Henkimaa » child abuse

I’m not a mother, but I am. And then there’s Anya James.

Mel Green — Sun, 22 May 2011 10:58:01 +0000

With Rozz, Whylie the dog, & my thumb, Christmas 1996: just a few days after he arrived in Alaska

I never intended to become a mother, but then my partner’s nephew came to us from a background of severe abuse & neglect. Now he’s 23 & doing great. In contrast: the case of Anya James.

On May 8, the boy said to me, “Happy Mother’s Day.”

It was, of course, Mother’s Day, and I did, of course, help raise the boy — he’s actually a man now — from the age of 9 years and 2 days. That’s exactly how old he was the first time I saw him coming off an airplane when he first arrived in Alaska late 1996. He’s now 23.

I don’t know why, but I’d never really wanted to have kids. I simply never felt that instinct or desire or whatever it is that so powerfully prompts so many women toward motherhood. It worked out well that I turned out to be a lesbian. Not that lesbians are unable to have children, but it takes effort to find a sperm donor; even more effort to go through large swaths of one’s life mistakenly assuming (as the endemic social propaganda would have it) that one is heterosexual, and having a boyfriend or marriage, having kids that way, & only then realizing you’re gay — & having to figure out what to do about it.

With me on a backpacking trip in the Chugach Mountains, Chugach State Park, near Anchorage, Alaska. Abt. Aug 1997. He was 9.

I never had those issues: I came out early enough never to have gotten sexually involved enough with a guy to risk pregnancy; & I never had the desire to go the turkey baster route.

Or, as I’ve often joked,

I thought I thought I had a foolproof birth control method — until I became pregnant with my partner’s nine-year-old nephew.

I’ve never gone through real labor, so can’t compare my experience with any other woman’s experience of becoming a mother. I can only tell you that it hurt like hell. As I wrote a couple of years back,

This was a boy who had been at the very least witness to sexual abuse of one of his siblings, if not a victim of it himself; & had most definitely been victim of physical & emotional abuse & neglect. And for many long months in his fear of more of the same, he took it out on us. I had never lived with abuse before — an abuse that I reckon was not him abusing me, but was his father reaching through him — as [the boy] used to say, “[My father] is in my head.” It messed me up so badly, it took months to for me a wordworker to find words for it:

Cycle

the man in the head of the boy
the father of memory
the father who would pitch
his sons into the wall
the man who used their sister
for his “needs”
who sold them back for
four hundred dollars
in an Oklahoma City
KFC

the man in the head of the boy
the man in the boy’s fist
in his kicking feet his butting head
his spit on my face his biting teeth
in the bruise yellow and purple and green
on my arm the blood beneath my skin

the hurt that cannot speak

But, long story short, we got through the hard times, he learned to trust us, and the violence went away. And I became a pretty good parent. I’ll never forget the success I felt after I successfully negotiated him and two other boys his age, his friends, through grocery shopping at Fred Meyer’s followed by a visit to the video store, where they had to agree on three videos for us to rent. I lived! They lived! I had skills I’d never knew I had!

And life went on, and years were lived through, and here we are: a 23-year-old young man, working hard, living through his first (one doesn’t yet know if it’s his last) long-term relationship with a girlfriend, and sitting next to me on the couch Sunday night saying, “Happy Mother’s Day.”

For all that I’ve never been “Mom” ( I’ve always been Mel); for all that I’ve never had any form of legal relationship with him (he came up her as relative foster placement with his aunt, Rozz, now Ptery, my then-partner); for all that I had never actively wanted a kid — yeah. All the same, I’m a mother. And it means a lot that he sees me that way too.

Williwaw hike in the Chugach Mountains, 1997

And then enter the case of Anya James. She’s the adoptive mother who’s in all the Anchorage headlines now: indicted on 10 felony counts of kidnapping and 6 felony counts of first degree assault for her (alleged) abusive treatment of 6 adopted children. Kidnapping because she is accused of locking the kids up in their rooms in order to prevent their escape. A good chance she did a lot more harm than that: she’s had lots of foster kids over the years too. And the Office of Children’s Services (OCS) and the Anchorage Police Department — both of whom had a number of complaints and contacts with James over the years — somehow missed it all. While the kids continued to suffer. Yeah. They really dropped the ball. Read all about it.

