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 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.
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 the sanctions the government imposes about graduating 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 was 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 had 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’re been concentrating 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 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, Egypt, 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, from infancy to early teens. A 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 districts 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 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. 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 some 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. 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, close to the most explicit forms of sexual activity. Think about it—both FGM and the Program are intended to affect sexuality in opposite ways, the first one completely eliminating it and the second, legally mandating extreme forms of it, but both ways are radical, profound, and unhealthy.
Readers of The Realist can’t do very much individually to affect the FGM problem, 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.
“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.
Amelia and Jeremy shyly, longingly, looked at each other and then went back to the computer.
Later, Amelia showed the article to Kevin and Denise.
“Well, it’s good you switched servers,” Denise chuckled. “After this gets out, I think there’ll be people looking for the Realist blogger with tar and feathers at hand.”
“Yeah, this should get the establishment really riled up,” Kevin agreed. “Guys, it’s time to discuss Part B of our plan for the governors, and we want to see what you think about it—and you’ll be our guinea pigs first.”
“Uh oh,” Amelia said to Jeremy. “I’ve heard how they operate. This means trouble.”
“What do you have in mind?” Jeremy asked warily.
Kevin explained his idea. “If the Program Committee demands some kind of physical form of having the Program, which is the sense I’m getting from Hanford, first we’ll ask them to tell us how we can compel participation. Using force isn’t allowed, although in some schools they broke that restriction and in others they came close to force by using extreme threats and coercion. We succeeded in mobilizing the kids and parents at your school so that coercion won’t work there and neither will the threat of not graduating. You know all that stuff already.
“But I can’t see that they’ll be able to suggest anything. The school says they’re willing to have the Program, and technically I guess that it’s running, but no one’s participating,” he grinned. “Amelia told us that they’ve been calling kids’ names every single day to go to the office to participate, right?”
Amelia and Jeremy nodded. “Yeah, they’re still doing that,” Jeremy agreed. “No one ever goes.”
Kevin went on, “The head teacher told me that he’s informed the National Program Committee that it’s not the school’s fault that kids won’t participate and that the Committee can’t tell him a legal way to compel participation. So it’s an impasse. Denise and I can suggest a way to break the impasse. I’ve got all the materials we need to do that now; I just got a set of DVDs from our friends back in the States. The videos show an alternate kind of Program that a group of us developed. It achieves the exact same objectives as the one that the U.K. Program law states.
“If we do go ahead with our version of the program, we’ll need help and you guys will be that help. We were the first helpers for this project when our friends got the idea for it back when we were seniors in high school. There’s no nudity but lots of contact. Are you okay with that?”
Amelia looked at Kevin, then at Jeremy. “Contact? What do you mean?”
“Simple touching, embracing, holding hands, and later, a kind of massage,” Denise said.
“Oh...” Amelia said. “With Jeremy?”
“Sure. Is that okay?” Denise asked, smiling; she hadn’t told Kevin about finding the teens in a passionate embrace.
“Oh my, I think I’d like that,” she said shyly and Jeremy took her hand.
“I would too,” he said, looking into Amelia’s eyes.
“Okay, that’s great!” Kevin smiled. “Because we’ve got a massage class scheduled so you can learn something about it; our Plan B program for the school ends up with some massage procedures.”
He gave them a flyer.
“Tantric massage?” Amelia read. “Um... Isn’t that about doing... sex things?”
“Well, sometimes tantric massage does involve sexual intercourse. A better name for those particular massage sessions might be ‘tantric erotic massage’ or something like that,” Denise told her. “But read the flyer.”
Amelia looked it over while Jeremy read it over her shoulder.
Tantric Massage Workshops Offered
The word “tantra” often evokes the image of a sensual or even sexual massage; it’s a word which is frequently misused and conjures up many misunderstandings. Often people assume that the object of a tantric massage is for the recipient to have a sexual release.
