Talk Show Sexually Exploits Children

With the show’s rat-a-tat theme music blaring in the background, the television announcer, already planning future shows, says to the national viewing audience: “Is your teen daughter obsessed with sex? If so, call us at 800-93-SALLY and tell us about her.”

For those who find enjoyment, excitement and lots of laughs in the sexual exploitation of children, I offer you the Sally Jessy Raphael experience.

I had the misfortune to see the Feb. 19 show, titled “My Teen Can’t Go Without Sex.” It was like spending an hour in an unclean bathroom.

The show opened with several comments like this: “Sally, my little girl is only 12 years old, but she’s already had sex with 25 guys!”

Loud prurient cheers erupted from the studio audience and the music intensified as Raphael kicked off a show that was unrelentingly vile and degrading and brutally abusive to its young guests.

The girls (no boys) were encouraged, cajoled and all but coerced into revealing excruciating details of their promiscuity.

Then they were roundly denounced, cursed, reviled, laughed at and otherwise humiliated by the rowdy audience. They even were chastised by Raphael, an empty-headed and maddeningly selfrighteous host.

A 15-year-old, who was booed because she had slept with 17 guys, wept and blurted out that she had been abused sexually by her mother’s boyfriend.

“How far did he get?” Raphael asked. “Tell us. Steffi. How far?”

But however far the abuser got, it was no reason - as far as the host was concerned - to give the girl a break. Raphael told her, “If you take all the women in the world who have been abused, they don’t go and do what you’ve been doing.”

Microphones were handed to members of the audience who wanted to denounce the girls.

“You make me sick!” a woman shrieked at the 15-year-old. She told the girl that if she ever became pregnant, the child (apparently predestined to be female) would be a “slut” just like her mother. “There’s going to be one slut in the other one,” the woman said.

That was one of the milder comments. You got the impression that if rocks had been distributed to the nitwits in the audience, they eagerly would have thrown them at the wretched offenders.

That was the tenor of the entire show.

The star was the 12-year-old, which was not surprising. She was the youngest, and the whole point of the program was to titillate the audience by eroticizing children. The girls were made up heavily, and repeated references were made to their relationships with older men, their reluctance to use condoms and so on.

It was a form of ritualized, legalized child abuse.

The host and the audience, equally reprehensible, attempted to immunize themselves and safeguard their enjoyment by portraying the children as demons and seductresses rather than as the victims of the men and boys who had preyed upon them, the parents who were unwilling or unable to protect them and a society capable of viewing programs like Raphael’s as entertainment rather than as a menace.

A 12-year-old who has slept with dozens of boys needs professional counseling in a safe and compassionate environment - not the hoots and derisive shouts of a mob masquerading as an audience.

If Raphael had even the slightest sensitivity to the needs of a child who has been molested sexually, she could never think that “outing” that child on national television is a good idea.

The children on Raphael’s show were betrayed.

By definition, they were excessively needy. That is the case with all sexually exploited children. But instead of getting help from a powerful authority figure like the host of a nationally syndicated television show, these children were brutally victimized again.

And the abuse was not limited to the young.

The mother of the 12-year-old seemed to be mentally impaired, perhaps retarded. When she made a tearful comment that was uttered with difficulty and was grammatically incorrect, the audience and Raphael broke into uncontrollable laughter. The daughter, distressed, looked on helplessly.

What fun.

Maybe they can do an entire show on mental illness. It ought to be at least as entertaining as child sex abuse.

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