A Home : A Family : A Prison : Confinement and abuse shattered their childhoods. Now there is evidence their lives can be made whole again.

From the age of 3, Donna’s childhood was solitary confinement in a cobwebbed cupboard beneath the stairs. When she was allowed out, it was for sex with her father, her grandfather and three uncles. Rose is 13. Over a period of 10 years, for weeks at a time, her parents kept her locked in a closet on a fetid bed of cockroaches, fast-food wrappers and her own feces. When found by police, her front teeth had been broken out and she had the height and weight of a 7-year-old. She gave head lice to the first county worker who hugged her.

Patricia’s prisons included an attic, a foot locker and, on one particular day each year, the family’s cabin in the mountains. There, her father bound the 10-year-old to a kitchen table with duct tape. Then he dropped spiders on her face and raped her.

“He liked doing that on Father’s Day,” Patricia remembers. “It was his special time.”

These are, or were, America’s littlest prisoners.

Most, but not all, survive their captivity. A majority grows painfully--fragmented, depressed, listless for life--and try numbing their childhood memories and adult hurt with alcohol, drugs and, finally, suicide.

These days, however, the horror appears to be lessening. New clinical studies by pediatricians at Vanderbilt University Medical School and psychologists at Yale and the University of Minnesota are probing deeper into the full adult effects of child abuse.

One result is a revelation: that not all abused children will develop into psychotic, abusive adults.

“Full recovery is no longer an impossibility,” declares psychotherapist Joyce Snyder, who will chair a UCLA Extension seminar Saturday program for adult survivors of abusive and confining families.

So far, no agency has counted the captives among the reported 2.5 million children abused annually in this country. What is known is that youngsters in parental captivity were among the 1,200 children who died in abuse cases last year. In Los Angeles, an average of one child was killed by its parents each week--a rate second only to New York.

Public knowledge of these cases is generally confined to brief newspaper stories of the child’s discovery and the later sentencing of the parents for child abuse.

But there is life beyond the cage--even though for most it is stunted.

“Imprisonment as a child . . . destroys your ability to be alone as an adult,” explains psychologist Susan Byers. Her caseload at the Community Psychiatric Center in Santa Ana includes adult survivors of child abuse and imprisonment. “You (the victim) are constantly anticipating the door will open, that there will be more abuse . . . so whenever you are alone, you are in an anxiety place.” (Overall, psychiatrists say, children’s horrifying recollections are accurate.)

An inability to trust others also precludes good friendships and solid marriages.

The abused are further inclined to eating disorders and self-mutilation. Susan, now 17 and the legal charge of Manhattan Beach psychologist Cheryl Kent, has poured hot wax in her ears.

“Many times, if she has a cut, she will put things in the cut to keep it open and make it worse,” Kent says of Susan, who was held prisoner by a cult that used her for child prostitution.

“She feels that she needs to have pain inflicted on her for punishment for what she did,” Kent says.

Kent believes the teen-ager could be trying to gain control over pain, so it is no longer something being inflicted by others. Continues Kent: “Some people that you talk to . . . are actually able to identify a buildup of anxiety, and the only thing that relives that is for them to abuse themselves in some way.”

“With a woman (who has been abused), it is destruction to self; with a male, it is destruction to others,” notes Mel Osburn, a licensed family and child counselor and hypnotherapist. “A woman will seek treatment. Men act out their abuse and wind up in jail.”

For both sexes, dissociation--the development of several “ego states,” or multiple personalities--is common.

“While the personality is being formed, usually between the ages of zero and 5, the abuse starts to take place,” says Gary Zager, a counselor and clinical director of the Casa Youth Shelter in Los Alamitos. “The child then invents a play, or fantasy, personality to suffer the abuse. So, ‘It’s not me suffering the abuse, but the fantasy figure.’ ”

The personalities may duel for control. Some may remain dormant. One may take drugs, while another remains clean. One may seek a life of peace, while another fights therapy. The aim of the treatment is integration of all the personalities.

Patricia’s mind and life are still being reconstructed. Her father first crammed her into a footlocker when she was 3. Now, at 33, there are 22 personalities to unscramble and integrate.

