But the solution to drowning has never been, to my understanding, to push the face of the struggling swimmer deeper into the water. Truthful storytelling has to allow that both aspects of reality exist, and that there are bridges between them, ways of moving from one to the other. Our own choices cannot always determine our circumstances, but we can choose our responses. We are not lost. We can choose to go another way.
People do it every day.
I do believe that compassion can be cultivated with well-written books. But while I doubt that anybody can possibly understand what it means to have been raped unless they have been through such a thing themselves, I fail to see how the literary and spiritual rape of an innocent reader is going to make the world better for anybody. This is what kids want, too - safety, beauty, love. You know, we don't tend to see our young people very clearly. The media, babysitter to the world, doesn't do much to correct our mis-vision.