Erupting Voices: When the 1st Amendment is Silenced for Minors

The page contains a powerful, poetic draft titled “Bulletproof Glass Beneath the Volcano” that explores themes of trauma, silencing, and resilience particularly from the perspective of a young girl who refuses to be buried by societal neglect.

Main Themes

• Silencing of survivors: The poem critiques how society dismisses raw expressions of pain, especially from young girls.
• Volcanic metaphor: Her voice is likened to a volcano—buried, explosive, and impossible to ignore.
• Childhood and exploitation: It condemns the objectification and abuse of girls, portraying them not as muses or playthings but as victims whose pain is often ignored.
• Systemic failure: Institutions like the church, justice system, and media are portrayed as complicit in ignoring or redacting her story.
• Reclamation of voice: The speaker transforms from silence into eruption becoming the map, the volcano, and the lava that demands to be heard.

The victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse still wait to be heard. Despite their courage, despite the years that have passed, the FBI has not given many of them the dignity of an interview. This silence is deafening—especially when we see that Ghislaine Maxwell, his close accomplice, has not only been interviewed but has now been transferred to a “lockless” facility. By every measure of justice and safety, this is a privilege she should never have been granted. Even more alarming, she has been allowed influence over the placement of other inmates—women who face harsher restrictions merely because they expressed their disdain for her. That is not justice; it is cruelty layered on top of cruelty.

At the same time, powerful figures and institutions—Disney, Fox, late-night hosts, even political leaders—are debating the reach of the First Amendment, framing it in ways that encourage citizens to act as enforcers against their neighbors. To call employers, to silence dissent, to weaponize speech depending on the speaker. We see networks threatened with lawsuits for speaking uncomfortable truths, while lawyers labor under fear to defend what should never require defense: honesty.
And still, the survivors of Epstein’s crimes—children when they were first abused—remain silenced. Not because their testimony lacks truth, but because those in power do not choose to listen. Their voices are met with no contact, no response, as if their pain is too inconvenient for the system that failed them in the first place.

I write this not only with concern for them, but also as someone who has endured abuse herself. I know what it means to be dismissed, ignored, or told your suffering does not matter. And yet, as this nation celebrates men like Charlie Kirk—whose rhetoric demeans educated Black women and belittles our humanity—too few pause to consider the long shadow his words will cast. His children will one day read what their father has said. They will see not only his voice but the responses of those who either applauded or condemned his cruelty. They will read to understand—and in that moment, the weight of words will fall where no one can erase them.

And then, in another moment of human contradiction, his wife’s public forgiveness of a shooter reminds us that grace is possible. But grace does not erase accountability. It does not undo harm. And it should never be used as an excuse to look away from the abuse of children, the silencing of victims, or the erosion of truth.

“Bulletproof Glass Beneath the Volcano”

They told her
her voice was too loud,
too raw,
too jagged to be poetry.
But silence—
silence is the language of the buried,
and she was never meant to be a tomb.

She screamed once.
Not into the void,
but into a wall—
bulletproof glass,
buried miles beneath a volcano
that erupts on schedule
but never spills its truth.

Her terror was not theatrical.
It was tectonic.
It cracked the crust of comfort
and made gods tremble
in their marble halls.

She was thirteen.
She was fifteen.
She was a child—
not a muse,
not a plaything,
not a passport to pleasure
for men whose marbles
fell from the Chinese game board
and shattered
on the broken GPS of morality.

They wandered,
those men,
desperately seeking a potter
to glue their shame into shape.
But clay doesn’t lie.
And neither do the children
they tried to mold
into silence.

She is not silence.
She is eruption.
She is Medusa’s gaze
turned inward—
a mirror to the pain
they said didn’t count
because it didn’t leave bruises
in the places they measured.

She is the morgue’s overflow.
She is the church steps.
She is the grocery store parking lot
where grief parks itself
and waits for justice
that never clocks in.

She is the forgotten file,
the redacted name,
the “not my department” shrug
from men in suits
who praise themselves
for arresting shadows
while the monsters
sign autographs in daylight.

She is not lost.
She is the map.
She is the volcano.
She is the lava
they swore would never spill.

And now—
she speaks.

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