One of the personalities, “Sharon,” giggles a lot. “Stephanie” likes dancing. When Patricia refers to events in her life, she oftens says they happened to “us.”

“ ‘Barbara’ works and does most of the day’s business,” Patricia states. “Then there is ‘Ellen,’ who is always depressed; ‘Jennie,’ who is not very good because she’s too young and screws up a lot and gets us into trouble. . . .”

Patricia’s therapist, who requested anonymity for herself and a pseudonym for her patient, says such massive dissociation is rooted squarely in the abuse. So are all of Patricia’s other problems: Five marriages. Spousal batterings. Three children, now in foster homes. Twelve years of anorexia. One year in a psychiatric hospital.

No one, says Patricia, could have predicted any of this from the outward appearances of her childhood.

The family lived in an affluent Florida suburb. Mother was an educator. Father was a personnel executive and mayor of their small town.

“We had all the makings,” Patricia recalls. “Two brothers and a sister, a dog and a bird and a cat, and a three-bedroom home with a three-car garage and all the stuff you’re supposed to have. But my father was crazy.”

The abuse lasted 11 years. Whenever Patricia refused her father’s advances, she was forced into the attic, a hall closet or the foot locker.

She does not know how long she was held captive. “I knew there would be periods that were hotter than others, so days and nights did pass,” she says. That’s when she began dissociating.

“I would pass out (in the locker) and fall asleep in there,” she recalls. “I’d wake up, and I’d still be in there. I remember that my dad would come and take me out because my mother was coming home. I’d come out, I’d be all cramped up, and it would be real hard to straighten up.”

Her mother was no ally. She was estranged from her husband and remote with the children. Patricia now recognizes it as denial.

“When I got older, about 12, I told my mother (about the abuse),” she says. “She said, ‘What you are telling me is that you are having an affair with my husband.’ They responded by nailing the windows of my bedroom shut, reversing the lock on the door and locking me in when I got home from school.”

The cabin, says Patricia, was the worst. Her memory of that remains a horrible stumble. She summons “Stephanie” to recall the moments. Her eyes widen and are strangely still.

“I’m getting these images. The tape. He would bind me with the tape, the silver tape. I can smell it right now. I can see the table, the big wooden table sitting there, and being taped up and laying on the table.

“Then he would tape the rope between the table and my hands . . . um . . . tie the rope on the table leg . . . excuse me. . . .”

Her therapist intervenes. Patricia is told to take deep breaths. These are only memories, the therapist says, and they cannot hurt you. We will put them back in their box where all memories, good or bad, belong.

“Stephanie” leaves. Patricia returns.

Calmer now, Patricia says her prison sentence ended when the physical abuse went too far. She went to school with a broken jaw and a fractured cheek. A teacher called police.

There was an investigation. But she says her father, the mayor, had enough clout to blame the accusations on an emotionally disturbed daughter. He was not prosecuted.

Patricia became an incorrigible runaway. Two days after her 16th birthday she ran away for the last time and married a bus driver.

He was an alcoholic who kept her under house arrest for months. A later husband tied her to a chair and beat her. After another marriage, Patricia came to California in 1988, married a fourth man, and this one tried to kill her and cash in on a $500,000 life insurance policy.

Re-creating pain and imprisonment through marriage, says Patricia’s therapist, is a standard pattern among the abused. Last year police and the courts brought an uneasy comfort to Patricia’s life. Police arrested her husband, he went to jail for spousal battering, and they divorced.

Patricia has been ordered into therapy by the court and must take parenting classes. She has found a job and a house. Six weeks ago she found her fifth husband.

It may or may not be a wise choice. Her therapist doesn’t know if this new man has the unconditional patience, understanding and love to be married to a patient.

Patricia doesn’t know either. She does recognize this husband as “a rescuer, a co-dependent.”

But so far, it seems to be working. The husband is sharing the therapy and reading books on multiple personalities. Patricia’s stomach ulcers are healing. Her anxiety attacks continue, but they no longer bring vomiting.

Medication is minimal. Soon Patricia may be able to shop for her own clothes, visit a mall alone and trust the strangers, particularly men, who might serve her.

She still hates the smell of beer, roast beef, perspiration and fabric softener. They were her father’s smells. Problems remain with hot, close places, especially elevators.