I’ve been angry since James’ arrest was first reported. I’m angry not only about James abuse (alleged) of these kids, but also about many of the kneejerk & often highly biased comments made by online readers of the Anchorage Daily News about the case. Case in point: the one that prompts me to come back to this post in the middle of the night, wherein a commenter identified as kearbear wrote,

Anya had everyone fooled. It happens. The only true advocate for children are the biological parents. When the biological parents negate their job and abandon their children it is a crap shoot. Many foster parents and adoptive parents are loving. Sometimes they are cruel and abusive.

Maybe s/he’s just not a very good communicator in writing. But in any case, the comment that “the only true advocates for children are the biological parents” got me pretty ticked off. After all, I have a good deal of firsthand experience with the results of what fine and “true advocates” my kid’s bio parents were for him and his siblings.

What I wrote in response:

“The only true advocate for children are the biological parents.” But then you go on to say, “When the biological parents negate their job…” do you see the contradiction in your words here?

Different cases are different. I am the nonbiological parent of a boy who at age 9 came to live with my and my partner, his biological aunt. We were two women raising a boy — the middle of three kids — who had been physically & (at least in his sister’s case) sexually abused & neglected by their biological father & stepmother, & got only a bit better deal from their biological mom & stepfather before they were taken by child welfare authorities in the county in Missouri where they lived at the time. His biological parents were not “true advocates” for him. They were both disasters. His advocates were me & my partner: two women, lesbians. I have never even had any kind of legal relationship to my kid (though his aunt, my partner, did) — but I have been more an advocate and a parent to him then either of his bio parents ever in a million years would even think of being.

And now today, he’s a 23-year-old happily adjusted young adult (sitting next to me as I write watching Doctor Who) with a job & a girlfriend, who seldom has nightmares about his father anymore.

But back then: he was one of three kids, two of the whom were warehoused on pysch drugs in a children psych hospital for years, the third — the one who came to live with us — on a succession of 4 different psych drugs plus a succession of 6 or 7 foster homes in Missouri (we’re still not sure the exact number) before a group home for six months before he came to live with us. He was scared, angry, violent, & passed it on to us because he thought we would treat him as he had already been treated. It was horrific for me: I’d never lived with abuse before. It was his father’s abuse — “[father's name] is in my head” he’d say after violent outbursts” — emerging through him, directed at us in threats, biting, spitting, hitting, kicking. It wrecked me for awhile. What saved us was the help. We had wraparound services under the Alaska Youth Initiative — where has that program gone? Away? We as parents were part of a treatment team also including a case manager from Alternatives, the community mental health center; an outpatient therapist; a home-based therapist who came in & helped us deal with in-home issues; & activity therapists who took him out on activities in the community (also providing us with needed respite at times from what was very traumatic for both of us). And we had our friends.

Without that help we couldn’t have done it. It takes a village. It seems like in this case, & maybe it’s systemwide now, it’s a matter of “hand the kids off to someone & let them handle it” — alone, without either support, or checks on them.

Yes, OCS dropped the ball. Bigtime. But you know: I’ll betcha that even as it was in our time with DFYS (OCS predecessor) & the continual revolving door of social workers coming into our lives, then burning out & leaving — OCS doesn’t have the resources to really care for the kids under its jurisdiction. I haven’t checked into it, but I’ll betcha that the budget just isn’t there. I haven’t heard squat about Alaska Youth Initiative in years either, without which we could not have survived just _one_ kid who’d been evaluated as “severely emotionally disturbed.” And the reason the resources to look out for children of abusive parents isn’t there?

Because the people of Alaska will blather on endlessly about how much they love kids — but they won’t put their money where their mouth is. They could care less about these kids, until something like this happens. And most of them will forget about it by sometime mid-next week.

