Child Abuse: The Ultimate Betrayal

By Ed Magnuson

Her name is Mary. She is 34 years old and lives in a suburb of New York City. With her neatly tailored beige suit, pink designer blouse and necklace of seed pearls, she has the well-scrubbed preppie look of someone who has had a safe, comfortable life. When she begins to speak, the words seem strange, as if they belong to some other person.

"What I remember most about my mother was that she was always beating me. She'd beat me with her high-heeled shoes, with my father's belt, with a potato masher. When I was eight, she black-and-blued my legs so badly, I told her I'd go tell the police. She said, 'Go, they'll just put you into the darkest prison.' So I stayed. When my breasts started growing at 13, she beat me across the chest until I fainted. Then she'd hug me and ask forgiveness. When I turned 16, a day didn't pass without my mother calling me a whore, and saying that I'd end up in Potter's Field, dead, forgotten and damned for all eternity. Most kids have nightmares about being taken away from their parents. I would sit on our front stoop, crooning softly of going far, far away to find another mother. "What she did to my young brother was worse. When he was two years old, she tried to hang him from the shower curtain and drown him in the toilet. He still has tic-tac-toe marks across his chest from being held down across a red-hot heating grate. From the time he was born, my. mother groomed my brother to kill my father. When Daddy came home, she made us tell him how much we hated him. I went to bed and prayed he didn't believe me. It was after I'd been married two years that my mother and brother bludgeoned my father to death in the cellar with his own pool cue. They stuffed his body in the car trunk and drove him to the middle of town and left him there.

"I started abusing my boy because he was an accident and a screamer. When he was four months old, I hit him so hard my engagement ring carved a deep bloody furrow across his soft face. His screams shattered my heart. I sank to the floor with self-loathing. Then I held him tightly in my arms, so tight he turned blue. I told him he had to do his share. Why didn't he help out? Why didn't he stop screaming? Deep down, I knew he couldn't understand. But I also thought he was doing it on purpose. He'd start crying again and I'd hit him again, and I felt so helpless when this happened.

"When he was ten, I got so angry with him, I panicked. I was rushing to kill him. But I managed to tell him to go to his room and lock himself in and not to open the door no matter what I said. He fled. He was really afraid. I could hear him breathing like a frightened rabbit behind the door. I was fulfilling my mother's predictions. I was no good and I'd never be any good. I went to Mass every Sunday, and every Sunday I'd say, 'I'll confess.' I couldn't. I'd go into the confession box and choke on the words. When you abuse your child, it seems like you're watching someone else do it. There is guilt, horror, pain. Society need not hate us. We hate ourselves. No one hates an abusing parent more than the abusing parent."

Most abused children, of course, do not murder their fathers. A parent who tries to kill or succeeds in killing a child is also relatively rare. Unfortunately, Mary's account of the physical and emotional humiliation inflicted on her by an out-of-control parent and the recycling of the same kind of abuse when she became a mother is all too typical. What is hopeful, although unusual, about Mary's story is that she realized she needed help, found a group, Parents Anonymous, that knew how to help her, and made peace with her son. In high school now, he is a straight-A student and a starter on the baseball team. Mary says, "He is always telling me that when he is very rich, he'll build a beautiful house and put me and his father on the second floor with a sauna bath, a fireplace and a Jacuzzi. Now we are a warm, happy family."

But that is not the way most child-abuse cases end. The majority of parents who batter their helpless children or molest them sexually or simply deprive them of sustenance do not know--or are not able to admit--that they need help. If somehow accused of maltreatment, they deny it. The few who do want aid, frequently do not know where to find it. Far too often, those who are asked to help do not know how to provide it. Even the experts disagree on how best to treat the offenders.

Less is known, and less is done, about helping the victims.

One thing is certain: the number of reported cases of child abuse in the U.S. is rising sharply.

In 1976 the American Humane Association found that 413,000 cases of child abuse had been reported to state and local authorities that year. By 1981 the count had doubled to 851,000. Last year it climbed by 12%.

While alarmed by those trends, most analysts see a glimmer of hope in the grim statistics.

They believe that the figures may reflect a growing alertness and willingness among officials in schools, hospitals, law-enforcement and social agencies to detect and report instances of child abuse. Relatives and neighbors of the victims also seem more ready to ask the relevant local authorities to intervene. The wall of silence is breaking down even in cases of incest and sexual abuse of children by close acquaintances, which were almost always hushed up in the past.

As abused children become adults, more and more are openly discussing their pasts, both to conquer their emotional problems and to help others deal with theirs. Private and government agencies are forming to aid the victims. At the same time, public awareness of child abuse has taken a quantum jump. In 1976, for example, polls showed that only about 10% of Americans considered it a serious national problem. A recent Louis Harris survey placed that concern at 90%.

The experts argue over whether the actual rate of child abuse is rising, or just the reporting of it. Either way, only a small fraction of all abuses is reported. Guesses on the "tip of the iceberg" range from 10% to 25% of actual cases, but no one really knows.

