When Studies Don’t Sway, Bring On the Victims : Congress: Even the most sensitive committee members become numbed by statistics. Gripping, real-life stories of hardship are tougher to forget.

Peggy Adams is an expert in rearing children and pulling together ends that don’t quite meet. Hunger is no stranger in her household.

“I have seen my children’s bodies stop growing like they should, and I pray it’s not their brains as well,” Adams said earlier this year at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on federal food and nutrition programs.

It was an emotional moment.

“These senators were glued to their chairs and listening to every word intently,” Jeff Coleman, a senior income analyst for the committee, said later. “You could see on the spot that people were being affected. The questions they asked were very, very thoughtful.”

Capitol Hill hearings are often characterized by the relentless recitation of government statistics, the polite drone of think tank researchers, the familiar arguments of professional lobbyists.

Even the most sensitive lawmakers can become numbed. That’s when it’s time to bring on the victims.

They’re the people who have lost jobs and homes, gone hungry and suffered illness, endured beatings and lived with disabilities. They’ve been scarred by foster care, harassed at the office and traumatized by illegal abortions.

“They’re very useful because they’re real. They take all the studies and statistics and make them personal,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) of California, whose Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families showcases victims of everything from domestic violence to gang warfare.

Although some may relive their agonies and humiliations to no avail, the consensus is that any cause is strengthened by the testimony of an ordinary person with no ax to grind.

Advocacy and research groups “certainly have a place and a role,” said Judith Lichtman, president of the Women’s Legal Defense Fund. “But very often real-world hardships are more persuasive.”

Lichtman’s group led the fight for a bill guaranteeing unpaid, job-protected leave for employees needed at home.

Despite the threat of a presidential veto, Congress recently passed the job-leave bill after three years of hearings and a parade of people forced out of their jobs by births, adoptions or medical emergencies. (Bush carried out his threat; Congress is not expected to override it.)

One man testified that he was assigned to a night shift at a doughnut bakery although he had told his boss he had to drive his infant daughter to a Washington hospital that night. She was scheduled for heart surgery the next day. “I am no hero,” said David Wilt of York, Pa. “I am just a working man who was fired because he loved his kids.”

A woman from Charleston, S.C., claimed that she was assured she could return to her job at a retail store after a doctor-ordered medical leave during a difficult pregnancy. But when she returned six weeks after having the baby, she said she was told no jobs were available. “It hurt,” said Liberia Johnson. “My family needed the income.”

Dexter Manley, a defensive lineman for the Washington Redskins at the time, was asked last year to discuss his learning disability. When he realized that he could not read his prepared statement, he broke down and cried before a battery of television cameras. Manley was later suspended from professional football for using drugs.

At hearings on a bill expanding federal child-care programs, a bereaved couple haltingly recalled the death of their child in unlicensed day care and a police officer told of finding two children, left alone by a mother desperate to hold onto her job, dead inside a dryer.

Senators heard unusually graphic testimony this year at a hearing on an abortion-rights bill. One member of the audience fainted as witnesses described their illegal abortions and self-induced miscarriages.

Aides who orchestrate these hearings say politicians find it difficult to be argumentative or ideological when a victim is sitting in front of them.

If a woman says she thwarted the law and risked her health to get an illegal abortion, “that decision-making process is something that’s hard to second-guess,” said Kelly Signs, an aide to Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio).

Diane Shust, an aide to Congressman Miller, said one House member tried to take on a witness at a hearing on the “sandwich generation”--people who have to rear kids and care for ailing parents at the same time--and got nowhere.

“She just fired back at him. She slashed his theories to shreds,” Shust recalled. “There was no way he could counter. There was the expert sitting in front of him.”

The perfect victim--someone who is genuine, articulate and sympathetic--often surfaces in a newspaper story, a letter to a lawmaker or a list kept by an advocacy group.

Signs, who organized the Senate abortion-rights hearing, said all the witnesses who told personal stories had already done so at least once before in a public forum. She said it is hard to find women willing to talk about long-ago abortions.

“They were not legal and were done under secretive conditions. There may be members of their family who don’t know about it,” Signs said.

Most advocacy groups can readily point congressional aides toward people who have experienced the problem they want to illuminate. And some go even further. The Maryland Food Committee of Baltimore has developed a “talent pool” of sorts--a stable of eloquent poor people regularly dispatched to press conferences, meetings and hearings.

Coleman said the Baltimore group came up with six or seven possible witnesses for the Senate hunger hearing in February. The two chosen were Adams, a white woman with nine children, and Mary Tamper, a black woman with two children.

Adams said her family lost its income when she separated from her husband, who made $55,000 a year as an engineer. He was jailed on child-abuse charges. Tamper’s husband, whose annual salary was $30,000, died of leukemia. She said she had to give up her teacher’s aide job and move the family in with her mother.

Coleman said the two women, forced to rely on a variety of federal programs to feed their kids, were picked with an eye toward breaking stereotypes.

“Both had been middle class,” he said. “We felt that was a strong message. There are so many myths about who poor people are--minorities with lots and lots of kids, on welfare and food stamps for years. We felt it was important not to perpetuate those myths.”

From Coleman’s viewpoint, the hearing was a success. He said its major recommendations--to expand food stamps and a nutrition program for mothers and children--won the support of both Chairman Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.) and Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), the senior GOP member of the panel. The extra money may be added to the 1990 farm bill.

Lichtman said victim witnesses also helped secure passage of a 1988 fair housing law.

When women described being denied housing because they had kids, “that helped make the case about why we needed to prohibit discrimination against families with children,” Lichtman said.

She said the same dynamics were at work when the Voting Rights Act was extended in 1982. “People were brought in from Alabama and Georgia and talked about what it was like to be disenfranchised or never enfranchised,” Lichtman said. “That helped get the law reauthorized.”

Even the strongest testimony, however, does not always convert lawmakers or alter the shape of public policy.

For example, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), a strong abortion foe, heartened some in the audience at the wrenching abortion-rights hearing by saying he was “rapidly coming to the conclusion that we have to do more with family planning.” But he still opposes a long-sought renewal of the federal grant program for family planning groups, because he believes they are too enmeshed in providing abortion counseling and services.