Tim Barrus: New York Times: Boys Raped
Some kids have never had real parents. They have always parented themselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/style/snowplow-parenting-scandal.html?comments#permid=31096013
College admission?
I work with young adolescent boys with HIV.
In rural Appalachia. Reading about parenting is like reading about Mars.
Every boy has been raped. You think not. Overly dramatic. Yet rape is a way of life.
They have all done sex work. This is not a contradiction. More a symptom. They hate married men. There is always some kind of rent to pay. They get the value of money. They bribe cops. No celebrity journalist covers that.
Reading about parenting is science fiction. The boys attract and scare adults. They were done with school by ninth grade. However, they are not stupid. Playing with sex work is like playing with a loaded gun. They are still children.
They see sex work as four years of running a business. Antiretrovirals (when available) create viral loads that are undetectable. No transmission. How successful you are at business is reflected in what sidewalk you sleep on, and what you wear. Not designer clothes. But clean ones.
Disparity.
All of them have been sexually abused, too. By parents. No bulldozers. No helicopters. They are broken, suicidal, and filled with internalized rage. No one writes articles about celebrities who support them. They are discarded, mainly gay, clinically depressed, at-risk, and exhausted with mere survival. The institutions of education and family have failed them. Society itself pays an exorbitant price for the cyclical poverty, the sexual rape and violence it is indifferent to.
College exists in a galaxy far away.