A Silence of Mockingbirds (24 page)

A few months following the Karly Sheehan trial, Joan Demarest
gave birth to a healthy baby boy. She is now the mother to four children—
three boys and a girl. Joan Demarest loves being a mother.

I asked Representative Gelser why, of all the issues brought
before her, she latched onto Karly’s Law and has fought so diligently for
it. A mother of four, Gelser followed the news reports on Karly’s death closely.
She was mortified that such a tragedy happened right in her own backyard.

“The right thing to do is often a hard thing to do,” Representative
Gelser said. “Child abuse is grossly underreported.” Too often people see
children as property and parents as owners of that property, Gelser said.
Onlookers are reluctant to interfere. “I can’t imagine how many people
have seen something and wondered but failed to take the difficult step
of reporting it.” As is too often the case, people do not get involved until
child abuse affects them personally, and even then they remain reticent.

Gelser has been fielding phone calls from officials in other states,
wondering how they might also implement Karly’s Law. It should be a
federal law that any child with injuries be photographed and seen within
forty-eight hours by a medical professional trained in child abuse. But
most doctors lack the training to correctly make such an assessment.

“On average a medical provider gets less than fifteen hours of
training concerning child abuse issues in medical school. That is not
enough,” said Karen Scheler, director of ABC House. If Karly’s case
had been handled correctly, as Dr. Chervenak testified, she would
have identified Karly’s injuries as classic signs of abuse. A doctor with
specialized training in child abuse is twice as likely to correctly diagnose
abuse as one who hasn’t received the appropriate training.

“Karly’s Law is making a difference,” Representative Gelser said.
“It’s been quite effective at getting these kids identified a lot earlier.”

Abuse centers throughout the state are seeing a jump in the number
of children they assess. The first year Karly’s Law went into effect, ABC
House saw a jump of 150 additional child abuse referrals. Dr. Chervenak
was called in on each of those. On average, the ABC House serves 350
children in-house and an additional 150 through consultation.

Rarely does a law receive the support of the full legislature the way
Karly’s Law did. Representative Gelser was elated that the bill passed
unanimously— understandably so, since she had put her formidable
shoulder to pushing it through.

But passing a law is easy enough for any legislative body. The real
struggle is funding such mandates. The budget for the ABC House is
cobbled together from a variety of sources, including grants, medical
billing, specialty funding from the state, and private donors. Rep. Gelser
worked hard to find funding to support the impact of Karly’s Law on
centers like the ABC House. At her urging, Oregon legislators dedicated
a million dollars toward funding Karly’s Law. But then the recession
hit and that money went to help backfill harsh cuts made to the Child
Abuse Multidisciplinary Intervention (CAMI) funds.

Karly’s Law brought an additional workload to ABC House and
other child abuse centers throughout the state. “We in Oregon are
dedicated to doing better and Karly has been the inspiration for that,”
said Karen Scheler. “But it is a struggle every day. This year our agency
had 160 consults for physical abuse alone.”

Finding the resources to meet the needs is difficult. Taxpayers will
pay to lock people like Shawn Field away for life, but when it comes to
funding the people who are working “boots on the ground,” our state’s
Child Abuse Response teams or Child Abuse Intervention Centers,
those positions are considered expendable. Just another strike-through
on a line-item budget.

Rep. Gelser agrees that the funding issue remains a problem for
cash-strapped states. But Oregon’s legislators took the bold move of
dedicating funds to Karly’s Law, even when they could least afford to do
so. “It was a good-faith effort on their behalf,” said Rep. Gelser.

Funding issues aren’t the only problems that arise during a recession.
Domestic abuse and child abuse rates rise during times of economic
hardships. Twenty-two children died in Oregon in 2010 as a result of
child abuse— nearly twice the number of children who died in 2009.
Most of those children had never been reported as potential victims or
evaluated at a Child Abuse Intervention Center, like the ABC House.

