Issue of the Week: Human Rights
Hadley Duvall, Democratic National Convention, August 20, 2024
Updated: August 22, 2024
After Michelle Obama tore the roof off of the Democratic National Convention tonight in what CNN’s Anderson Cooper described as the best political speech he had ever heard, Barack Obama tore off what remained of it.
The point here is not to focus on the convention or the unprecedented events of the past few weeks in US politics, although that will come.
The point is to focus on something else unprecedented that has been at the heart of our work.
In his recitation of the credentials of Kamala Harris, Barack Obama began:
“As a prosecutor, Kamala stood up for children who had been victims of sexual abuse.”
Talking about child sexual abuse at all in such a context is virtually unprecedented. It was chronologically logical, but not required as the opening example of her prosecutorial experience. Choices of words and their placement in such an historic context mean something. In this context, it couldn’t mean more.
First words on any subject have a unique impact. First words about a subject Obama was not known for talking about, in a situation unlike the US has ever experienced politically, with arguably more at stake than ever, have unique gravitas.
This is a man who is one of the great politicians and orators of modern times, many would say the greatest at his best, and he’s been getting better as he gets older. He picks every word and gesture with cerebral strategic intent and soulfulness simultaneously.
“Child sexual abuse” was picked in part comparatively to shine a favorable light on Harris and to highlight a dark one in more than one respect on her opponents.
The most salient context of the above was the night before, during the first prime time appearances at the convention.
The most heart-stopping moment was the following (transcript from CNN):
HADLEY DUVALL, ABORTION RIGHTS ADVOCATE: Growing up, I was an all- American girl, varsity soccer captain, cheerleading captain, homecoming queen, and survivor.
(CHEERING)
(APPLAUSE)
DUVALL: I was raped by my stepfather after years of sexual abuse. At age 12, I took my first pregnancy test, and it was positive. That was the first time I was ever told, you have options. I can’t imagine not having a choice. But today, that’s the reality for many women and girls across the country because of Donald Trump’s abortion bans.
He calls it a beautiful thing. What is so beautiful about a child having to carry her parent’s child? There are other survivors out there who have no options. And I want you to know that we see you. We hear you.
(CHEERING)
(APPLAUSE)
DUVALL: Kamala Harris will sign a national law to restore the right to an abortion.
(CHEERING)
(APPLAUSE)
DUVALL: She will fight for every woman and every girl, even those who are not fighting for her.
(CHEERING)
(APPLAUSE)
It is impossible to overstate the courage it took for Hadley Duvall to tell this to the world under a spotlight unlike any other. She has our eternal gratitude and admiration.
The big picture observation is that nothing like this had ever happened before about this issue, at a national convention that would go a long way toward determining who would be the next leader of the most powerful nation on earth.
The reason the issue was front and center was and is critical—the unprecedented taking away of abortion rights women had had for half a century. It has already proven to be an enormously important political issue with a majority of Americans supporting that right.
However, in this situation it also opened the door to the larger issue of child sexual abuse, and has created even more focus on it.
We’ve gone through the issue many times. Nothing is more damaging, and when by a parent or other family member—where the plurality of child sexual abuse occurs—it has an added horrific impact.
As outlined here before at length, hundreds of millions of children a year are victims. Unspeakable and unimaginable. The ultimate crime of power against the powerless. Along with physical abuse and neglect, a billion children a year are victimized, as we have pointed out before is reported by the World Health Organization.
Sexual abuse of a child has been often referred to as murder of the soul.
In the Showtime/Paramount series, The Mayor of Kingstown, which ranges from insightful to vacuous (and filled with gratuitous graphic violence), the compelling character of Iris, a sex slave, reveals that the path that led to this began with ongoing rape by her father as a young child. What did your mother do, asks the lead character? She looked at it happen and walked away, a steely-eyed Iris replies.
The case too often. And mothers rape too, and boys are also often victims, as we’ve reported at length.
At a reflective moment of feeling safe and expressing some hope for the future, Iris notes that if rape of a child is murder of the soul, maybe the soul can be reborn.