An ordinary massage is given to relax the recipient, mainly by kneading the muscles and relieving bodily stresses. This technique is directed toward the yin energies which circulate in the body. The yin energies promote relaxation. Instead, tantric massage improves on ordinary massage by mobilizing both yin and yang energies. The yang energies are stimulating energies and the tantra techniques are designed to interweave and modulate the energies of relaxation and stimulation, building up and releasing these opposite energies in the body, which results in the recipient achieving a deep sense of peace and a fulfilling sense of wholeness.
Another misunderstanding is that it’s assumed that tantric massage must be done with the recipient being naked. The yin and yang energies are actually mobilized through the stimulation of focal points on the recipient’s body and along the body’s energy meridians, so it’s possible to give a tantric massage through clothing and also without touching the sexual organs, but some people have actually attained orgasmic experiences with no contact with their sexual organs, even while they are wearing their clothes! But remember, the massage’s objective is not necessarily for the recipient to achieve sexual release.
If clients are interested, they can consider our advanced classes, which do cover the teaching of massage techniques that incorporate nudity and include the genitals in the massage since the sexual organs are an integral part of the body and an essential contributor to the body’s energy sources. When the sexual organs are incorporated in a tantric massage, the unique energy they contribute to the experience, the strong life force energy which flows through them and into the other parts of our bodies, allows an unparalleled orgasmic experience.
But our basic workshops are meant as an introduction to tantric techniques and there will be no pressure for anyone to move past their own comfort limits.
See below for the times that these workshops will be offered. We hope that you will take the opportunity to study tantra with us....
Amelia looked up; her face was beet red. “Oh, I don’t know...” she began. “Orgasmic release?”
“You don’t need to do any of that, honey. But it’s really not sexual, mostly. Sensual, yes. Kevin and I have done a number of these tantric classes,” Denise explained. “My first experience was at a workshop where we were expected to get naked. I didn’t know about the nudity part beforehand; we went to the class on a lark and I almost ran out of it when they told the group that we should get naked. The nudity part kind of broke up the workshop because the others who came soon left, but the teacher convinced Kevin and me to stay and did a private lesson for us with our clothes still on. I had a wonderful time. Kevin and I still do what they taught us, too. We put parts of what we learned at that workshop into the program that Avery developed.”
“Jeremy, if I go, is it okay for you?” Amelia asked.
“Sure, I’ll go. We won’t do anything that you’re uncomfortable with. I know a bit about the qi energies and meridians, Eastern lore, from my taekwondo classes and had some massages. It was really tame stuff,” he assured her.
Kevin smiled, “Good. I’ve already signed up for a session tomorrow evening; now we all can go.”
~~~~
The tantra class the following evening was very basic, as the flyer suggested. The instructor showed the locations of the major chakras and energy meridians and then demonstrated with her partner various massage techniques, mainly concentrating on the hands, feet, legs, and back. She showed the deep stroking methods that could be used, which she explained are only effective using massage oils on bare skin, and told the group how the alternation of deep pressure and sensual stroking could stimulate erotic sensations in the body. Everyone was encouraged to try the techniques on their partners, and then partners switched around so the giver became the recipient to allow both partners to learn the techniques.
Amelia and Jeremy were enthralled with the experience, and after the class ended, Amelia embraced Jeremy in a passionate hug and kiss.
“Ohmygod,” she panted, “that was... oh... so intense. Wow. I tingle all over my body!”
Jeremy looked like he had been slugged when Amelia let him go. “Wow... can we kiss that way again, darling? Kevin? We have to demonstrate that stuff to the kids in school? Shit, that’s like X-rated, almost!”
Denise giggled. “You two really got into it. You both had such an intense look. I think you’re both naturals. We’ll show you the moves that we’ll want you to demonstrate when we do the first class. But Kevin and I wanted you to experience the kind of power that simple touching can unleash, even over clothes, as we’ll be doing with kids, if they accept our suggestion ”
“Damn. That was just brill. When can we start?” Jeremy asked brightly.
They all laughed.
~~~~
The next day, Amelia and two of her friends were waiting in the lunchroom for Jeremy to join them. He hadn’t come to their history class and she was concerned. About five minutes later, Jeremy showed up. He motioned to Amelia that he wanted to speak to her privately so she joined him.
