Near as I can tell, Hou-Lin Li stretched out his arm, reared back, and struck his 8-year-old daughter flush in the face with all the cruel might he could muster. His palm was open–the pictures show the thin red outlines of four fingers–so it could best be described as a slap.
This wasn’t Ingrid Bergman keeping Humphrey Bogart in line. This was a hell of a slap, and it must have hurt a little girl who didn’t dare slap back.
It left a mark on her face, and it wasn’t the only mark that a Chicago police officer spotted when he happened on Li and his daughter in a park last summer. She had been slapped, hard, on the face and neck and arms. And for that, Li and his wife, Luying Deng, were arrested and charged with domestic battery.
“That goes beyond appropriate discipline,” Cook County State’s Atty. Richard Devine said this week.
Devine was absolutely correct. That wasn’t appropriate discipline. That was child abuse.
So why did Devine get so much grief for prosecuting Li, so much grief that Devine backed down, made a plea bargain with Li and dropped charges against Li’s wife?
Because Li hit his own daughter instead of somebody else’s 8-year-old girl. And, yes, that makes me uneasy.
But it doesn’t shake my belief that Devine was wrong to prosecute Hou-Lin Li. Here’s why.
When newspapers write about child abuse, it is usually when a story has drama. When the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services makes a mistake and a child dies, we write about it. When 19 kids are found living in filth, we write about it. When a parent is unspeakably cruel to a child, we write about it.
What we don’t often write about are the DCFS success stories. If the Cook County state’s attorney had not attempted to prosecute Luying Deng and Hou-Lin Li, a prosecution that threatened to get them deported to China, we wouldn’t have written about it. And we would have missed a good story.
This was a child abuse case. The parents were caught mistreating their child, and the DCFS caseworkers and the state’s lawyers swooped in. They took the child to a shelter.
The caseworkers didn’t force the little girl to live with strangers in foster homes for six or eight or 10 years while the paperwork got shuffled around. She went back to her parents after a couple of weeks in the shelter.
The parents had to prove they weren’t going to batter their kid anymore. They had to get counseling on how to check their anger. They had to learn how to discipline their child without beating her. By all signs, they took this very, very seriously.
And after five months, DCFS and the courts were reasonably sure that the parents wouldn’t hurt her again. They closed the case. This was a success story.
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Now, in some ways this was an easy one. DCFS wasn’t dealing with some drug-addled mother who couldn’t cut through her PCP fog to figure out why it was wrong to let her boyfriend rape her daughter. These were well-educated parents, smart enough to figure out that a whole lot of people were telling them they couldn’t hit their daughter like that.
It’s good to see that DCFS, which is a much better place than it was a few years ago, can quickly and deftly handle this kind of case.
But the state’s attorney stepped in, and decided to lower the boom on Luying Deng and Hou-Lin Li. As Chinese immigrants, they faced deportation if they were convicted of a domestic battery charge.
It apparently didn’t dawn on prosecutors that deportation would amount to child abuse. You’re going to send an 8-year-old girl to a country where female fetuses are routinely aborted? A country where, in some villages, baby girls are killed because families prefer baby boys? A country where beating your child is considered appropriate discipline?
If Li slapped my child, I would want him to be locked up. You bet. So does that mean possession counts, that he gets away with it because it is his own child?
Not at all. Not because she is their child, but because they are her parents. The decision should have been guided on what was best for the little girl.
If Li slapped my child and he was convicted, locked up, deported, whatever, my child would still have her parents. If he did that to his own child–but he was no longer really a threat to his child–any punishment meted out on the father would have been punishment meted out on the child.
The people who got to know this family–the caseworkers, the public guardian’s lawyers–thought that would be a terrible mistake. Li loved his daughter, his daughter loved him, he admitted he had been wrong. A conviction would only serve to harm the little girl.
There’s something ironic in this. For years, one of the great criticisms of the caseworkers and lawyers in the child welfare system was that they always focused on the parents, instead of what was best for the children. They’d go easy on the parents, give them their kids back, and the kids would get hurt.
That’s the opposite of what happened here. The prosecutors were focused on the parents–focused on really thumping them in court–instead of what was best for the child.
The prosecutors were wrong, but it’s easy to see why they did what they did. All you have to do is look at the photographs of the red lines and blotches on the little girl’s face and neck and arms.