One man's take on his culture's stereotypes

La Raza Cósmica: “The Cosmic Race.” Refers to a movement by Mexican intellectuals during the 1920s arguing Mexicans have the blood of all the world's races – white, black, Indian and Asian – and therefore transcend the world.

One man's take on his culture's stereotypes

By Gustavo Arellano

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Dear Mexican: What is the deal with Mexican denial when it comes to dealing with child sexual abuse? I know counselors who tell me that it’s a big problem trying to get Mexican families to admit and confront this. In my own experience, I have seen my Mexican relatives be more concerned over the fact that their son is CERTAINLY NOT GAY than over the fact that there is a strong likelihood that he suffers repeated exposure to an abusing adult. Why the secrecy? Sometimes, I wonder why pedophiles just don’t focus on Mexican children, since with them is the least chance that their parents will acknowledge the problem. Is it a class issue? A marginalized-people issue? Or something especially acute in Mexican families? Chester the Non-Molester

Dear Wab: It’s not just Mexican denial, Chester – or are you so clueless that you haven’t heard about the Catholic Church pedo-priest scandal in the United States, and the silence of the faithful when it comes to their leaders’ role in the rapes of innocents? It’s near-impossible to find accurate stats on child sexual abuse of any kind, and Mexico is no different.

Cicely Marston, a lecturer in social science at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, wrote in a 2005 paper examining child sexual abuse in Mexico City that it was “extremely difficult to find any published information about [child sexual abuse] in Mexico, and information that exists appears in potentially unreliable newspaper reports,” that her study was “the first to my knowledge of sexual abuse in a general population in Mexico,” and doesn’t it tell you something that it takes a Brit to publish a report on the subject.

The easy answer to your question involves Mexico’s usual suspects for any of its pathologies: Catholicism, machismo, la Malinche, age of consent is 12 – ustedes know the drill.

But such an analysis is wrong, since child sexual abuse is such an underreported crime in all communities.

Instead, the Mexican urges any raza who knows of or suspects sexual abuse to do the right thing: Call the cops.