There’s no doubt that Suleman’s story is interesting, not only for its shock value, but because it opens up public debate on issues like parenting choices, child rearing, IVF, ethics, individual responsibility, and more.

I can’t help but wonder which horrific case of child abuse will open up the same kind of national debate.  How many tortured children, infant rapes, dead bodies, and light sentences will it take before the public demands substantial changes to child welfare, adoption, and foster care policies?

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services estimated that in 2006, out of 48 reporting states, 1376 children were killed by abusive parents, relatives, and caregivers. (They estimate 1530 nationwide). In Florida, which ranks among the worst states for child abuse and welfare, 52 of the 140 children killed in 2006 had prior contact with “family preservation” (DCF) services.

Those are the children that died. 885,245 more were known to be victims of abuse in 2006 — a highly conservative estimate since many cases go unreported.

I’ve expressed my belief that child welfare agencies need a drastic overhaul before.   It is unconscionable to me that an advanced society still views children as chattel, and confers what amounts to child ownership on the basis of DNA.

“Preservation of the family” methods, such as anger management or parenting classes for abusive parents, largely fail.  The mentality of violent parents is not born of short-term frustrations.  Even though perpetrators may place the blame on any number of stressors, from job loss to drug use, the essential fact is that the ability to choke, beat, stab, burn, rape or poison another person, particularly a child, doesn’t come from stress, or even from mere ignorance, but from an ingrained mental or character defect.  Stress or lack of education does not cause people to throw helpless infants against the wall or immerse them in scalding water.  If this were the case, humankind would not have gotten as far as it is now.

There have always been violent people in society, and unfortunately they have never seemed to lack for partners.  One of the most appalling trends in child abuse has been pedicide caused by the live-in boyfriends of mothers. In many cases, women are choosing to live with men they’ve known only a brief time, and entrusting these men to care for their children.

Haleigh Marie Cain is only one of the many children brutalized by their mother’s boyfriend.   Haleigh died from massive injuries at the hands of Dennis Creamer, who was angered by Haleigh’s request for juice and cookies before bedtime.

A course in anger management or proper parenting is unlikely to change men like Creamer, or people like Kimberly Ann Trenor and Royce Zeigler, whose all day torture session of two year-old Riley Sawyers resulted in her death.

While America holds fast to the notion of parenting as a right rather than a privilege, it has yet to provide a national Bill of Rights for its most vulnerable citizens.  Individual states such as New Jersey, which recently introduced such a bill, come under fire primarily from conservative religious groups such as The Eagle Forum, which believes that giving rights to children “undermine(s) the sacred role of parental rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children“. The tone of dissent borders on hysteria that the State will interfere with the “rights” of parents to rear, educate, and control their children as they please, particularly when it comes to home-schooling.

One of the fundamental rights of children should be a well-rounded, quality education.  While thousands of homeschooling parents immerse themselves in providing this, and ensure that their children have varied academic as well as social opportunities, others are sorely unqualified, largely unmonitored, and use homeschooling as a way to control and isolate their children, rather than to enrich their experiences.

While many would disagree with the State of California, which recently upheld a law stating that homeschooling teachers must be credentialed, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect that parents who wish to teach at home show some qualification outside of a DNA relationship to do so.  Even the children-as-chattel mindset cannot do away with the fact that eventually children become adults.  There is no recourse for poorly educated, overly-sheltered children when they enter the world of adult work and responsibilities — if they enter the world at large at all.

Homeschooled children from religious cults, like those from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas, are taught to fear the world outside of their sect. Most never attend school at all, and what little education they receive is from under-educated parents whose main concern is the indoctrination of their children into a set of cult beliefs and behaviors.

The call of neo-conservative religious groups to hold the rights of parents as “sacred” while denying children their own set of rights is transparent.  They want exclusive dominion over their offspring regardless of what society may deem harmful or contrary to the best interests of children.

Unfortunately, the rights of parents are largely put above the almost non-existent rights of children. Thousands of children spend years in the limbo of foster care, unable to be adopted into loving families, while abusive, neglectful, and otherwise unfit birth parents hold onto their legal parental rights.  Thousands more live unmonitored with people who have previously been convicted of violent crime such as rape, murder, assault, molestation, or child abuse.  Under present laws, custodial parents may live with whom they please, and non-custodial parents don’t even have the right to demand a background check on those who will be involved in the day-to-day parenting of their children.