What the experts do know is that even the reported cases are far too many and that the cost in physical and emotional suffering, ruined lives and future crimes (studies of prison populations show that upwards of 90% of all inmates claim to have been abused as children) is intolerable in a civilized society. Even more intolerable, child abuse perpetuates itself. In a great preponderance of cases--estimates run as high as 90%--the abusive parent was abused as a child. Says Lieut. Richard Willey, a child-abuse specialist in the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department: "The rate of increase is geometric: if a woman has four children and abuses them, there is a potential for four abusive families."

Studies show that women are more apt to be child abusers than men. The reason is obvious: they usually spend more time with the children and thus are provoked to a greater degree. With single mothers, the stress of child rearing is often aggravated by reduced economic circumstances and the lack of a supporting adult to share parental burdens. The unwanted, the unusually brilliant or retarded, and the physically handicapped children tend to be often abused.

Male adults, including fathers, stepfathers and live-in friends of unwed or separated mothers, all too frequently beat children too. But the cruelty of child abuse is most traumatic, and most widely abhorred, when such men prey sexually on young girls, sometimes barely past infancy, in the household. Some examples: P:"All the time my father would be having sex he would be telling me I really liked it or telling me what a great body I had," writes Linda Halliday, 36, in The Silent Scream, her autobiographical account of how her father had regular intercourse with her, as well as with her three sisters, from the time she was seven until she was 16. "I would fight the waves of vomit that washed over my body but never made it past my throat. In my mind I would scream all my hate of what he was doing to me but again it never passed my lips. I would lay there wishing I could die."

The experience impelled Linda to attempt suicide several times, turn to alcohol and prostitution, and to date only men who were physically and sexually abusive until she married her present husband. She finally found that telling her story in her book was therapeutic. She now works with other victims of sex abuse in British Columbia, urging them to face their childhood horrors by speaking and writing about them.

P: "It wasn't enough for my father to do something sexual to me and gain satisfaction," recalls Sherry, 39, of the molestation she suffered from her father, starting when she was three years old. "He had to do something mean. It was like punishment, and for years that was what I called it. I would think, 'My Daddy was mean to me, but it was O.K. because I was a bad girl.' " Sherry had no one to tell. Her father was the only minister in a small Midwestern town. "I never had any hope that anyone would hear or believe or listen to me. After church everyone would say how lucky I was to have such a fine father."

Sherry's father would take her out of school one day a week and drive her to "secret places," including motels. He would pretend that he was going to hang her or he would put her in a coffin-like box before abusing her sexually. Still, she says, "when father wasn't being horrible, he was the person in the family who loved me most." She blames her mother for not ending her torment. Sherry developed multiple personalities, married and divorced an abusive man ("He was going to kill me"), has a teen-age son, now works as a teacher and researcher in Los Angeles. She has been in therapy for twelve years. "Once a week," she says, "I just sit and cry for what I didn't have as a child. What I hate most is how damaged my life has been."

P:For most of his 40 years, John, a Los Angeles machinist, has thought of himself as "a no-good, useless bastard." That is what his father, who beat him with sticks and belts until he was 13, continually called him. And that, for a time, is what John became. He left home after high school, joined the Navy, but failed to mature. "I couldn't deal with adults. I was a loner and avoided people unless I was picking fights with them." He drank too much, married a divorced woman with a three-year-old daughter, and discovered that "emotionally, I was in a desert."

John's stepdaughter viewed him as her father. "This little girl accepting me unconditionally was about the best thing that could have happened to me. I didn't have to account to her. I was Daddy and she would listen." As the girl grew, "she started becoming a woman in my eyes." Their relationship became directly sexual, and he persuaded her not to tell her mother. But when he slapped the girl around for missing school too much, she revealed their secret. Her mother reported the story to the sheriff and left home with her daughter and a son she had had with John. For 2 1/2 years, John fought molestation charges through the court system, finally paying an $800 fine and spending four years on probation. "When my daughter rejected me, that was the end of my world."

The mother has returned to John with their son. John joined a volunteer self-help group called Parents United and discovered that "it's helped knowing I'm not the only person in the world who did this. I'm making myself a better person. But I'll be in therapy a long time." His stepdaughter has lived consecutively with her grandmother, her natural father, in a shelter for girls from broken homes and now, at almost 18, with an aunt. No one can predict whether she will ever get over her childhood trauma.

Law-enforcement agencies have difficulty dealing with physical abuse that falls short of wanton cruelty or life-endangering acts. The line between a generally approved spanking and a beating that escalates into brutality and illegality is often fuzzy. But the law, like society in general, is not ambivalent about sexual abuse of children. Incest, usually defined as intercourse between blood relatives extending through first cousins, is illegal in every state. Sexual offenders who are not family members may be charged with rape, child molesting or similar crimes. Pedophiles, who have an obsessive fixation on sex with children, can abuse their own sons and daughters as well as youngsters on the playground. Rehabilitation is rare, although voluntary hormone therapy has been used with some success.

Whatever the type of abuse, there is often friction between police, charged by law with trying to prevent crime and arrest criminals, and social agencies, directed by civil statutes in many states to place a priority on helping families end the abuse so they can remain together. When the abusive situation in a home seems unlikely to change permanently, authorities often argue over who should leave the household: the offending adult or the victimized child. Since it is easier under most state laws to remove the child than force a parent to leave, that is how the problem is most often resolved.