“I got pulled into the head’s office,” he explained. “All kinds of shit hit over the last blog. He tried to tell me that I needed to stop it but I told him that he could deny that anyone at this school was involved. So he reminded me that one of my early postings had been traced to this school and he knew that I was the only pupil signed in to use a computer then. I got a bright idea then; I told him that the media lab has a wi-fi hot spot and if someone used it, it would show the same address as the lab computers since everything shares the same router. So he could claim that anyone could have their device on the wi-fi connection and the password was common knowledge.
“He looked doubtful but then called the technology teacher, who basically agreed with me. Then he had me wait while he rang up someone, who was apparently really angry—I could hear the yelling from where I was sitting. The head told the guy on the phone that he had done some further checking and explained what the tech teacher told him. And he and I listened to more yelling.”
“So what happened? Are you in trouble?” Amelia asked, concerned.
“Ha! No, after he rang off, the head teacher told me that the guy on the phone told him that he had decided to get an expert to trace the blog’s account to try to identify its owner, only to find that the old blog account was now gone. Then this morning our new article appeared in the papers about kids being tortured in the Program and now the blog was on a different server. And the head told me that they have no idea where that new server’s located! So everything’s ace ‘cause the papers publicized the blog article and Kevin’s server is really hidden!”
“And that took the whole period?” Amelia wondered.
“Only part. The head had me wait till he could get a copy of one of the tabloids so he could see what it said. Then he spent the rest of the time telling me to be less inflammatory in my writing.” He smiled. “I told him that I’d try to tell that to the blogger.”
“Shit,” Amelia grinned, “I can’t believe what you’re doing, sweetie...”
“Hey, I’m using your ideas too, honey. We’re making a good team.”
Amelia kissed her fingers and touched Jeremy’s lips. “That’s all I can do in school, Jeremy. I like being on your team. Now let’s go sit with the girls. They’re burning to talk about the FGM blog.”
They went to the girls’ table and Jeremy was immediately inundated with questions.
Darra got hers in first. “Jeremy, you must have persuaded the Realist blog guy real good; that was a hot article. Did he say that he would keep putting our stuff on his blog?”
Jeremy nodded. “He’s cool with doing it. But he tries not to include stuff that’ll give away who his sources are. You can imagine why.”
“Oh yes,” Tisa said, “I have a newspaper here with that article from yesterday.”
Amelia reached and Tisa handed it to her. Amelia and Jeremy scanned the article.
“I tried to find the blog last night but it was gone,” Mariama complained.
“It got moved,” Tisa told her. “That was in the paper too, with the new address.”
“I think the blogger must have been feeling some political heat,” Jeremy said. “Especially now that he’s telling people not to be in the Program. Maybe... oh, I’ll bet he found a way to keep his identity hidden. Ha, he must have a secret identity.”
The others laughed.
“Oh, my mum heard something about Hana,” Estelle told them. “She’s mostly ok but isn’t coming back to school. Her dad decided to take her out of our school. My mum said their family was embarrassed at how terrible it was that she let her privates be exposed. Mum tried to tell them that Hana was forced, two men were holding her down, but Mum said that her mum didn’t understand. I think that they didn’t want to understand.”
Jeremy nodded, “I wish I could’ve gotten to her in time. Well, maybe all this anti-Program publicity will help.”
“Ugh,” Darra scowled. “We still have that hanging over us—there’s been a rumor that the Program people are coming to the school for a meeting next month.”
“Yeah.” “Heard that too.” “Huh-uh.” the others replied.
“So ladies,” Jeremy asked, “do you have any more stuff to pass on for that blog?”
Estelle dug a sheet out of her bookbag. “Here’s what a girl wrote about her experience for me. So far we know of seventeen girls with FGM in the school now. I think that’s all we can find.”
Amelia was looking at some papers; then she looked up. “That actually fits the published stats I found, Estelle,” she said. We have 431 girls here and if 17 were cut, that’s... um... almost 4 percent?”
Jeremy was punching his phone. “3.9. Wow. Very good, Amelia! How’d you do that?”