It can be, with proper treatment and support. In a new series, Mastermind, streaming from Hulu, the extraordinary story of Dr. Ann Burgess is told, who at 87 is going strong teaching at Boston College and being the main expert on a number of cases at all times. She led the way in centering working on child sexual abuse on support for the victim and the necessity of treatment for the victim, as a child, or as an adult survivor if the abuse does not come out until then, which is so often the case. She pioneered work on rape victims from children to adults. The stone age views she fought against as a pioneer in a sexist world are a profile in fortitude and courage. She became famous, in no small part as the only woman on the FBI team that literally created the science of profiling predators of rape and serial killers, not at first receiving the credit she deserved (because she was a woman in what initially was an all-male universe) for having the key insights that led to revolutionary results.
In a case the writer was involved in (to save three child siblings, a girl and two boys, from sexual abuse and rape by both their mother and father and other family members) that won in a unanimous decision at the supreme court, she wrote a critical declaration that summarized the larger problem—the entire system and society itself becomes enmeshed with the incestuous family system.
This is consistent with the unprecedented New York Times investigative series Exploited, which we presented with our commentary in 2019 and 2020 on child sexual abuse on the internet, increasing at a rate that would equal hundreds of millions of crimes per year at this point, noting that society does not want to look into the “ugly mirror”–the sexual abuse of children being the worst reflection of a society that does not protect its children.
We reposted the series starting last April, with the first in the series, including our commentary, published in arguably the most striking front page of the Sunday New York Times in its history: “The Internet Is Overrun With Images of Child Sexual Abuse. What Went Wrong?”. This was followed by the rest of the series and our updated commentray here, here, here and here.
The series concluded with a short synopsis: “An Explosion in Online Child Sex Abuse: What You Need to Know.” Here it is:
By Gabriel J.X. Dance and Michael H. Keller, February 19, 2020
Tech companies are reporting a boom in online photos and videos of children being sexually abused — a record 45 million illegal images were flagged last year alone — exposing a system at a breaking point and unable to keep up with the perpetrators, an investigation by The New York Times found.
The spiraling activity can be attributed in part to a neglectful federal government, overwhelmed law enforcement agencies and struggling tech companies. And while global in scope, the problem is firmly rooted in the United States because of the role Silicon Valley plays in both the spread and detection of the material. Here are six key takeaways.
Reports of abuse images are escalating
While the problem predates the internet, smartphone cameras, social media and cloud storage have made it much worse.
Before the digital age, offenders had to rely on having photographs developed and sending them through the postal system, but new technologies have lowered the barriers to creating, sharing and amassing the material, pushing it to unprecedented levels.
After years of uneven monitoring, major tech companies have stepped up surveillance of their platforms and have found them to be riddled with the content.
Offenders are sharing images of younger victims and more heinous crimes
Criminals are increasingly “going dark” to hide their tracks. They are using virtual private networks to mask their locations; deploying encryption techniques to obscure their messages and make their hard drives impenetrable; and posting on the so-called dark web, the vast underbelly of the internet, which is inaccessible to conventional browsers.
As the technologies lower people’s inhibitions, online groups are sharing images of younger children and more extreme forms of abuse.
“Historically, you would never have gone to a black market shop and asked, ‘I want real hard-core with 3-year-olds,’” said Yolanda Lippert, a prosecutor in Illinois who leads a team investigating online child abuse. “But now you can sit seemingly secure on your device searching for this stuff, trading for it.”
Lawmakers foresaw the crisis years ago, but enforcement has fallen short
Congress passed a landmark law in 2008 that foresaw many of today’s problems, but The Times found that the federal government had not fulfilled major aspects of the legislation. Annual funding for state and regional investigations was authorized at $60 million, but only about half of that is regularly approved.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a sponsor of the law’s reauthorization, said there was “no adequate or logical explanation and no excuse” for why more money was not allocated. Even $60 million a year, he said, would now be “vastly inadequate.”
Another cornerstone of the law, biennial strategy reports by the Justice Department, was mostly ignored. And although a senior executive-level official was to oversee the federal response at the Justice Department, that has not happened.
The Justice Department’s coordinator for child exploitation prevention, Stacie B. Harris, said she could not explain the poor record. A spokeswoman for the department, citing limited resources, said the reports would now be written every four years beginning in 2020.
