Iraq is a conservative, strongly religious society where many women are sheltered from contacts with males who are not family members.
Where I grew up in South Florida the guys all tried to hold not you -- not right away -- but the door, your hand your good opinion and I know I was sheltered in the way I was brought up strict religiously.
And I have left many things behind in learning along the way -- but I still feel the same protectiveness towards innocence the same despair experienced at rough hands tearing innocence from its socket.
I have told my 10 yr old daughter about the beautiful mysteries of her body -- how it is all hers -- to share or not -- when she gets older and as she sees fit. When she asks me "Does it feel good?" I tell her the truth -- Yes! -- but I have also let her know that there are some bad men when she grows up who might try to take the wonder of the way her body works without permission.
I tell her this to protect her to build a wall of cognizance against breaches that can break a spirit. "Not me!" she says "Nobody is the boss of my body but me!" I hug her and she goes back to play and so I understand her puzzlement when she finds me upset and I just wont tell her why. "We can talk about everything!" she accuses.
It's just that talking about something hypothetically and building a wall of protection for her with my words so she will not be the one taken unawares and never suspecting a thing it's just that it makes sense accomplishes something.
But the senseless rape and murder of an innocent/sheltered Iraq girl the telling of it to her makes no sense to me. I don't' want to give her a particular of the possible I informed her of before.
So I am vague, feel like a hypocrite as I tell her that there are some very bad people in the world and that some of them are soldiers that have hurt a girl and I am sad because of that but also because they have hurt me indirectly hurt her and all the other women/girls that we know/don't know I feel like the girl those soldiers hurt is a sister to us that we do not know.
I think of dark fairy tales in which the bones of victims sing until their perpetrators are brought to justice and the passage in the Bible about Cain murdering his brother Abel where the Lord says that the voice of Abel's blood cries out from the ground.
I think of that and how those soldiers have killed their sister in a way because we are all related we are all one family if you go back far enough and I think What have you done? The voice of your sister's blood accuses you from the ground. Your sisters bones are singing in the desert they are singing on the wind...
But I just think it to myself. My daughter is looking at me intently. She brushes my hair back behind my ear "Mommy, I want to have super powers so bad! I would go over there to Iraq and I would throw those soldiers into outer space!" Me too, baby, me too.
About the Author
Annette Marie Hyder is a freelance journalist/editor, artist and author.
She sees life as a poem that is constantly altering its form to accommodate one's world view/experiences: sometimes a sonnet, sometimes haiku, sometimes graffiti on a wall. She believes that in love you should not say it with flowers, you should say it with words. Diamonds, however, are always acceptable.
My main focus in art is color, design and composition. I have a true passion for color as the art subject itself - how colors fit together, how they communicate with each other within the design, how certain colors combined with one another evoke a certain feeling - this is paramount in my work. I am a social worker, artist and poet living in Austin, TX. Read More...
Annette Marie Hyder is a freelance journalist/editor, artist and author. 
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