It Takes a Village (14 page)

On April 29, 1994, James Darby, Jr., a boy just a year younger than that waiter's son, wrote to my husband from his home in New Orleans. “Dear Mr. Clinton,” he began, “I want you to stop the killing in the city. People is dead and I think that somebody might kill me. So would you please stop the people from deading. I'm asking you nicely to stop it. I know you can do it. Do it. I know you could.” He signed the note, “Your friend, James.”

Reprinted with special permission of King Features Syndicate.

Nine days later, James Darby, Jr., was fatally shot in the head during a drive-by shooting in his neighborhood.

The freedom James and the waiter asked for is the kind Bill and I experienced when we were young. It existed because adults in our communities offered us both formal and informal means of protection when we ventured out. A number of efforts are under way to re-create that sense of freedom.

The first step is to take weapons off the streets and to put more police on them. The Brady Bill, which my husband signed into law in 1993, imposes a five-day waiting period for gun purchases, time enough for authorities to check out the buyer's record and for the buyer to cool down about any conflict he might have intended the gun to resolve. Since it was enacted, more than forty thousand people with criminal records have been prevented from buying guns. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act banned nineteen types of military-style assault weapons whose only purpose is to kill people and it stopped the revolving door for career criminals with its “three strikes and you're out” provision. As part of a “zero tolerance” policy for weapons, drugs, and other threats to the safety of teachers and students, the President signed an executive order decreeing that any student who comes to school with a gun will be expelled and punished as a condition of federal aid.

Twenty-five thousand new police officers are being trained, with the goal of adding seventy-five thousand more by the end of the decade. Taking a cue from what's worked in the past, cities are deploying officers differently, getting them out from behind desks and putting them back on the sidewalks, where they can get to know the people who live and work on the streets they patrol. They will be doing what is called “community policing,” where being a good police officer is as much about establishing good community relationships that help prevent crime as it is about responding to crime when it happens.

The other half of community policing, of course, is the community's role. Citizens have to be active participants in crime prevention. In Houston, nearly a thousand new officers added to the city's police force since 1991 have been joined by thousands of citizen patrollers observing and reporting suspicious or criminal behavior in an anticrime campaign spearheaded by Mayor Bob Lanier. In addition, Lanier, who understands that the entire ecology of a community affects crime, has supported soccer leagues and golf instruction for kids, built parks and playgrounds, started youth programs, and exhibited a respect for the diversity of the city that gives all citizens a stake in their city's future.

In the 1980s, residents of the Fairlawn neighborhood in Washington, D.C., fed up with the drugs on their streets, formed the Fairlawn Coalition. Every night, members of the coalition organize into groups, put on bright-orange hats to identify themselves, and patrol the streets in their neighborhood that are known to be centers of drug activity. The patrols do not confront drug dealers directly, but members carry notepads and sometimes video cameras to record information for the police. For their own safety, they carry walkie-talkies. The presence of the patrol serves as a deterrent to illegal activity. As one coalition member explains, “The dealers will deal drugs right in front of the police, but they won't do it in front of people who are from the community.” Since the coalition went into action, neighborhood parents have become less fearful about letting their children play outside, and the entire community feels more secure.

Children know when adults are letting them down, and it angers them. A boy in Kansas City told members of the National Commission on Children what it was like for him to walk to school every day. What could have been a ten-minute walk took him double the time, because of the zigzagging course he took to avoid a house where he knew crack was being sold. “What I don't understand,” the young man said to the commissioners, “is if the people who live on the street know what is going on in that house and the police drive by all the time as though they know something bad is going on in there, why don't adults do something about it?”

In another neighborhood in Kansas City, adults are doing something about it. After witnessing an escalation of crime in their neighborhood, a few concerned citizens started organizing to stop it. They formed the Wyandotte Countians Against Crime (WCAC), a citizens' group with more than 350 members. They closed one drug house by posting a sign in front announcing that drugs were being sold there. They managed to close down another by taking down the license number of every car that pulled up in front. They also organized a safe Halloween block party for kids in the neighborhood and are working toward creating a community center for teenagers.

The Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America and the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention at the Department of Health and Human Services coordinate and help fund hundreds of such grassroots coalitions around the country. In addition to neighborhood patrols, these groups have initiated programs like after-school activities for young people and graffiti paint-outs, and have worked with local schools to establish drug-free, gun-free zones. These coalitions are living proof that we can take back our streets and communities and give back to our young people the security most of us took for granted when we were children.

In the meantime, we will have to take responsibility for the effects of exposing children to violence. Some youngsters have witnessed so much random bloodshed that they have begun to plan their own funerals. One little boy who had seen his mother murdered began to reenact her death repeatedly, falling down on the ground, lying still, and staring up at the ceiling with a dead look in his eyes. It was his way of remembering his mother and coping with his loss. Children who have been exposed to violence often have difficulty concentrating or sleeping. They may have violent flashbacks and difficulty forming relationships of trust. Some become paranoid or cynical about the future, which may lead them to take risks with alcohol and drugs. They need counselors and teachers who are trained to listen and to help them articulate what they have experienced, at just the time when many schools are paring back on such “extras.”