Law enforcement agencies are struggling to keep up
With so many reports of the images coming their way, police departments across the country are besieged. Some have managed their workload by focusing efforts on imagery depicting the youngest, most vulnerable victims.
“We go home and think, ‘Good grief, the fact that we have to prioritize by age is just really disturbing,’” said Detective Paula Meares, who has investigated child sex crimes for more than 10 years at the Los Angeles Police Department.
About one of every 10 agents in Homeland Security’s investigative section is assigned to child sexual exploitation cases, officials said, a clear indication of how big the problem is.
“We could double our numbers and still be getting crushed,” said Jonathan Hendrix, a Homeland Security agent who investigates cases in Nashville.
Now we have AI added to the digital nightmare.
But the point of all the above is that we can do something about it, if there is the public and political will.
But first, all of us as a society have to look into the “ugly mirror”.
The Times did it again–forced us to look–with another brilliant and disturbing front-page investigative journalism piece this year. We posted it as our Issue of the Week and the most recent installment of our multi-year series, The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, the day it came out, with an extensive accompanying commentary: “A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men”.
Here’s an excerpt from the opening:
The End Of Civilization As We Knew It: Part Twenty Three
We have updated this piece from its initial presentation as a result of an extraordinary New York Times investigative journalism front page article released online about 24 hours after posting.
When civilization finally crashes into the abyss, the one place you won’t be able to point your finger at is the investigative journalist team at The New York Times which has created the most extraordinary group of reports dominating front page covers over the past few years on the issue of child sexual abuse and its partner in a new level of exponential perpetration, corporate technology.
We continue to focus on this issue from last week’s Issue Of The Week, not just as a follow-up to the last Issue (and many before on this subject), and not just because it is the single most grotesque example of evil in our species, and not just because the damage from it to individuals and society is the single worst example of what is unsustainable about humanity unless it is turned around from expanding to in the main being ended (absolutely doable with the cultural and political will)–but because the example of the Times is beyond exemplary and the issue now investigated is as teachable a moment as it gets.
There have been many moments and examples and studies given of the abuse of boys being virtually as widespread as the abuse of girls–and of women being perpetrators, and the enablers in chief, as well as men. The point of the point is the reminder that in the end this is an issue of the most vulnerable being abused by power that is supposed to protect them–by men, women, all adults.
The best known modern popular work on mysogyny, “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” got this point in. The original Swedish film version is incredible, but in part plays into the idea of the child protecting the mother rather than the other way around. The American version of the film made it unmistakably clear that child sex abuse was at the core of the rot as well as the convergence of all evil being in the abuse of power (and the connection between neo-nazis, racism, sexism, child abuse and the power of the haves over the have nots), being downright terrifyingly prophetic in 2009 and 2011 looking back now. The author here went to the American version in the theaters in 2011 with their teen daughter, who commented that it was clear at the end that child sex abuse was at the genesis of the story. When the journalist protagonist finds the woman who had been thought murdered as a teen but in fact had faked death to escape the ongoing rape by her father and brother (also raped by the father), justifiably being forced to kill her father in the escape, he asked her, “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” She responded, “I did. I told my mother.” Who did nothing.
There are many ways in different contexts and societies in which gender and gender inequality are very much factors in child abuse in various ways, twisted and twisting like the fibers of a rope with many other factors.
All reduced to one.
The abuse of power.
And as we’ve kept pointing out there is no abuse of power and of children that equals that of incest and other abuse by parents.
And if you don’t get that as easily as having a random thought, then for the sake of the children, the species and the planet, wrap up for a long walk–as long as it takes–until the obvious becomes obvious. No one and nothing impacts us at every level like our parents and our families of origin.
When we hear that half of all children on earth are abused, neglected, victims of violence, it’s a shock that can often be followed by numbness, then tossed out of consciousness because it demands action in an age of dumbed down narcissism like none before.
And among activists too there has been a strange regression. For instance in the context of violence and war, the phrase “women and children” has had a resurgence after the proper phrase “children and adults” had begun to replace the former outmoded, sexist, anti-child, brain-rotted phrase. Journalists we respect in other regards succumb to it. Women are more important than and more vulnerable than children, and men don’t exist in this phrase-making. It’s the summation of all inequality and abuse established by a patriarchal controlled commentariat meant to put women on a pedastal in shackles going back centuries, with children an afterthought and men allowed to exist only as superhuman.