And I’ll just leave it at that (for now) and go to bed.

Except first to say: to hell with the creeps who claim that lesbians and gays should have no right to be parents. Yeah, Mr. & Mrs. Heterosexual did such a grand job with my kid & his siblings. A grand job, that is, of beating the crap out of them & leaving us to pick up the pieces.

Resting up from another hike. Powerline Pass, Chugach Mountains, 2006. The dog here is Sweetheart.

James Dobson’s God is a child abuser, & so is Jerry Prevo’s

Mel Green — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:18:45 +0000

Max Blumenthal in Anchorage: click on picture for full-size poster with details on where & when you can hear him during his visit.

Crossposted at Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis

Thanks to some problems with a print job I was needed to help solve, my lunch yesterday was late, & to compound frustration it was interrupted by a fire drill, which meant having to shut down my computer, do a quick pack-up, & join everyone else in the office — faculty, staff, students — in a walk in the rain.

But the worst of it was that it interrupted me in my reading: having learned at Phil Munger’s blog Progressive Alaska about the upcoming visit to Anchorage of Max Blumenthal, & further detail about the same at some of the other Alaska progressive blogs like Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis, What Do I Know, Immoral Minority, and the Mudflats, I decided to check further into his recently published book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party. [Ref #1-6]

Palin's in here too, in case you were wondering.

Well, lunchtime wasn’t enough to get the full skinny out of what is something of a fat book (416 pages in hardback) I ended up buying the book for my Kindle. Didn’t have my Kindle with me, actually — but I did have my iPod Touch, with the Kindle for iPhone app, so after work found me reading at the bus stop at Prov Hospital, then on the bus, & then some more over dinner. Per my Kindle, I’m now 14 percent of my way through the book at locations 1110-1119. That tells you a lot, doesn’t it? Sorry, Kindles don’t come with page numbers (I sure wish they did). Okay, so another way of saying it: I’m at the beginning of chapter 8, “The Killer and the Saint,” which is about to describe to me how serial killer Ted Bundy got some last-minute attention prior to his execution in January 1989 by blaming his sociopathic ways on an addiction to pornography, & by seeking absolution from the father-confessor he’d chosen, Focus on the Family leader James Dobson.

That chapter should be interesting. Back in the ’80s I’d read at least two or three books about Bundy, & I remember the date of his execution well — I was in Seattle at the time, where a lot of people were discussing him that day, especially women who lived in King County when Bundy was raping & murdering women there. Having read those books about Bundy, having read 7 chapters of this book already, I know even without having yet read chapter 8 that Bundy’s confession to Dobson was nothing more than self-aggrandizing publicity on both their parts. Bundy might claim to have been “born again” as a Christian on Florida’s death row, but best I can figure in all I’ve read about sociopaths of his ilk he had no soul to save: it had been, for whatever reasons, lost long ago — perhaps as a result of the abuse he himself had experienced as a child. Dobson might be claiming to be witnessing Bundy’s salvation, but best I can see is he was either (1) a chump; or (2) delighted to have Bundy’s assistance in promoting his distorted idea of Christianity, which itself is marked by a promotion of child abuse (what Dobson called “discipline”). Maybe both. Y’think?

I hadn’t actually known before starting this book that James Dobson got his start as a child psychologist & was even a professor of pediatrics at USC School of Medicine in the late ’60s/early ’70s. Then in 1970 he published his child-rearing manual, Dare to Discipline — his answer to the “permissive” child-rearing advice of Dr. Benjamin Spock. Blumenthal quotes from Dobson’s book:

A little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child…. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely. After the emotional ventilation, the child will often want to crumple to the breast of his parent, and he should be welcomed with open, warm, loving arms. [Ref #6]

Wow. If my partner & I had followed that advice in disciplining the already-abused boy who came to live with us at age 9, guess what would have happened to us? We’d've been charged with child abuse. And rightly so.

