Jessica Hall's youngest daughter got lice from a catcher's helmet early this summer.

She didn't panic when she discovered the bugs in her 5-year-old's straight blond hair. Her eldest had once caught lice about a decade ago in elementary school, and it was fairly easy to get rid of.

Hall, an elementary teacher in Independence, Kansas, knew that catching the highly contagious parasite had nothing to do with the cleanliness of her home or children. While there isn't reliable data on how many people get head lice each year in the United States, the CDC estimates 6 million to 12 million infestations occur each year among children 3 to 11 years of age.

So, Hall tried the same approach that worked last time. She bought Nix Lice Treatment, an over-the-counter cream, and applied it. After that, she combed through her daughter's hair and did it again less than a week later. The itching kept coming back.

She treated her kindergartner six or seven times this summer, switching between Rid and Nix, and spending hours combing through her hair each week. The week before school started, her middle child caught it.

Hall started treating them both. She braided both girls' hair and sprayed them with a natural rosemary spray she bought from the hairdresser. She cleaned and washed everything in the house. She treated them with the OTC chemical formulas every week. She spent 10 to 15 hours a week combing out their hair and picking out eggs or bugs. She bought special combs with lights on them, replaced all the hairbrushes, tried special shampoos.

This went on for months. She used the chemical treatments on their scalps anywhere from 15 to 20 times.

She called her pediatrician, who prescribed a thick cream used to treat scabies. She lathered her kids' scalps with it.

The lice came back.

As soon as she would see one of the girls scratch their heads, she would call them over and inspect their scalps. They each would have to sit for an hour and a half each time she combed through their hair.

By October, the family had spent nearly $1,000 and countless hours fighting these bugs. Finally, she said to her husband: "I am done doing this. I am not getting it out. It's not working. All this stuff I'm buying, it's not working."

Her husband searched online and found Heartland Healthy Heads in Liberty, Missouri. It's a lice-removal clinic that uses the FDA-approved device AirAlle, which blows hot air to destroy lice and their eggs. It's been shown to be safe and effective at treating lice.

"I didn't know there was such a place," Hall said. "I would have done it the very first thing."

Her husband took the first available appointment, took the girls out of school and drove 150 miles each way to have them treated.

Cherie Parker, a nurse practitioner and owner of Heartland Health Heads, says she has treated a lot of desperate people. Lice bugs have adapted to the over-the-counter treatments, which don't work anymore. This new strain of super lice has to be treated with different prescription medications or the AirAlle. Their treatment costs $159, which includes a re-check and 30-day guarantee.

Parker says they do about 100 treatments a month. For those who do not live near a treatment center, it's best to get a prescription from a doctor to treat resistent lice.

"Lice has nothing to do with income level or cleanliness," she said.

A study published in the Journal of Medical Entomology earlier this year found almost all lice collected and tested from 48 states had mutations responsible for resistance to the active ingredients in widely used OTC treatments.

"We know the resistance is here," Parker said.

Oh, the resistance was known in the Hall household for the past four months.

Hall says her husband was very excited to see an end to the evenings she had to spend picking bugs out of their daughters' hair.

"It was a little crazy," she said.

They have been lice-free for more than a week, but Hall knows far too well not to start celebrating too soon.

She lost several battles against super lice, but may have won the war.

Unless, of course, someone catches it at school again.

This column has nothing to do with politics.

It has everything to do with our culture.

It's a discussion prompted by the now-infamous words of the GOP presidential nominee. An 11-year-old "Access Hollywood" video shows Donald Trump saying these words: "You know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful (women) -- I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab them by the p---y. You can do anything."

He has since defended his comments as "locker-room talk."

This is what the actions he described look like outside a locker room.

Writer, director and actor Amber Tamblyn posted her story on Instagram last week. She described a scene involving an ex-boyfriend who found her in a club, where she was with her girlfriends.

"He's a big guy, taller than me. The minute he saw me, he picked me up with one hand by my hair and with his other hand, he grabbed me under my skirt by my vagina -- my

p---y? -- and lifted me up off the floor, literally, and carried me, like something he owned, like a piece of trash, out of the club. His fingers were practically inside of me, his other hand wrapped tightly around my hair. I screamed and kicked and cried. He carried me this way, suspended by his hands, all the way across the room, pushing past people until he got to the front door ... That part of my body, which the current Presidential Nominee of the United States Donald Trump recently described as something he'd like to grab a woman by, was bruised from my ex-boyfriend's violence for at least the next week."

Jennifer Conti, an ob-gyn, shared her own experience in an essay published on Slate. When she was 10 years old, a grown man reached between her legs and squeezed.

"I was at a local toy store. My father was in the next aisle and heard me scream. The man got away, but the memory of this event has stayed with me ever since. ... These memories lie dormant for most of the time, tucked away in a place I choose consciously not to acknowledge. But the Taser I own, the keys I keep clutched between my knuckles when walking alone, and the fear I feel for my own daughter are testaments to how you can never truly erase this kind of violation."

