A paradox of child abuse is that it is better understood and more thoroughly studied than ever before, yet it seems to be an ever more intractable problem.
The number of child-abuse deaths is up, and prevention is elusive. Some experts talk about identifying problem families and getting to them early, but many just throw up their hands. The problem is like a boulder, constructed of virtually every social ill, that can only be chipped away at with scores of very expensive chisels.
Yet we know some things about child abuse that were only suspected decades ago. Among them: You have to shake a baby very hard to kill it, and such a thing happens often; bruises and brain scans can be read like texts to provide damning testimony at trials; juries are reluctant to convict mothers of killing their children, no matter the evidence.
Many of the people responsible for building that body of knowledge met in Chicago Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the first National Colloquium of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children.
In the tranquil, almost Zen-like Hotel Nikko, they talked serenely of some of the least peaceful acts imaginable.
More Top Picks Best Smart Speakers For Seniors
“We had statements that the father had sodomized the baby,” said a San Diego prosecutor-turned-judge, one of the leaders of a seminar on how to convict child abusers.
“We had a child that was stuffed in a box behind a sofa for being bad, and he suffocated,” a child psychiatrist from Los Angeles said during the discussion.
And makers of abuse “detection and documentation” devices advertised their wares via enlarged, closeup images of bruised flesh.
Such obscenity is what these people deal in every day. Sometimes the response is black humor: A lawyer at one point joked sardonically about a baby being dribbled like a basketball.
And sometimes frustration takes over. During a session on advances in medical identification of abuse, someone suggested what everyone in the field probably has mulled over at one time or another: licensing parents.
“Yes, a license to conceive,” mused one expert. “I’m ready to advocate it. I’ve seen enough.”
This conference, thought to be the most far-reaching yet on the topic, was not for the layperson. It was 600 lawyers, cops, social workers, doctors, academics and bureaucrats talking among and between themselves in 6-hour seminars. It was gory details and the trading of tips: How do you pick a jury that will convict a mother? How do you know when it’s safe to return a child to a once-abusive father?
It detailed some of the state of the art: aggressively prosecuting “permissive abusers,” those parents who let others hurt their children; scanning bodies with ultraviolet light for hidden bite marks, a clue to an abuser’s identity as distinctive as fingerprints; and developing panels of medical and law enforcement experts, child-death review teams, to ensure that a death is investigated aggressively and competently.
Missouri, for instance, passed a law requiring such a panel to investigate every death of a child under 15 years old. In 1992, the first year data was collected, the recorded number of child-abuse fatalities doubled, said program chief Gus H. Kolilis.
The quick increase suggests that many child deaths due to abuse had gone undetected and that many still do in less progressive states. It also suggests that some of the rise nationwide in child-abuse deaths-22 percent from 1985 to 1991-is a result of better reporting and awareness.
“Across the board, there’s increased reporting of abuse. Across the board, there seems to be inadequate resources to deal with the increased reports,” said Paul DerOhannesian, a prosecutor for Albany County, New York. “We don’t know what to do with all these cases we have.”
Chicago is a hotbed for child abuse in several ways. American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children and the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse have their headquarters here. Guidelines on how to autopsy children developed by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office are being propagated as a national model. And the social conditions through vast tracts of the city-where dirt-poor single mothers live in cramped conditions with little support-provide virtual incubators for child abuse.
Already this year in the Chicago area, 14 children have died of abuse. Last year, 60 children under age 15 were killed here, according to authorities, 28 of them abuse victims.
On Thursday, Illinois entered the vanguard of child-protection law.
Gov. Jim Edgar formally signed off on a bill, effective immediately, that places children’s rights first at every stage of Juvenile Court proceedings. It was written primarily in response to the hanging of a 3-year-old West Side boy two months ago.
The boy, Joseph Wallace, had been removed from and returned to custody of his mentally ill mother three times. She has been charged with killing him.
The new law, which also lets foster parents intervene in custody cases, replaces one that made reuniting families the priority.
Its instatement was applauded by many experts at the conference, though it was noted that in Florida, for instance, the pendulum is swinging back the other way, toward family preservation.
While some of the discussions at the colloquium focused on new ideas and tactics to combat child abuse and neglect, a seminar Saturday about when to return children to their parents from the foster care system pounded home the basics to a roomful of caseworkers and therapists: Be simple and direct when telling parents what they must do to get their kids back.
Diane DePanfilis, a University of Maryland researcher and panelist at the reunification seminar, said that too many social workers not only confuse their clients with jargon, they get confused themselves and think that it’s enough to send a father to parenting classes-a means to an end-instead of recognizing the true goal: telling him he must stop beating his kids.
In a Friday seminar, Bill Hammond, a consultant from McLean, Va., and a former South Carolina police officer, advocated an approach that focuses on cooperation.
He helps communities establish programs for missing, exploited and abused children in which all government departments and agencies-police, courts, school prosecutors, social services, medical and mental health officials-work together with their collective eye on what he called the bottom line: “protection of these children.”
Although it sounds fundamental, Hammond said his idea is a radical one, given the fiefdoms, bureaucracy and animosities that often exist within government.
“I refer to it as the `CIA syndrome,’ ” he said. ” `This information is confidential, and I’d love to share it with you, but if I share it, then I’d have to kill you.’
Hammond said that sharing data would greatly speed the resolution of cases of abused and missing children. Solving the worst cases faster enables workers to get to the less severe cases sooner.
Although he has spent more than two decades working in the field, Hammond, of the non-profit Public Administration Service consulting firm, cannot offer pat solutions to the problem.
“I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that we don’t give up.” he said.
Donna Shore-Forbes, named last month as the sole prosecutor for child abuse in her region of Elizabeth City, N.J., said, “I don’t know if we can stop it, but we might be able to stop it at an earlier stage,” before the abuse becomes fatal.
More Top Picks Best Chew Necklaces For Sensory Needs
She was listening as Dallas child abuse expert Police Lt. Bill Walsh told abuse professionals his technique for extracting confessions from child abusers.
“You’re asking them to tell you a deep, terrible secret,” he said.
The method includes what Walsh called “the sliding scale of criminal culpability”-persuading the accused to tell all because “there’s somebody worse than him.”
“If he had intercourse with his daughter, tell him, `You’re not as bad as this guy. He gave his daughter syphilis.’ If he gave his daughter syphilis, then tell him, `You’re not as bad as this guy. He got his daughter pregnant.’ “
Carole Jenny, director of the Child Advocacy and Protection Team at Children’s Hospital in Denver, conducted what amounted to a series of medical puzzlers that gave a sense of how much doctors need to know before they can pinpoint the source of some kinds of abuse.
She gave the audience of 30 people, most of them doctors, growth charts that tracked the height and weight of several children over time.
The reasons for what medicine calls failure to thrive were as odd as humankind. In one case, a child showed steady growth interrupted at odd intervals by sharp drops.
After visiting with the family, investigators found that the reason was, of all things, a rock band. The mother was a devoted follower of the Grateful Dead, and when she traveled to see the band’s concerts, she did not feed the child properly. The situation was solved, Jenny said, by seeing that other child care was in place at those times.
DerOhannessian, the Albany prosecutor, said charging people in cases of abuse by neglect is another area expected to burgeon in the next decade.
Prosecutors face special challenges in getting juries to convict child abusers, he said, for several reasons: a body often does not look abused; the case must often be proven through medical records; and the motive can remain unclear.
“In general there is a tremendous amount of denial,” he said. “While we abhor the abuse of children, we find it hard to believe.”