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 News from Around the Americas | April 2007 
Texas Activist Takes Message to Mexico
 Jonathan Clark - Herald/Review
| | Lorenzo Villegas, left, mayor of Naco, Sonora, Mexico, listens to a presentation by Lt. Col. Kevin May on Thursday in Villegas’ office. Several other Mexican officials also attended. May is the facilitator for the Darkness to Light, a non-profit, anti-child sex abuse organization. (Mark Levy/Herald-Review) |
Activist and Fort Huachuca soldier met with city officials here Thursday in an effort to establish a cross-border partnership for combating child sexual abuse.
Lt. Col. Kevin May, of Sierra Vista, Texas, is a facilitator for the Charleston, S.C.-based nonprofit group Darkness to Light, which May said works with community leaders to shift the responsibility for preventing child sexual abuse from children to adults. “Get involved,” May urged Mayor Lorenzo Villegas and 10 of his cabinet members while speaking via interpreter and Darkness to Light volunteer Jose Valle of Hereford.
“We want you to reduce risk and protect children by training your staff and volunteers.”
With that goal in mind, May and Villegas are working to set up a seminar in Naco next month that will teach local leaders to prevent abuse, to recognize its symptoms, and to act responsibly when a problem is identified.
Villegas said he hopes to have 50 of the town’s political, educational, religious and law enforcement leaders complete the training.
“We are always looking for ways to protect our children,” Villegas said. “And I think that the best way to do that is to implement a program like this that will make us more sustainable.”
In recent years, Naco has had one of the highest rates of child sexual abuse in the state of Sonora — a phenomenon, Villegas insisted, that resulted largely from a string of assaults committed by one particular community member.
Now, with the offender behind bars, Naco is faring better in terms of abuse, Villegas said. But even so, he added, it’s important that the city remain attentive so that new offenders don’t appear.
Isabel Davila-Quilihua, director of the Naco branch of DIF, Mexico’s family development agency, said she was surprised by May’s statistics suggesting that in the United States, one in four girls and one in six boys will suffer sexual abuse.
“In Mexico, I think the numbers are much lower,” Davila-Quilihua said. “Here, we have many more stay-at-home mothers, and Mexican moms are very protective of their children. I know mothers who won’t even let their own family members take care of their kids.”
Still, Davila-Quilihua acknowledged that Mexico and Naco are not immune from problems such as child sexual abuse.
“We have situations here where parents are involved in drugs,” she said. “And cases like those are often where problems occur.”
One form of abuse that has been a long-standing problem in Mexico is the sexual exploitation of children. Due in part to lax laws, an underground child sex industry has flourished in some resort and border cities, attracting sex tourists from the U.S. and other foreign countries.
In an attempt to crack down on the problem, federal legislators in February passed a law tightening penalties for child abuse and reclassifying sexual exploitation of children as a major offense.
The new law also mandates double sentences of up to 30 years for people such as priests, teachers, doctors and family members who use their positions of authority to exploit children.
Four months earlier, in October 2006, national DIF director Ana Rosa Payan Cervera announced that her agency would spend $1.8 million on a campaign to raise awareness of the physical and sexual abuse of children in Mexico. |
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