Isn’t that just great.
And so reassuring in 2024.
Children come second at best, women are infantalized and men as equal vulnerable beings don’t exist.
Part of owning equality for women and men, and most importantly the prioitizing and protection of children, is being clear that women are just as responsible as men for the harm of children and that all adults have equal responsibility in their nurturing and protection.
Which brings us to the Times’ most recent brilliant contribution to truth telling.
The emphasis in media and throughout the culture worldwide of social media would literally be impossible to overstate, as well as the attention given it in terms of harm to children in countless ways. It’s like a petri dish for creating disordered minds, especially for children in their most crtical developmental stages.
Which mirrors the larger role of mental, emotional and spiritual corruption social media is playing in the war between democracy and human rights and dictatorship and brutality writ large across the planet.
No greater cause and effect than the influence of social media, and no more horrific example of the degree of corruption of the human species exemplified by the selling of daughters by their mothers (you know, the natural protectors in the animal world), for the sake of their own images and profit–selling in many ways, but specifically to pedophiles, as the focus of The New York Times piece.
Here it is:
“A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men” – The New York Times
By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Michael H. Keller, Feb. 22, 2024
For this investigation, the reporters analyzed 2.1 million Instagram posts, monitored months of online chats of professed pedophiles and interviewed over 100 people, including parents and children.
Seeking social media stardom for their underage daughters, mothers post images of them on Instagram. The accounts draw men sexually attracted to children, and they sometimes pay to see more.
This box represents a real photo of a 9-year-old girl in a golden bikini lounging on a towel. The photo was posted on her Instagram account, which is run by adults.
🔥🔥🔥
wooowww
Mama mia ❤️❤️🥰💯🤗
Great body😍🔥❤️
Love
😍😍😍😍
Perfect bikini body
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️😋😋😋😍😍😍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Mmmmmmmmm take that bikini off
😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
You’re sooooo hot
❤️🤗💋🌺🌹🌹💯
Y’all are dogs! She’s a child.
👏😍👏😍👏😍👏😍
The ominous messages began arriving in Elissa’s inbox early last year.
“You sell pics of your underage daughter to pedophiles,” read one. “You’re such a naughty sick mom, you’re just as sick as us pedophiles,” read another. “I will make your life hell for you and your daughter.”
Elissa has been running her daughter’s Instagram account since 2020, when the girl was 11 and too young to have her own. Photos show a bright, bubbly girl modeling evening dresses, high-end workout gear and dance leotards. She has more than 100,000 followers, some so enthusiastic about her posts that they pay $9.99 a month for more photos.
Over the years, Elissa has fielded all kinds of criticism and knows full well that some people think she is exploiting her daughter. She has even gotten used to receiving creepy messages, but these — from “Instamodelfan” — were extreme. “I think they’re all pedophiles,” she said of the many online followers obsessed with her daughter and other young girls.
Elissa and her daughter inhabit the world of Instagram influencers whose accounts are managed by their parents. Although the site prohibits children under 13, parents can open so-called mom-run accounts for them, and they can live on even when the girls become teenagers.
But what often starts as a parent’s effort to jump-start a child’s modeling career, or win favors from clothing brands, can quickly descend into a dark underworld dominated by adult men, many of whom openly admit on other platforms to being sexually attracted to children, an investigation by The New York Times found.
Thousands of accounts examined by The Times offer disturbing insights into how social media is reshaping childhood, especially for girls, with direct parental encouragement and involvement. Some parents are the driving force behind the sale of photos, exclusive chat sessions and even the girls’ worn leotards and cheer outfits to mostly unknown followers. The most devoted customers spend thousands of dollars nurturing the underage relationships.
. . .
Last year we re-posted an Issue of The Week on the tenth anniversary of an historic and critical landmark article. Here’s an excerpt:
Incest: The Sound of Silence, Part One.
This year is the tenth anniversary of an article in The Atlantic Monthly that was as earthshaking, or more so, than anything you could ever read.
Before proceeding, there is a relationship to the day this is in the US–Memorial Day. Or rather, the historical day for Memorial Day. It’s now on the last Monday of May to create a three-day weekend, so sometimes it falls on May 30 and sometimes not.
