The three fell silent.
This was not a truth that could make anyone happy. A group of children had encountered danger at some summer camp. Here, they could cry to heaven and earth, but no help would come. Let alone three children—even thirty more would have posed no threat to a strong instructor.
Children were far too easily frightened. If the other party was a repeat offender and understood this, he had countless ways to make sure the children never dared tell anyone what had happened here. The vast majority of child molesters who were not caught immediately escaped legal punishment through such methods.
It might sound ridiculous, but all they needed was some childish lie like, "If you tell anyone what happened today, a demon will crawl out from beneath your bed and eat you." Children whose common sense had been shaken and who were under stress would believe it, then become too frightened to say anything.
It was not because they were stupid. Children's brains were not yet fully developed. Studies showed that 90 percent of children had experiences during childhood where they could not distinguish fantasy from reality. It was a necessary stage of brain development.
Once they were frightened, fantasy and reality became even easier to confuse. Some repeat offenders exploited this to distort children's common sense, making them think that perhaps it was no big deal, or frightening them with imaginary things that did not exist. Through repeated insistence, they made the children believe it, threatening them into silence.
"Good thing David is here," Charles said. "If he were an ordinary person, then no matter how much he imagined, he probably couldn't have escaped their clutches."
Batwoman turned to look at Toxic Plant, trapped inside the bubble. Up close, he looked even more ridiculous. He