All authorities agree on one point: a child cannot be helped unless his or her plight is reported. With considerable unanimity, police and social workers criticize doctors, particularly in private hospitals, for mending broken bones and cigarette burns on young bodies without taking action to prevent "an accident" from happening again. "In most cases the stories given by parents are not consistent with the injury," says Dr. Annette Picker, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., which handles some 600 cases of child abuse a year, more than half of them sexual. (Children two years old and younger sometimes arrive with herpes and gonorrhea, including oral, anal and genital infections.) Says she: "Our first obligation .as doctors is to recognize child abuse and report it."

There is clearly a class bias against the poor in the reporting of child-abuse cases. Doctors, teachers and police are less likely to accuse affluent families of beating or molesting their children even when the evidence is clear. Clinics and social-welfare agencies deal more frequently with the poor. Whether actual abuse occurs more often among poor families is not certain. A correlation between increases in unemployment rates and rises in physical child-abuse reports, however, suggests that stress over money matters tends to make parents lose their tempers more readily when a child cries too long or is unruly. Still, contends Betty Singer, who heads a childtrauma team at Boston's Children's Hospital, "every parent has the capacity to abuse."

Indeed, many experts consider it a myth that sexual abuse occurs mainly in rural hillbilly communities. They contend that it is just as prevalant in urban areas and among middle-and upper-class families. Nor are victims only girls. Homosexual abuse of boys by adult males in the home is more common than generally realized, they say, although no reliable statistics are available. Incest between mothers and sons is hardly ever reported.

If locating a victim is difficult, pinning the blame on an adult is even trickier. Children are understandably reluctant to accuse their father or mother. When they do, the parent often denies any wrongdoing--and law-enforcement authorities find it difficult to take the word of a child over that of an adult. Despite the pain involved, various counseling groups encourage open confrontations as a means of getting the guilty to face up to the problem.

Another goal of the governmental and private groups that are belatedly grappling with the child-abuse problem is to teach younger children to recognize that what is happening to them is not normal. Children do not know the anatomical terms, of course, but when given dolls with genitalia, they can point out what happened. Some school districts invite child-abuse specialists into lower-grade classrooms to teach the difference between a "good touch" and a "bad touch." Theatrical groups present plays that make the same points in a gentle way.

In a Columbus school workshop the counselor tells children: "A good touch is coming home from school after getting an A in spelling and your Dad pats you on the back, hugs you and tells you, 'I'm really proud of you.' It makes you feel good inside. Sometimes, somebody that you know and love, even somebody in your own family, might try and touch you in a way which frightens you, or makes you feel confused, or maybe even hurt. You need to talk to somebody about those kinds of touches."

What should an outsider do when a child reveals, however obliquely or mutedly, that his parents are abusive? First, say counselors, the trusted adult should believe the child; youngsters rarely invent such stories. The adult should tell the child that this is not a secret that must be kept, then try to determine if it is safe for the youngster to return home. The adult can confront the offender, warn someone else in the family, or seek outside professional help. Most large communities have child-protection agencies, community mental-health centers, a children's hospital and police departments with sexual-assault specialists.

Two community facilities, normally staffed by volunteers and often listed with community services near the front of telephone directories, are becoming increasingly important in the campaign against child abuse. One is a hot line for parents who are losing control of their emotions and on the verge of harming a child; calling anonymously, they can talk their anger out with a sympathetic listener. "Hammer on a board, count to ten, do anything, but don't hit or touch the child," they are often advised. The other is a crisis center, where the child can be sent until the crisis at home subsides. Often parents and child can meet there in a comfortable neutral atmosphere and work out their tensions with the help of experienced advisers.

Chronic offenders or potential abusers can work to control their impulses through the peer support of groups like Parents Anonymous, patterned after Alcoholics Anonymous. Indeed, some experts say that incest, like alcohol and drugs, is mood altering, since it can provide a momentary escape from feelings of loneliness or inadequacy. "Sexual offenders and chemical dependents have the same thinking patterns," says Richard Seely, director of the Intensive Treatment Program for Sexual Aggressives at the Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peter. "They get highs each step of the way."

Funds at both federal and state levels have been declining for work in the child-abuse field even as the affliction appears to be getting worse. Private contributions have not closed the gap. Beyond the immediate practical needs to protect young victims and give them counseling and therapy after hellish experiences, research into longer-term solutions is suffering. "You cannot wait to help a child in trouble," warns Roy T. Bowles, a lecturer in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. "We must not allow the complexity of this problem to paralyze us."

At stake is America's most precious asset, its human capital. At stake, too, is simple human dignity. If wolves and bears and birds take meticulous care of their young, why are human beings subjecting theirs to whippings and punches and sexual perversion? Children, with their unrestrained love and unquestioning trust, deserve better. Says Sergeant Dick Ramon, head of the sex-crimes unit of the Seattle police department: "Child abuse is the ultimate crime, the ultimate betrayal." --By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Meg Grant/Los Angeles and James Wilde/New York

With reporting by Meg Grant/Los Angeles, James Wilde/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.