They return her to the foot locker.

Cruelty to children is a cardinal crime. Lee Blackwell, a psychologist with UCLA’s Sexual Disorders Clinic, believes it is worse than murder because the torture is chronic.

“It takes much more cruelty, more malice, to sustain severe abuse over time than it does to all of a sudden momentarily feel like killing somebody, losing control and squeezing a trigger,” he says. “This (abuse) is like beating them to death every day.”

Moreover, Blackwell adds, the psyche of a child imprisoned in a closet is probably brutalized even more than those of adults who survived Nazi death camps. Adults at Dachau had love, understanding and human concerns in their lives before imprisonment, he explains, adding: “Confinement and torture was not their sole identity. But the child has no such framework.”

Neither did Donna. Her first memory of a Pennsylvania childhood was being locked under the stairs for minor disobediences. For Donna, one of 13 children of alcoholic parents, it meant days--then ultimately 12 years--of imprisonment, incest and a vile torture: Her father slit her vagina with a razor blade for easier penetration.

“I remember being slung under the stairs,” Donna says. “There was a light bulb, but if I did something really ugly, like talking back to my mom, they’d take the bulb out.

“It was real scary not knowing what was around me, and being afraid of bugs. Then I’d hear voices, and I’d think they were evil spirits. They’d say they want to tear the walls down or bust open the door. Then I realized it was me talking to myself.”

Her father, a coal miner, threatened to kill her if she ran away. So did her mother. So Donna waited until she was 16, fled the home and was married with children at 18.

Her first husband ended their arguments by locking her in a closet. Her second, an invalid, beat her with armrests he removed from his wheelchair. And in between Donna traveled the country as a prostitute, sometimes working in Nevada’s legal brothels, always taking the children with her.

Two years ago, at 41, she left her second husband and moved to Los Angeles. Prostitution was in her past. She became a nursing aide. Life was improving.

But something was still very, very wrong.

Chicken tasted good one day, distasteful the next. One day she quit her job. The next day she couldn’t remember why.

“Then I started seeing images in a mirror and it wasn’t me,” Donna says.

A friend referred her to a therapist. The diagnosis was post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of childhood abuse. Her therapist also has identified multiple personalities.

Donna says her life is easier after 18 months of therapy. The personalities are integrating, and she has returned to work. She is back in school and wants to become a registered nurse working with “mentally ill adults because, God knows, I’m one person who really knows where they’re coming from.”

Still, there are echoes. Donna says she will never lose one memory of her childhood in darkness.

“I used to sit under those stairs and cry and pray that someday this would all end,” she says. “Then I’d sing to myself, ‘Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, Daddy’s going to buy you a mockingbird. . . .’ ”

But she is determined to shut down the past with a simple credo: “Before, I was a survivor. Now I want to live.”

Even as generation follows generation into child abuse, it is not easy to understand parents subjecting their own to soul-breaking confinement.

Psychologist Kent considers them “psychopaths with no feeling for other people.” Others believe inhuman parents regard children as toys, or punching bags for releasing their own pain and frustrations.

Some single parents will use a closet, a crib or a cellar as a baby-sitter, confining a child so they can go to work.

“I have one woman in my caseload right now who was locked in the basement daily,” says UCLA’s Blackwell. “Her mother would lock her in there and take her out for meals. It was a way for her mother to keep her from getting underfoot. This went on for probably the first six years of her childhood.”

But he has seen other prisoners where the motivation went far beyond nuisance control.

“That’s where some kind of abuse got out of hand and they (parents) needed to protect themselves from exposure,” Blackwell says. “So they kept the child there . . . to prevent the child from running away, to prevent the child from telling.”

Darlwin Carlisle’s mother was a drug addict, and Darlwin was her imposition. So the last time the mother left their crumbling brick home, she left her 9-year-old daughter padlocked in an attic bedroom. It was January and freezing in Gary, Ind.

Three days later a construction worker came to board up the foreclosed house. He found Darlwin curled in the fetal position, crying. At Chicago’s Wyler Children’s Hospital, doctors found frostbite in both feet and gangrene in several toes. Darlwin’s legs were amputated below the knees.

Her mother was located by police, went on trial and is in prison for child neglect.

