Even though many of you know me well, there are significant events in my life that you do not know anything about and that unfortunately continue to haunt me. I will never be able to shake free of them even if I were to live to a hundred.”
Erik Mørk was nervous. His beginning faltered and lacked conviction, and he felt an unfamiliar lack of control. Despite his low voice, he had had the full attention of his audience from his very first words. Most of them were employees in his small business and a handful were his personal friends. The remainder were strangers that Per Clausen had rallied. From where and how he did not know, only that they were one hundred percent loyal. And it was in a long look by one of these unknowns that he found the support to continue—an unusually pretty girl with blond curls and supportive blue eyes. He raised his voice slightly and launched into what he had to say.
“When I was five years old, my father died, and my stepfather moved in. From that day forward until I went to an orphanage at age ten, I was raped three, four, or five times a week. Summer and winter, weekend and weekday, morning and evening, year after year after year. Sexual abuse became such an integral part of my childhood that I believed for a long time that it was the way things were, that all kids went through what I did. It was simply not something one talked about, in the same way we don’t talk about shitting. We do it, but we rarely mention it. As an adult I realized that I had been both right and wrong. Right in that this is not something we talk about, wrong in thinking that the rape of a child is normal. It is rather more common than most people imagine, or rather bother to imagine, but it is not, of course, completely normal either.”
He avoided cliché-laden words such as taboo and a sense of guilt. The connections were simple and immediately understandable. To bring psychology into it would be a mistake.
“As a ten-year-old I tried to murder my mother, which was illogical since in my eyes my childhood had been normal. Why I did not target my stepfather is another question. He was my tormentor, not her. In fact she warned me when he was on his way—by screwing up the volume on the television. I tried to crush her skull with a cast-iron pot that I threw from the window of my room one day when she was in the yard with the laundry. We lived on the third floor and I missed the mark by several meters but the intention was unmistakable so I ended up at the Kejserstræde Home for Children. The first day I was there I was beaten up. Everyone received that welcome. When I crawled into bed that evening—black-and-blue like one giant bruise—I was the happiest child alive.”
He looked out at his audience. The atmosphere was intense. No one drank or ate or looked at one another. Everyone was following him intently—motionless, with bated breath, as he confided in them. He felt tears pressing at the back of his throat. Not because of his childhood but because they were listening and giving him respect, solidarity. His voice remained steady when he spoke again.
“Many people other than me have been abused and perhaps I belong to the lucky ones, however damaged I have been. A more tragic example is my little sister. She replaced me when I went to the children’s home, but unfortunately she was more frail than I and she never got over her wounds. One morning she sat down on the coastal railway line, a cloth over her head. She was twenty-two years old. The train driver was granted early retirement. He only lasted three years. Evil metastasizes.”
He regretted the expression as soon as it left his lips. It was too medical and the image too stilted. It had sounded good in his head. He continued, somewhat irritated.
“I’ve often wondered what she was thinking about when she heard the train come screeching, its brakes on full. My stepfather? Nothing? Herself? Me? I will never get an answer but I keep asking the question, and the day she died I promised her that when I got the opportunity I would write her obituary. Not by telling her story—it is too banal and will be forgotten—but by asking a string of questions. Today I have the financial means and I intend to use them. The moment is right. The five executed men in Bagsværd were all active pedophiles, each with numerous abuses on their conscience. As you know, the rumors have been swirling for a while and my source in the homicide unit tells me that the police will confirm them in the next few days but that the information is being temporarily withheld. There is subsequently no doubt that the sexual abuse of children will soon become a dominant topic in the media. My questions will line up in the wind, show another truth, give another perspective.”
He turned on the projector with rehearsed timing to avoid too much of a focus on the dead men, and everyone naturally looked up at the image.
“This advertisement was in all the papers this morning, big and small.”
He gave them a minute while they read with amazement, then he tossed out his calculation.
“It is, of course, an unverified number, but many researchers estimate that between one and two percent of the population has been sexually abused in their childhood, which is to say, that around five thousand children between the ages of five and ten years are at this time being victimized. I myself was raped some eight hundred times as a child, but perhaps I was an unlucky outlier among the unfortunate. I place the estimate of average rapes for the average abused child in this age group at two hundred. Each of you can now try to make these calculations on your own but I’ll spare you the trouble. My guess is that every single day around five hundred children are abused in Denmark. If I am right, then tell me, what is the biggest problem in our society? The day cares? Schools? Freeways? Or is it the five hundred children who will be raped tomorrow?”
He paused. The statistics created a certain distance, as statistics always did, and the intense silence from earlier was gone. It was time to come in for the landing.
“As the ad says, I want to try to get people to make their own assessment and I want your help to do this but you have to decide if you will do so or not. Those of you who are my co-workers also have a choice. You can take the next three weeks off fully paid and without using your vacation, or you can stay here and help me. If you feel that you can’t engage with this, then I would rather that you stay away. Now I want you to get up for a while. Walk around and talk to each other, think it over—and then report back what choice you have made.”
He turned off the projector.
“Let me end by telling you that I once knew a wise man who has unfortunately passed away. He asked me if I believed that the world could be changed by a handful of people fighting for a new order and he gave me the answer himself, which is as ordinary as it is true, that the world has always been changed in that way.”
Erik Mørk waited eagerly for any preliminary indications. In the scenarios he spun out at night he had imagined a string of different reactions, but none of them matched up with reality. The woman straight ahead of him was apparently speaking for many, and in advance he had written off her as too analytical, unmoved by emotions. But he was wrong.
“I don’t need more time. Just tell me what to do.”