Blumenthal makes a case that Dobson’s beliefs about corporal punishment extends into his views about — & indeed the overall Christianist view about — the Christianist believer’s relationship to (their version of) God. Blumenthal quotes from Philip Greven’s book Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse:

The persistent ‘conservatism’ of American politics and society is rooted in large part in the physical violence done to children…. The roots of this persistent tilt towards hierarchy, enforced order, and absolute authority — so evident in Germany earlier in this century and in the radical right in American today — are always traceable to aggression against children’s wills and bodies, to the pain and the suffering they experience long before they, as adults, confront the complex issues of the polity, the society, and the world. [Ref #6]

Blumenthal points out that many Christianist leaders — including Dobson — were themselves subjected to corporal punishment and/or outright physical abuse as children.

Now, this doesn’t surprise me. I’ve felt for a long time that the God worshiped by Christianists was your basic big bully. And that the fear of God’s bullying punishments & the threat of eternal damnation were the only things that many Christianists felt could keep them in line — if indeed they did keep them in line. When you’re taught from babyhood that “responsibility” is no more than blind obedience under the threat of a slapping hand or a belt or a “board of education” (which I remember seeing in use two or three times in junior high: yes, teacher-administered corporal punishment with a wooden paddle was allowed in public schools when I was a kid), what kind of responsibility do kids really learn? Do they learn the internal strength needed to make truly moral decisions? Or are they merely running scared from Mom’s or Dad’s or the (so-called) Lord God Almighty’s whiphand?

People in Anchorage probably won’t be too surprised, either, to learn that at least as of 1985, even preschool children in the Anchorage Baptist Temple-affiliated Anchorage Christian Schools were subject to corporal punishment. From an October 1985 story in the Anchorage Daily News:

The Rev. Jerry Prevo announced Thursday that pre-school children will no longer be paddled at the Anchorage Christian School following Wednesday’s sentencing of a school employee for child abuse.

Prevo, whose Anchorage Baptist Temple runs the school, said corporal punishment will no longer be used on the pre-schoolers, “based on the fact it’s hard to spank and not take a chance of accidentally bruising.”

“When that happens, it puts our employees in an awkward position, and it’s not worth the hassle,” Prevo said.

Mary Lou Love, 52, a secretary with the school, was given a six-month suspended sentence for bruising a 2-year-old child’s bottom. Love swatted the child, Jennifer Wheeler, three times with a wooden paddle last May when she refused to eat.

… During her sentencing hearing, Love testified that she had been deeply disturbed over the incident and said that she never meant to bruise the child. She said she spanked her only because her job required her to do so.

“I would not have swatted her if I’d knew it would have bruised,” she said, adding that she will never paddle another child even if it means losing her job.

In 1983, Love’s supervisor, Robert Moreland, was charged with bruising the bottom of a 2-year-old child who also refused to eat….

Prevo said the bruising incidents were isolated cases.

“The parents sign a permission slip knowing that corporal punishment will be used.

“We’ve had as many as 800 kids a day and in the 13 years (the school has been open) and we’ve had two incidents. We would think that’s pretty good.”

He said corporal punishment will continue to be used at the grade school, junior and senior high school levels. [Ref #7]

That was, of course, 24 years ago, in 1985 — I have no idea if Anchorage Christian Schools still hits older-than-preschool kids with wooden paddles for serious crimes against the Lord Bully Almighty like refusing to eat. It is, after all, possible that ACS has learned over the years using wooden paddles on older kids is just as much of a “hassle” as hitting two-year-olds with them. But then again… maybe not.

(Did I say I remembered seeing wooden paddles in use in my junior high days? Much more do I remember hearing them: the hard loud thwack of wood against a kid’s behind, & the kid crying out with each swat. None of the cases involved a kid having been violent. No, only the teacher was violent. This was in 1971–72. It’s a practice I hope the Columbia Falls, Montana school system has dropped long since.)

People in Anchorage will possibly also not be surprised that ABT’s pastor Jerry Prevo, like James Dobson, grew up in a household where incidents of abuse occurred:

Born Jan. 12, 1945 in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Jerry Prevo grew up as the eldest of two sons to a pious mother and an alcoholic father who worked at a nuclearfuel processing plant.