Darlwin was fitted with artificial limbs and became a celebrity to a sympathetic nation. There were 6,000 telephone calls a day, enough toys to fill two hospital rooms and, eventually, visits and photographs with Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby.

Now, Darlwin is 13 and living with her great-grandmother. She runs and jumps on replacement legs and her life is rap music, pepperoni pizza and being an honor-roll student. Darlwin has forgiven to the point of visiting her mother in prison.

Much more important, she survives as an apparent model of the perfect recovery.

Former nurses and case workers say a full combination is working: a supportive environment; personal successes; love and therapy. Her great-grandmother, now her legal guardian, says the teen-ager is strong and will make it.

Darlwin is still too young to address future fears. She has only just learned to handle the past.

“I don’t like to think about it,” she says. “I’m glad it’s behind me.”

For 13-year-old Rose, however, the past remains too close.

Last October Rose Marie Sauceda was discovered in a filthy 4-by-5-foot closet. She was wearing only an oversized sweat suit drenched in her own urine. Her bruises and broken teeth were from her father’s blows.

“Funny, but her first response was to run to her father, then into the living room to check the mother, I guess because that was the other familiar face,” said San Bernardino police Cpl. Steve Filson.

The parents, who pleaded guilty to charges of child endangerment causing great bodily injury, are in prison now. Joseph Sauceda, 34, will be there for eight years, his 32-year-old wife, Sandra, for five.

Rose is now in a foster home (as are her six brothers and sisters). Yet in no child imprisonment case is that the final resolution.

“We just don’t know what is going to happen to children we are trying to help in therapy,” notes Pat Hare, a psychologist and a San Bernardino juvenile justice commissioner familiar with the Sauceda case. “I say ‘trying to help,’ because which one of us really knows whether or not this kind of therapy we are giving is really going to be what this child needs?”

Other counselors say Rose is luckier than most. Although imprisoned and physically abused, there was no evidence of sexual abuse. In therapy, the teen-ager has not displayed any signs of multiple personalities.

So Hare says she has a chance: “With psychotherapy, with the loving care of adults, by working through and identifying what happened during her confinement . . . the prognosis at this stage is good.”

Rose is taking dance, aerobic and modeling classes to help a stunted physique. She has learned to read and write and is progressing rapidly in school.

And Rose is also learning to be a little girl.

Filson and Marilyn Radcliffe, a victim advocate with the San Bernardino County attorney’s office, call her Angel. They have taken her to Disneyland. She has ridden horses and seen jugglers at the Renaissance Faire and fed ducks in a lake for the first time in her life.

Radcliffe says her relationship with Rose has “crossed the line as far as getting involved with a client.” But, Radcliffe continues, “she is giving me far more than I am giving her. You have to be moved by her appreciation of little things and seeing life for the first time. This neat little kid has never had anything except the closet. . . . Even going to the dry-cleaners is an experience for her.”

So is eating out. On a recent lunch date, Rose asked to be taken to Baker’s Square. Radcliffe asked how she knew about the restaurant.

“She told me that sometimes her family of seven kids would go to Baker’s. Everybody would eat but Angel (who was not allowed to eat),” Radcliffe says. “She just wanted to go there and be able to eat. It just broke my heart.”

Where to Get Help More than $20 million in state money is channeled annually through the Child Abuse Prevention, Intervention and Treatment (CAPIT) program to clinics and crisis centers throughout California. To report a case of child abuse in Southern California, or to locate low-cost or no-cost treatment agencies for survivors and their families, contact your county social services department:

* Los Angeles Department of Social Services, Department of Children’s Services. (800) 540-4000.

* Orange County Social Services Agency, Child Protective Services. (714) 834-5353.

* San Bernardino Department of Public Social Services, Child Protective Services. (714) 383-2121 during business hours, (714) 387-5373 after business, on weekends and holidays.

* Riverside Department of Public Social Services, Office of Child Protective Services. (800) 442-4918.

* San Diego Department of Social Services, Child Abuse Protective Services. (800) 344-6000.

* Ventura Public Social Services Agency, Children’s Services Department. (805) 654-3451 during the day, (805) 654-3200 after business hours, on weekends and holidays.