kindergarten, he started having night terrors and he never slept through the night without screaming and trying to sleep in the bed with me during those times.  This stood out to me as signs that there has been some kind of abuse that he may have experienced because I also went through years of having nightmares and not wanting to sleep alone in my room as a child to the point where I was also terrified at bedtime.  Thankfully he grew out of being terrified to sleep in his own room and no longer has nightmares, but I hope and pray that if he ever remembers any form of abusive behavior that he is able to reach out to me for support and that he doesn't feel as alone as I did.  It's just so upsetting to me that so many children continue to suffer through abuse alone and are afraid to tell.  The one thing I learned from my experience is that you should always tell, even if you're misunderstood, or blamed tell anyway, not only does it help you to talk about it, but you never know how many other people you may prevent from getting hurt because most abusers abuse more than one person.