You feel no one's pain but your own. The way you get that in a child is you torture the child, again and again. Then you simply sit back and let that filthy poisonous mess percolate. We're in far more danger from what's happening inside our houses than we ever are from communists. The runaways, the push-outs.
Kids are like radioactive isotopes.
They have, like, a half-life. Their lives as children are done rather quickly, and their value to evil people is used up even more quickly. For Andrew Vachss, it is war, a war he fights every day. What I want the books to do is make people angry. I'm not looking to raise consciousness, because I think that's a waste of time.