In New Haven, where four out of every ten sixth, eighth, and tenth graders say they have witnessed a violent crime, police and mental health professionals have joined forces in the Child Development–Community Policing Program, designed to assist children caught in the crossfire of violence either at home or on the streets. Police officers are trained to deal with these vulnerable children, to recognize when they need additional counseling, and to see that they get it.

Children who witness continual violence in their homes may come to identify with the predominant behavior of the parent of their sex. Boys may take on a father's abusive behavior, while girls may find themselves in relationships in which they become victims as their mothers were. Equally troubling, boys and girls who are exposed to domestic violence may come to regard it as the chief way of resolving conflict and as the inevitable ingredient of any close relationship. Based on his own personal experience, the President gives high priority to the Violence Against Women Act, which treats intrafamily assaults as the serious crimes they are.

That same attitude ought to apply to the physical and sexual abuse of children. For most adults, the thought of an adult abusing a child is inconceivable. And yet, according to a 1995 report by the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, two thousand children a year die from abuse or neglect. Homicide rates for children aged four and under have hit a forty-year high. Near-fatal abuse and neglect leaves eighteen thousand children permanently disabled each year, and tens of thousands of others will enter adulthood bearing the psychological scars. One out of three victims of abuse is a child under the age of one year. The report estimates that 141,700 infants and children were seriously injured or neglected in 1990 alone. It notes: “In the 33 years since Dr. C. Henry Kempe first described the Battered Child Syndrome, more children have died from child abuse and neglect than from urban gang wars, AIDS, polio, or measles; yet the contrast in public attention and commitment of resources is vast.”

The sexual abuse of children is even harder for us to fathom, but the statistics are equally dire. In 1993 alone, nearly 140,000 children were reported as victims of sexual abuse. No one can calculate how many more cases of sexual abuse go unreported. Former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur was among those who forced this ugly issue into the open when she spoke out bravely about the sexual abuse she was subjected to by her father.

Sexual abuse may not leave visible bruises or broken legs, but its injuries are profound and long-lasting. And it is often made worse by the conspiracy of silence among adults in the home who look the other way or refuse to believe or protect the child. Some experts also suggest that the loosening of sexual mores and the pervasive use of sex in advertising, including the exploitation of children in grown-up ads, have combined to sabotage the fundamental taboo against incest.

Whatever the reasons for the apparent increase in physical and sexual abuse of children, it demands our intervention. We should start with strong, unambivalent criminal prosecution of perpetrators. And a child's safety must take precedence over the preservation of a family that has allowed abuse to occur.

In his book
The Welfare of Children,
Duncan Lindsey, a professor at the School of Public Policy and Social Research at UCLA, argues persuasively that the child welfare system has been overwhelmed by the responsibilities assigned to it in the past two decades. With limited resources, it has proved unable to provide the full range of protective services for which it is responsible: intervening in emergencies, evaluating children's safety and removing them from the family when necessary, placing them in foster care and monitoring that care, counseling parents, deciding whether to prosecute parents, reuniting families, and coordinating services with schools, police, relatives, and other agencies. The burden of child protection not only has made it impossible for welfare workers to perform their historic mission of helping disadvantaged children but, according to Lindsey, “too often allows criminal physical and sexual assault of children to go unprosecuted and thus fails to protect children from continued harm.”

Cases of physical or sexual abuse should be referred immediately to the police. If the police decide to proceed with charges against any adult in a child's home, even as an accessory to a crime, child protective workers should assist in deciding whether the child should stay in the home or be moved to safer ground. And social workers and courts should make decisions about terminating parental rights of abusive parents more quickly, rather than removing and returning abused children time and again. As the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect recommends: “The child's safety and well-being must be a priority in all child and family programs.”

Physical and sexual abuse destroys the trust children need to feel secure. So does verbal abuse. If you wonder why I include it in the same breath, stop and listen to what's being said around you. Negative, belittling words directed at children pervade our culture.

You must have witnessed, as I have, parents who should know the hurtful effects of unkind words nevertheless humiliating their children over perceived shortcomings in athletics, academics, or appearance. You must have cringed, as I have, while a father or mother humiliates a child in public for no apparent reason. Not only parents, but many teachers, coaches, and other adults who have the upper hand are routinely disrespectful to kids. Perhaps they feel they must respond in kind to the aggressive and ugly attitudes some kids express toward authority. But like any kind of violence, verbal violence escalates if both sides continue to retaliate. And it wounds just as deeply. As Erik Erikson observed, the most deadly of all sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit. Adults should practice counting to ten and taking a deep breath before contributing to the climate of incivility and insecurity that surrounds us.

 

M
Y HUSBAND
went alone to the theater to see his favorite movie,
High Noon,
again and again when he was six
.
What made it his favorite is the role Gary Cooper plays, which is the very thing that makes it different from other westerns. Cooper plays a sheriff who is afraid of what he has to do to protect his town from the forces of evil—and does it anyway.