The day is in the main a remembrance and honoring of all those who have served, been harmed and died in the armed forces and related service. It is also, as we’ve pointed out before, a day when individuals, family, friends and so on are also sometimes remembered in rituals such as visiting where people are buried or memorialized.
There is a commonality in concept here, and many ironies. Those who served deserve our thanks. Others too often do not. They can, dead or alive, be like haunting darkness, even when the culture pulls and pulls, especially to the importance of blood ties, feeding on every insecurity and promoted by every ennobled concept that in fact is the opposite of love. Real love, which is always based on universal values, has no relationship to blood. The irony that the worst war in human history which we are fighting another vestige of today, was against an ideology that worshiped blood above all else, is its own instructive fact.
The war zone, for too many of us, for half of all children as the World Health Organization and others have told us, is childhood itself.
Every act of violence against a child is horrific, but not understanding the unique violation of child sexual abuse, especially in the family, is like not having basic instincts. It’s as intrinsic as understanding you have to breathe to live.
And so, in 1999, the year World Campaign was launched, the British actor and director, Tim Roth, created the film, The War Zone, about father-daughter incest. It’s as grueling as it gets.
In the post before last, we pointed out, as we have again and again for years, that the worst blight on humanity, child sexual abuse, is getting worse exponentially because of the internet. Abuse incidents doubling every year, now doubtless in the hundreds of millions of digital crime scenes of actual abuse, starting more and more with babies, because the tech world puts profit over even a modicum of conscience, except as pushed to some extent by activists in the usual branding needs for public appearance, because governments have not done their job in policy, and because all of us, with rare exception, are enmeshed in enabling and avoidance to various degrees, even those who have convinced themselves otherwise.
But before the internet ever existed, child sexual abuse was rampant, with the single largest part of it perpetrated by parents against their children.
It goes on.
The human race might as well be called the species of incestuous child sexual abusers and their enablers.
Here’s the landmark article we posted ten years ago:
America Has An Incest Problem, By Mia Fontaine, January 24, 2013
People are rightly horrified by abuse scandals at Penn State and in the Catholic church. But what about children who are molested by their own family members?
Last year offered plenty of moments to have a sustained national conversation about child sexual abuse: the Jerry Sandusky verdict, the BBC’s Jimmy Savile, Horace Mann’s faculty members, and a slew of slightly less-publicized incidents. President Barack Obama missed the opportunity to put this issue on his second-term agenda in his inaugural speech.
Child sexual abuse impacts more Americans annually than cancer, AIDS, gun violence, LGBTQ inequality, and the mortgage crisis combined—subjects that Obama did cover.
Had he mentioned this issue, he would have been the first president to acknowledge the abuse that occurs in the institution that predates all others: the family. Incest was the first form of institutional abuse, and it remains by far the most widespread.
Here are some statistics that should be familiar to us all, but aren’t, either because they’re too mind-boggling to be absorbed easily, or because they’re not publicized enough. One in three-to-four girls, and one in five-to-seven boys, are sexually abused before they turn 18, an overwhelming incidence of which happens within the family. These statistics are well known among industry professionals, who are often quick to add, “and this is a notoriously underreported crime.”
Incest is a subject that makes people recoil. The word alone causes many to squirm, and it’s telling that of all of the individual and groups of perpetrators who’ve made national headlines to date, virtually none have been related to their victims. They’ve been trusted or fatherly figures (some in a more literal sense than others) from institutions close to home, but not actual fathers, step-fathers, uncles, grandfathers, brothers, or cousins (or mothers and female relatives, for that matter). While all abuse is traumatizing, people outside of a child’s home and family—the Sanduskys, the teachers and the priests—account for far fewer cases of child sexual abuse.
To answer the questions always following such scandals—why did the victims remain silent for so long, how and why were the offending adults protected, why weren’t the police involved, how could a whole community be in such denial?—one need only realize that these institutions are mirroring the long-established patterns and responses to sexual abuse within the family. Which are: Deal with it internally instead of seeking legal justice and protection; keep kids quiet while adults remain protected and free to abuse again.