She grinned at him. “Okay, this article says, in a survey done by the Home Office, that in South London, the number of girls affected is between 4.7 and 3.9 percent. It’s highest here than in the rest of the country—which makes sense, we have the largest immigrant population here.”
“Does it say what the whole country is?” Tisa asked.
“Um... yes. England and Wales it’s only half of one percent of girls. All London is 2.1 percent. That’s where the immigrant families mostly are, for sure. But the larger cities, like Birmingham and Manchester, have about 1.5 percent.”
“That shows why the pilot tests of the Program didn’t encounter girls who were cut,” Jeremy mused. “Those schools were rural or very suburban—I remember that in the first school where the Program was started where that girl committed suicide...” He stopped at the girls’ blank looks. “Didn’t you guys have to read her journal? No? Well, it’s part of the stuff that kids at Program schools are required to do. I guess we never got to that point here. Anyway, that was at a school in a suburb of a small city, Canterbury, I think. There were about 350 kids there. If half were girls, then half of a percent with FGM is less than one girl. I think the other pilot schools were like that too.”
“So then when they started the Program in London, they ran into all the Muslim issues,” Darra continued. “And got girls who were cut and would have real problems—health problems—with the Program.”
“Exactly,” Jeremy confirmed. “Which is why I hope that all the anti-Program propaganda works.”
The conversation turned to sharing ideas for a future blog article. They planned to use Amelia’s demographic information on FGM prevalence in a discussion of expected numbers of affected children in urban schools.
~~~~
When Amelia and Denise arrived home after her hospital treatment on Friday, Denise noticed that Amelia seemed to be very uncomfortable; she had looked uneasy and agitated on their trip home too.
“Sweetie, is there something wrong?” Denise called when Amelia fled to her room after they entered the flat. “When we were riding on the tube, you were twitchy and couldn’t focus when we were talking. Did something happen during the therapy?”
Amelia came back out of her room. “Denise, I don’t know,” she wailed. “It’s all tingling and throbbing in my fanny now and I can’t think straight!”
“What is it—when did that feeling start?” Denise asked, concerned.
“Ooohhh... It started when Miss Romert was pressing into the skin over where the incision was. She said she could feel some tightness and said she would loosen the area. After a minute of her massaging, it suddenly felt like I was going to pee, like a big wave or a pressure was building down there, sort of, and I gasped, so she stopped and told me she thought that maybe doing that should wait till next week. But it feels so hot and throbbing and twitchy and squirmy there now and I don’t know...”
Denise was trying hard not to giggle, so she grabbed Amelia and wrapped her in a hard embrace.
“Oh, sweetie, sweetie, that’s incredible news,” she murmured into Amelia’s ear. “You know what’s happening? No, you don’t? You’re horny! You know what that is?”
Amelia pulled back and stared into Denise’s eyes. “Uh, yes, I know what that means... wanting sex? But...”
“Not exactly ‘wanting sex,’ dear. It’s more like a feeling of arousal, of sexual excitement. What you felt happened because your privates were stimulated by the treatment. It shows that your nerves have healed and you’ve gotten normal feelings now. You probably almost had an orgasm while Miss Romert was treating you,” she giggled.
“Ohmygod! You think? Is this what arousal is like? I can’t think straight! How does it go away?” Amelia asked plaintively.
Denise chuckled. “Well, I can think of a few ways... Most might shock you. How do you feel about masturbation? No? Didn’t think so. Hmmm. Maybe... Okay, let’s take the G-rated approach; you can take a bath or a cool shower. That might work. Later we can talk about the R-rated approach if you want.”
“Denise, I kinda felt that way after our massage workshop yesterday...” Amelia said softly. “It just occurred to me. So is that what it means to be horny? It makes me feel... like needing something that’s missing... but desperately wanting...”
“That’s it exactly. It’s one of the most primitive feelings that people get, according to what I learned in psych.”
“Aaaagghh! I need a cold shower!” Amelia exclaimed and ran off.
“Remember to tell Jeremy to come here tomorrow after taekwondo!” Denise called after her.
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