Nobody was issuing a cry for help on their behalf. There was only
the silence of people who suspected but never spoke up.

Dr. Chervenak serves Linn and Benton counties— one doctor to
assess all those cases, all those children. And when she is on vacation or
sick, she reviews cases via the Internet.

The medical assessment component of Karly’s Law has been a huge
challenge. “When the law was envisioned, we thought a lot more doctors
would advocate for this. But they don’t like to be involved in these cases.
It can take up a lot of time— all the training, plus the possibility of
having to appear in court,” Representative Gelser said.

Every five hours, a child in the U.S. dies from abuse or
neglect, according to a 2011 investigation by the BBC journalist Natalia Antelava.
The U.S. has the highest child abuse record in the industrialized world. America’s
child abuse death rate is triple Canada’s and eleven times that of Italy.
High rates of teen pregnancy, high school dropout rates, violent crime, imprisonment,
and poverty are some of the contributing factors, said Michael Petit, president
of Every Child Matters.

Here in America, a report of child abuse is made every ten seconds.
Here in the land of the free, an estimated 906,000 children are victims
of abuse and neglect every single year. That’s nearly a million children.
Here in the home of the brave, 1,500 abused children die annually,
usually from injuries sustained in their own homes.

In Oregon alone, there were 11,090 confirmed victims of child
abuse during the most recent reporting year. That’s more than thirty a
day— and those are just the confirmed cases.

What we are doing for abused children in this nation isn’t nearly enough.

In 2011, Miami-Dade county law enforcement officials found Nubia Docter’s ten-year-old
body in the back of a truck, doused with chemicals. Her twin brother, his body
also badly burned by chemicals, was convulsing in the front seat of the truck.
“Systematic failure,” the term Heiser used for Karly’s case, was the same excuse
offered by Florida state officials to explain how years of repeated complaints
to the Department of Children & Families (DCF) were ignored, even when those
complaints came from reliable sources: teachers and principals. Nubia told her
teacher herself that her father was touching her inappropriately.

Nubia’s adoptive parents dismissed the laundry list of complaints— hair loss,
sexual abuse, starvation, obvious bruises, reports of torture, all of it. Nubia’s
adoptive mother worked at a pediatric clinic. Perhaps that affiliation made
it easier for Florida’s DCF workers to conclude that Nubia’s problems were a
result of her “hyper” personality.

Instead of spending the money necessary to protect the children, the state
is now shelling out considerable funds to incarcerate the offenders. Prosecutors
are seeking the death penalty against the man and woman who adopted these twins
and tortured them.

Yet getting people to put the dollars on the front end to prevent child abuse
is a lot harder to do. “I find it disturbing that we don’t have designated funding
for child abuse,” Karen Scheler said. “Kids like Karly do slip through the cracks.
No one wants that to happen— no one. But it’s hard when there’s no funding. I
think that funding should come on a national level. I find it appalling that
our federal budget includes $28 million in designated funds to sponsor NASCAR
as a recruiting tool for our military but we do not adequately fund child abuse
to help intervene, support and protect our children.”

The Band Perry
If I Die Young

Allison Krause
Jewels
Jesus Help me to Stand

Aqualung
Brighter than Sunshine

Johnny Cash
Jackson
Ring of Fire
Belshazzar

Celtic Woman
Away in a Manager

Chris Rice
Come to Jesus

Civil War
My Father’s Father

Dave Barnes
Carry Me Through

Dixie Chicks
I Believe in Love
Top of the World

Eva Cassidy
Fields of Gold

Hillsong
From the Inside Out

Fernando Ortego
Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

Jeff Buckley
Hallelujiah

Merle Haggar
d
Folsom Prison Blues

MercyMe
Finally Home

NeedtoBreathe
Girl Named Tennessee
The Heat

Norah Jones
Seven Years

Nickel Creek
Sweet Afton

Nichole Nordaman
How Deep the Father’s Love

Regina Spektor
The Calculation