An Elegy for Megan Kanka

As children returned to their first day of classes at Sayen Elementary School on September 7, 1994, the administrators decided to make it appear as if nothing had happened. Principal Hank Keller stated that instead of forcing a program about death and bereavement on the students, he and the district administrators would keep everything as normal as possible. "The Samaritan Hospice does a puppet show designed to help kids cope with this kind of thing," Keller said, "but the state vetoed it and said it would not be done until 1995 (Ford 1994, 6). The school's guidance counselor also decided to hold off her usual classes on loss.

This is an essay about the legacy of denial we are creating following the death of Megan Kanka. In this essay I want to establish the absence of factual discussion about the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse, and I want to offer an interpretation of the flawed positions of community leaders whose responsibility it is to construct policy.

Throughout this analysis I will maintain that patriarchy is at the center of much of the discussion regarding the prevention of child sexual abuse. Patriarchy--a singular vision that places systematic oppression and maintained power above the recognition and resolution of human problems--is a constant of western civilization. In America, we have inherited a theory of community that is structurally patriarchal in nature. The founding fathers of western political theory--Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rosseau--provided us with a vision of social construct theory and liberal obligation theory that appear value neutral. Their natural man was, however, the embodiment of patriarchy, his actions and decisions based on structural sexism (Hirschmann 1992).

And so it is no surprise that the existence of patriarchy is evident in the events surrounding the death of a little girl. What is surprising is that we have not yet addressed the fact that many of our community leaders have set forth an analysis of child sexual abuse that is profoundly flawed. In construing an enduring social problem solely as a legal issue, members of our community have obviated the broad question of abuse, thus offering simplistic solutions to a complex problem that must be directly addressed.