Intentionally or not, children are protecting adults, many for their entire lives. Millions of Americans, of both sexes, choke down food at family dinners, year after year, while seated at the same table as the people who violated them. Mothers and other family members are often complicit, grown-ups playing pretend because they’re more invested in the preservation of the family (and, often, the family’s finances) than the psychological, emotional, and physical well-being of the abused.
So why is incest still relegated to the hushed, shadowy outskirts of public and personal discussion, particularly given how few subjects today remain too controversial or taboo to discuss? Perhaps it’s because however devastating sexual molestation by a trusted figure is, it’s still more palatable than the thought of being raped by one’s own flesh and blood. Or is it?
Consider how the clergy abuse shook Catholics to their core, causing internal division and international disenchantment with a religion that was once the bedrock of entire nations. Consider the fallout from Sandusky’s actions and Penn State’s cover-up, both for students and football. Consider how distressing it is for Brits to now come to terms with the fact that the man they watched every night on TV in their living rooms was routinely raping kids just before going on air.
Given the prevalence of incest, and that the family is the basic unit upon which society rests, imagine what would happen if every kid currently being abused—and every adult who was abused but stayed silent—came out of the woodwork, insisted on justice, and saw that justice meted out. The very fabric of society would be torn. Everyone would be affected, personally and professionally, as family members, friends, colleagues, and public officials suddenly found themselves on trial, removed from their homes, in jail, on probation, or unable to live and work in proximity to children; society would be fundamentally changed, certainly halted for a time, on federal, state, local, and family levels. Consciously and unconsciously, collectively and individually, accepting and dealing with the full depth and scope of incest is not something society is prepared to do.
In fact society has already unraveled; the general public just hasn’t realized it yet. Ninety-five percent of teen prostitutes and at least one-third of female prisoners were abused as kids. Sexually abused youth are twice as likely to be arrested for a violent offense as adults, are at twice the risk for lifelong mental-health issues, and are twice as likely to attempt or die from teen suicide. The list goes on. Incest is the single biggest commonality between drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, teenage and adult prostitution, criminal activity, and eating disorders. Abused youths don’t go quietly into the night. They grow up—and 18 isn’t a restart button.
How can the United States possibly realize its full potential when close to a third of the population has experienced psychic and/or physical trauma during the years they’re developing neurologically and emotionally—forming their very identity, beliefs, and social patterns? Incest is a national nightmare, yet it doesn’t have people outraged, horrified, and mobilized as they were following Katrina, Columbine, or 9/11.
A combination of willed ignorance, unconscious fears, and naïveté have resulted in our failure to acknowledge this situation’s full scope, but we can only claim ignorance for so long. Please reread the statistics in this post, share them with people you know, and realize that each and every one of us needs to pressure the government, schools, and other systems to prioritize this issue. Let’s make this the last inaugural address in which incest and child sexual abuse are omitted, because the way things are now, adults are living in a fantasy land while children are forced to slay the real-life demons.
Mia Fontaine is the author of Come Back and Have Mother, Will Travel. She has written for The New York Times and Ms. magazine.
Barack Obama in part fulfilled what Fontaine had hoped for, even if over a decade later, in his reference in front of countless millions of viewers to Kamala Harris as a prosecutor who “stood up for children who had been victims of sexual abuse.”
The hero of the story, though, as he would doubtless agree, was Hadley Duvall, who the night before, in front of the whole world watching the DNC, had told her story as a survivor of incest, raped by her step-father as a young child for years, becoming pregnant at 12 years old, with a state today that would try to force her with unrivaled brutality to carry this pregnancy of incestuous child rape to term.
Far, far, far past time for all of us to be heroes.
. . .
Tonight, August 22, 2024, Kamala Harris gave her acceptance speech as the nominee for President at the Democratic National Convention. The speech was widely acknowledged by commentators as being excellent. However, staying on point here, the following remarks by Harris in the speech are noteworthy:
“When I was in high school, I started to notice something about my best friend Wanda.
She was sad at school. And there were times she didn’t want to go home.
So, one day, I asked if everything was alright. And she confided in me that she was being sexually abused by her step-father. And I immediately told her she had to come stay with us.
And she did. That is one of the reasons I became a prosecutor.
To protect people like Wanda. Because I believe everyone has a right: To safety. To dignity. And to justice.”
Wanda was present in the convention hall.