Social services for children is a nightmare of red tape, inefficiency, and outdated, provincial policies.  Who was watching Donald Medsker, who was 26 years old in 1989 when he was granted custody of his 10 year-old half-sister?  He started sexually abusing her right away, making her quit school when she became pregnant at age 14.  Over the next 20 years Medsker’s sister, indoctrinated by him to believe that their relationship was normal, gave birth to six more children, two of whom were put up for adoption. Where were the social service follow-ups and the truant officers? How did a 10 year old child fall so completely through the cracks?  Was Medsker examined and found to be the best parenting choice or was this, again, a case where a DNA relationship outweighed consideration of the child’s best interests?

America could do so much more to prevent child abuse.  We could launch more comprehensive education and support programs for parents.  Schools could demand yearly physical exams as well as immunization records.  We could make it against the law for known violent offenders to live with children, at least without monitoring, and we could do much more for children living in isolation, such as those born into religious cults.  We could certainly rewrite the “preservation of family” standard that returns children to abusive homes.

However, as long as children are viewed as chattel, and a parent’s rights lawfully outweigh those of a child’s, we won’t.  We’ll just continue to be outraged — in the most empty way — because we’re not really willing or ready to give children a set of rights that would help ensure their dignity, education, or safety.

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I feel like I should give some disclaimer to this piece, some explanation of why, not only because the topic is tough, but also because it’s become a cliche.  Writers, film makers, and students alike have been steered away from the topic of child abuse — it’s been done, the subject is stale, and every story that could be told has been told.

Yet, when I wrote the first version of Cousteau’s Daughter as a teenager, I didn’t care about any of these things.  I was just a girl who had been sent to California with an ex-babysitter and her husband, who spent the summer molesting and threatening me.  That experience was followed by being raped by a seventeen year old boy and a nineteen year old man.  There was no one I felt I could turn to, so I went where it had become natural for me to go — to the world of words, where I could spill my secrets, cleanse my spirit, and maybe make some sense of a world that, to me, was frightening and unpredictable. 

I have since eclipsed the experiences of my childhood, but have found that the responses to my writing about it range from sympathy to disgust.  There are those who, in their compassion, wish to offer some comfort to the child from long ago, or the woman who carries the memories.  Others find something revolting in the telling of the story, believing it signifies a propensity for being stuck in the past, an inability to “get over it”,  or even the making of “excuses” for this or that failure as an adult.  A few have even preached the gospel of forgiveness to me, as if I had the obligation to heal by way of acceptance, or by viewing my experiences as some sort of sideways, God-given blessing.

I appreciate the compassion given the child, but at the same time wish people to know that for the woman, the pain from events that happened almost thirty years ago is distant.  I hesitate to use the word “healed” because I’m not sure what it means in this context.  I don’t know who I might have been or how I may have felt had I not gone through this particular pain as a child.  No experience, much less one that is traumatic, gets to sit outside the tapestry of one’s life, where all things fuse together to create character and personality.  My way of “getting over it” has always been to tell the stories, my own and and those of other children — even in times of resistance.  As for forgiveness, I have none for those who would lay a violent hand upon children, no matter what their backstory may be.  There is no abuse I would ever consider a blessing, no matter what poetic justice might follow.

All that said, Cousteau’s Daughter is still an important piece to me, not because it’s personally cathartic any longer, but because it was written so close to the events.  It is a child’s story, written by a child who, even in pain and turmoil, loved poetry and words, the oceanic world of Jacques Cousteau, and Lucky Charms cereal.

Some of the phrasing was cleaned up as I got older, but not much.  All the elements, including the length, have remained intact.  The length, as well as the subject matter, prevented this piece from being published in literary magazines, but I always wondered if it wouldn’t work better as a visual piece.  A while ago, I put out the call for a videographer on this site, and Elaine Charbonneau stepped up to make it happen.  I thank her for her patience, her care, and the hours she gave to this project.  My friend, artist and photographer Linda Woods, saw my vision even better than I did, and provided photographs to tell the tale.  The only thing lacking was a professional narrator, but I thank my local radio station, KQSP-AM, for allowing me to use their studio.

Stop it Now! is an organization which has done much to bring attention to the issue of child abuse, and I am happy to dedicate this video to them, as well as to all of those who have had to grow up too soon.  The child in me also holds onto some scant hope that someone who is thinking of molesting might watch this, and seek help before they act.  The sexual invasion of a child is not just a physical act, but one that causes long-term emotional devastation.

Does it matter?  Is one more tale of child abuse even relevant?  I don’t know.  I only know that the story of Cousteau’s Daughter has long been in my heart to tell — and now it’s been told.

If it’s relevant to you, or others you may know, please share it.  And please do visit the Stop it Now! website to learn more about what you can do to help prevent child abuse.

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