Vermont had its first AMBER alert last week. (AMBER is an acronym for America’s Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response, a cumbersome tribute to Amber Hagerman, who was abducted and murdered in Texas in 1996.)
Twelve-year-old Brooke Bennett disappeared on the 25th of June. Stories soon circulated that she had lied to her mother about where she was going and instead had gone off with a man she’d met on the Internet.
Different versions of the story displayed different photos of Brooke. One looked like school photo, showing a pretty young girl wearing a sweater. Another showed a sexualized pre-teen with heavy makeup on her eyes.
I won’t try to build suspense with this story; Brooke was murdered. Although the Internet was involved, this is not one of the horror stories we warn our kids about, it’s worse. Brooke’s uncle and former stepfather have been arrested in connection with Brooke’s abduction and for their involvement in a sex ring that traded in under-aged girls. They apparently intended to initiate Brooke into the ring. Instead, she’s dead.
All this looks mournfully familiar. There’s a woman with a child. The woman is from a low-income background and does not have much education. She was not particularly well parented herself. There may be substance abuse; there may be mental-health issues. The woman got pregnant in or out of wedlock, but the father wasn’t around much. There were men around – other husbands, boyfriends, uncles, either biological or honorary. The child or children are neglected or physically abused or sexually abused or all three by one or more adults in their life.
The girls, as a result of all this abuse, often become withdrawn or (perhaps in an effort to please) overtly sexual. Abused boys often become angry and violent. Either way, they are now poised to breed a new generation of abused children.
The state may or may not be involved. The lower the income of the parents, the more likely the state will be involved. This is not to say poor people are worse parents than middle-class or rich people. They’re not. Poor people just have fewer means of keeping state workers from intervening. The adults around Brooke must have had the wherewithal to keep the social workers at bay, which is too bad for Brooke, because it may have cost her life.
What’s the answer? I don’t know that there is one. Much as we like to malign “things today,” this is not a modern problem. MySpace and Facebook are new, sort of. Some of the above-mentioned abused substances are new, but all those are just new faces on a very old problem.
If you sit in the file room at the Department of Children and Families or Department of Social Services or whatever it’s called in your state and read the case histories, you’ll see several generations of the same families spawned by rape and incest. What’s different now is some of these stories make the news. In decades past they were either lost down at the end of a country road or in an urban underclass the news media didn’t see fit to report on.
I don’t know what the solution is. I know what it’s not. It’s not just the social services and entitlement programs that are traditional planks in Democratic platforms, although we need them. It’s not just the faith-based programs one sees recently in Republican platforms, although those are needed, too.
What it’s going to take to solve the problem is the same answer as what it will take to solve global warming or the oil crisis or any problem we all share. It’s going to take effort from all of us and a good deal of that effort will be devoted to performing actions we’d just as soon skip.
It will be worth it. Aside from the benefit of fewer abused children (I’m not so naïve as to write “no abused children”), we will help create real communities, instead of random groups of isolated people whose only connection to their neighbor is geographic proximity.
Like a Motherless Child
Vermont had its first AMBER alert last week. (AMBER is an acronym for America’s Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response, a cumbersome tribute to Amber Hagerman, who was abducted and murdered in Texas in 1996.)
Twelve-year-old Brooke Bennett disappeared on the 25th of June. Stories soon circulated that she had lied to her mother about where she was going and instead had gone off with a man she’d met on the Internet.
Different versions of the story displayed different photos of Brooke. One looked like school photo, showing a pretty young girl wearing a sweater. Another showed a sexualized pre-teen with heavy makeup on her eyes.
I won’t try to build suspense with this story; Brooke was murdered. Although the Internet was involved, this is not one of the horror stories we warn our kids about, it’s worse. Brooke’s uncle and former stepfather have been arrested in connection with Brooke’s abduction and for their involvement in a sex ring that traded in under-aged girls. They apparently intended to initiate Brooke into the ring. Instead, she’s dead.
All this looks mournfully familiar. There’s a woman with a child. The woman is from a low-income background and does not have much education. She was not particularly well parented herself. There may be substance abuse; there may be mental-health issues. The woman got pregnant in or out of wedlock, but the father wasn’t around much. There were men around – other husbands, boyfriends, uncles, either biological or honorary. The child or children are neglected or physically abused or sexually abused or all three by one or more adults in their life.
The girls, as a result of all this abuse, often become withdrawn or (perhaps in an effort to please) overtly sexual. Abused boys often become angry and violent. Either way, they are now poised to breed a new generation of abused children.
The state may or may not be involved. The lower the income of the parents, the more likely the state will be involved. This is not to say poor people are worse parents than middle-class or rich people. They’re not. Poor people just have fewer means of keeping state workers from intervening. The adults around Brooke must have had the wherewithal to keep the social workers at bay, which is too bad for Brooke, because it may have cost her life.
What’s the answer? I don’t know that there is one. Much as we like to malign “things today,” this is not a modern problem. MySpace and Facebook are new, sort of. Some of the above-mentioned abused substances are new, but all those are just new faces on a very old problem.
If you sit in the file room at the Department of Children and Families or Department of Social Services or whatever it’s called in your state and read the case histories, you’ll see several generations of the same families spawned by rape and incest. What’s different now is some of these stories make the news. In decades past they were either lost down at the end of a country road or in an urban underclass the news media didn’t see fit to report on.
I don’t know what the solution is. I know what it’s not. It’s not just the social services and entitlement programs that are traditional planks in Democratic platforms, although we need them. It’s not just the faith-based programs one sees recently in Republican platforms, although those are needed, too.
What it’s going to take to solve the problem is the same answer as what it will take to solve global warming or the oil crisis or any problem we all share. It’s going to take effort from all of us and a good deal of that effort will be devoted to performing actions we’d just as soon skip.
It will be worth it. Aside from the benefit of fewer abused children (I’m not so naïve as to write “no abused children”), we will help create real communities, instead of random groups of isolated people whose only connection to their neighbor is geographic proximity.
© Mark Floegel, 2008