Shaniya's case has hit me very hard. When I was a child, my own mother used to invite grown men to rape me. It started when I was about two and a half, according to records/family member's memory. My earliest memories (from around age four) are of being raped and ridiculed by grown men.
My mother was given money by the men she let rape me. I don't think that was her sole reason for doing it though. I strongly believe she had been sexually abused in her own childhood and she had this disgusting attitude where she wanted her own daughters to go through the same thing she did. She seemed to 'get off' on my being violated. She didn't get off in a sexual sense, I mean it just seemed to please her somehow to see me defiled.
Also, one extremely unpleasant factor nobody's really touched on. It is physically very difficult for a grown man to rape a child of four, five etc. A child of that age is very small and to rape a child of that size has to be a very, very, very violent act. When this was happening to me, I would wound up getting beaten when the man was unable to proceed with the rape easily. I feared this may have happened to Shaniya - the perp became frustrated because of how hard it is to rape such a tiny child and he got violent with her and killed her.
I strongly suspect that the mother in Shaniya's case didn't want Shaniya to die. Not because she loved her but rather because she wanted to continue prostituting her out for cash. My own mother also did not want me to die, because I was a source of cash for her. She would have been very annoyed if one of the perps had actually killed me - but of course it so easily could have happened.
It warms my heart how caring so many people have been in demanding to know what happened to Shaniya and in remembering her. I urge those same people to please have room in their hearts for those of us who were brutalised and raped as babies and children but who DIDN'T die. In my case, I didn't die in the physical sense but spiritually I died from that first childhood rape. Because I am now a woman and no longer an adorable innocent little child, nobody really cares.