One of his earliest childhood memories is rooted in a latenight argument between his mother and father when he was 3. Prevo’s father was in a drunken rage and threatened to kill the boy to get back at the mother.

She retreated, dragging young Jerry across the family bed to safety. He stills bears a scar on his chin from hitting the bedstead in the frantic escape effort.

His father, Prevo says, was abusive only when drunk. When sober, he taught Jerry how to hunt and fish and other fatherson things. During Prevo’s high school years, his father tempered his drinking somewhat and life was a little easier at home.

But when Prevo went away to college, the drinking began again and his father eventually deserted the family for a barmaid.

In 1976, the day he received a letter from his son in Alaska that spoke of how he still loved him despite the drinking, Prevo’s father hung himself in a shower stall.

Prevo speaks openly about the alcoholism, the abuse, the desertion and the suicide. But the arrival at his decision to reveal the final chapter of his father’s life, which he did to his congregation upon returning from his father’s funeral, was not easy.

“The biggest problem I had,” he says, “was the pride factor. I asked myself, “Are you going to share that with others? . . . Well, no one is perfect and sometimes people expect perfection in a pastor and get hurt . . . But it was an example that everything doesn’t always go my way, that people don’t always speak highly of me, that I have personal problems that everyone else has.”

His childhood experiences hardened many of his current beliefs, including total abstention from alcohol. [Ref #8]

What really strikes me here is the apparent assumption on Prevo’s part that his father’s alcoholism, abuse, desertion, suicide — somehow had something to do with Prevo‘s lack of perfection: as if the young Jerry Prevo was somehow at fault for his father‘s imperfections. For imperfections that, in fact, harmed Prevo’s mother & Prevo himself.

This isn’t just irony — although it is that, too. But mainly: his is a common reaction in people who have been abused as children: they take the responsibility for the parents’ abuse of them upon themselves. They blame themselves: something must be wrong with them for their parent to hurt them so.

And then, all too often, unless someone helps them to learn differently, they grow up to pass that belief on, in word & in deed: the cycle of violence. Some of them even teach that it’s what God wants.

What a horrible teaching. What a horrible God. But this is the God Jerry Prevo, as much as James Dobson, calls upon us to believe in.

Sorry, but a Big Bully Child Abuser in the Sky is not anyone I want to worship.

I have more to say about what I’m learning from Max Blumenthal’s book, but it’s way past midnight & time for sleep — so it’ll have to wait.

But before I shut my laptop & shut my eyes, I want to reiterate what the other folks have been saying: Max Blumenthal is coming to Anchorage this weekend, & you have a chance to see & hear him. Phil Munger has the full lowdown on where he’ll be. [Ref #9] And if you’ve got a spare dime, please consider donating using the PayPal link on Phil’s site to help cover costs of Mr. Blumenthal’s plane ticket up here!

References

9/21/09. “Max Blumenthal Returns to the Land of Queen Esther” by Phil Munger (Progressive Alaska).
9/18/09. “Now THAT’S what I call some down-home ‘indoctrination’!” by Linda Kellen Biegel (Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis).
9/21/09. “Frank Schaeffer on Evangelicals – Max Blumenthal in Anchorage Next Weekend to Tell us Personally” by Steve Aufrecht (What Do I Know?).
9/21/09. “Help Max Blumenthal receive the Alaska Bloggers bump” by Gryphen (Immoral Minority).
9/21/09. “Max Blumenthal is Comin’ to Town!” by AK Muckraker (The Mudflats).
Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party by Max Blumenthal (Nation Books, 2009).
10/18/1985. “Children won’t be paddled” by Kim Rich (Anchorage Daily News, p. C1).
10/30/1986. “No middle ground” by Andrew Perala (Anchorage Daily News, Lifestyles section p. 1).
9/18/09. “Max Blumenthal in Anchorage Next Week” by Phil Munger (Progressive Alaska).