After the "Trump tapes" were released, Canadian writer Kelly Oxford began tweeting about the times men had sexually assaulted her, starting with: "Old man on city bus grabs my 'p---y' and smiles at me, I'm 12."

She asked women to tweet about their sexual assaults. The next day, she posted this update: "Women have tweeted me sexual assault stories for 14 hours straight. Minimum 50 per minute. harrowing. do not ignore." Many used the hashtag #notokay.

Millions of people have had visceral reactions to the laughing and lewd talk on that video, partly because it makes them relive a moment when they've been bullied, humiliated or violated in some way.

An NBC/WSJ poll taken soon after the release of the tapes, but before the second presidential debate, revealed some interesting context. Prior to the video release on Oct. 7, 45 percent of likely men voters said they did not think Trump respects women. That number jumped 10 points to 55 percent after the recording became public.

The majority of men recognized it for what it is. You don't have to be a husband, a father or a brother of a woman to condemn sexual violence.

Only 31 percent of voters said Trump's comments about women were "inappropriate, but typical of how some men talk in private with other men," according to the survey. So, if you commonly hear talk or jokes about assaulting women, you are in the minority. If you defend predatory remarks about women, you reveal far more than your political affiliations.

In a 2010 survey, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 44 percent of U.S. women have experienced sexual violence victimization other than rape at some point in their lives, and nearly one in five has been raped.

Women are constantly fighting for their own bodily integrity, but we are not the only victims of sexual violence. Boys and men are sexually abused and assaulted, as well.

Our bodies are not objects for anyone to grab. Not if they are more powerful, not if they are wealthy and not if they are bigger.

A friend -- a 63-year-old man who has heard his share of lewd talk among friends -- reminded me that this is a message that transcends this brutally divisive election: Consent is a human right.

Learning to respond to offensive -- even hateful -- speech should be part of the college experience.

The first column I ever wrote for my college newspaper was to protest a speaker who'd been invited to present "the other side" about the war in Bosnia, which in the '90s was as terrible a mess as Syria is now. He was a defender of then-Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, who was later indicted for genocide and war crimes in the Balkan war.

I was horrified that the university was giving a platform to propaganda being used to carry out ethnic cleansing. My column said as much, and I got my first lesson in public pushback from the fraternity hosting the speaker. I decided to attend the lecture; my disgust was justified when the speaker said the Breadline Massacre, which had killed scores of innocent civilians in a market, had been staged to create worldwide sympathy for the victims.

It didn't occur to me to boycott or stage a protest since I've long believed in the disinfecting power of sunshine coupled with the power of the pen.

A recent response by students at St. Louis University demonstrated another effective approach.

Months ago, SLU's College Republicans invited Allen West, a former congressman, retired lieutenant colonel and provocateur, to speak on foreign policy. As part of the process of bringing a speaker to campus, the group submitted flyers to advertise the event. When those flyers indicated a talk about "radical Islam," university officials asked them to stick to the proposal they had originally pitched and gotten approved.

West threw an online fit soon after in response. His post on his personal website said that he was being censored. He slandered the Muslim Student Association (MSA) as a "stealth jihad radical Islamic campus organization" connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Members of the MSA at SLU met with university officials and the College Republicans to explain how his baseless lies smeared them and added fuel to a tense political climate. They pointed out the connection between the vilification of a group and rising acts of violence against that group.

University President Fred Pestello released a statement saying he condemned the claims made against students, and that he stood in solidarity with the MSA and all SLU students. But, he added, it was important to "expose all ideas and positions, provocative or pedestrian, to critical inquiry."

It's through civil engagement that truth emerges, he argued.

Now, every institution has its sacrosanct issues off the table for public discussion. For example, SLU did not extend the same freedom of discourse last year to a former law professor who had been invited by SLU law students to talk about reproductive issues, including abortion. That event was moved off campus because it reportedly conflicted with the university's values.

And suppose an invited speaker had maligned the Catholic Students Association as being involved with the clergy sex abuse scandal. Would the university have still given him a platform to promote such ideas?

It seems unlikely.

In this case, the decision worked out to the MSA's benefit. The Muslim students reached out to the rest of the SLU community. They asked them to wear white shirts, fill the rows in the auditorium and silently walk out before West's speech began.

Hundreds of their peers responded.

West was not silenced. No one tried to shout down his hateful attacks. They simply walked away from his bigotry.

Maariya Ahmed, a senior at SLU and co-president of the MSA, said she had been nervous before the event. The students' reaction moved her.

"Seeing how the university, the community of SLU stood behind us, it was so beautiful. It really restored my faith," she said. Co-president Azfar Shaik said the turnout was humbling, but that he wasn't too surprised by the overwhelming show of support.

"This was an attack against SLU and the ideals it holds," he said.

The university president followed up with a message that said he "beamed with pride for how our students integrated the Jesuit ideal of 'cura personalis' into lived experience through a showing of courage, strength and solidarity."

"Last night, we were truly one SLU," he wrote.

The students exercised their own freedom: To protest peacefully and powerfully.

To stand with those who had been unfairly targeted in their community. To make a statement without saying a word.