In Shaping Caring Society, We Can Pay Now or Pay Later

Surveys suggest the American public can’t get enough of the O.J. Simpson murder investigation. Count me in, too. I’ve read everything so far and have room for more.

But, just as a quiz, how interested were you in the front-page story Tuesday about the report that said abused kids are staying at the Orangewood Children’s Home much longer than those of 15 years ago?

Did you even read the story? Did you read that the home is overcrowded and the children there are suffering much worse problems than those of a decade ago?

I’m asking, not chastising.

My guess is that, like most people, your interest in that story was a fraction of your interest in the Simpson saga. And therein lies one of society’s great and lingering problems--we’re only interested in how things turn out, not how they start.

The people in social services know an ugly little truth--that many of tomorrow’s front-page crime and violence stories have already taken root.

As we all know, Simpson has been charged with killing his ex-wife, Nicole. The investigation already has raised the issue of whether stronger intervention in their earlier domestic problems may have prevented her death.

The Orangewood report deals with child abuse, but experts in the field say that, just as with domestic violence, early intervention can make a difference on child abusers, too.

The stakes are staggering, because Orange County reported 36,721 incidents of child abuse in 1993. As recently as 1990, the figure was 28,364.

Kathy McCarrell, executive director of the Child Abuse Prevention Center in Costa Mesa, said numerous studies indicate that prisons are overwhelmingly populated by adults abused as children.

She maintains that programs for early intervention and prevention have never been tried on a massive scale. “A certain percentage, and it would be difficult to say what percentage, would take that early intervention and make it something positive,” she said. “Some won’t, and that may have more to do with how bad the scarring was, mixed with their ability to overcome it.”

Her center matches volunteers with troubled families. The volunteers spend at least two hours a week with the family, for up to a year, in an effort to reverse the abusive behavior. Seventy families are involved now, and another 70 could easily be found if enough volunteers were available, she said.

Just as with child abuse, earlier and more meaningful intervention could slow the onslaught of domestic-violence cases, she said.

If authorities are correct about Simpson’s involvement, McCarrell said, his violent behavior may have been curbed had he been forced to attend group therapy or receive treatment.

Emphasizing that she wasn’t referring to Simpson specifically or commenting on his guilt or innocence, McCarrell said, “Kids who grow up seeing domestic violence are more likely to become perpetrators or victims (as adults). We’ve seen that generational cycle, so intervention in the spousal abuse cycle would certainly affect the next generation of spousal abuse.”

To social service professionals, the link between violent childhood experiences and adult behavior is so obvious as to sound tiresome to repeat.

Irene Briggs, a supervisor with the Orange County Child Abuse Registry, has repeated the mantra a thousand times, which makes the shortage of early intervention especially maddening to her.

“When you look at what it costs society to intervene afterward,” she says, referring to both child abuse and domestic violence, “it would have cost a lot less if there had been intervention earlier with families and with adults. We’re willing to spend a whole lot of money to build Orangewood and a whole lot of money to build prisons, but we could spend a whole lot less money and make real dramatic changes in families if we did prevention.”

And yet, she knows that isn’t jazzy enough to move society.

“The public doesn’t get it,” Briggs said. “Maybe they’ll start getting it now. I hope I live long enough to see it.”

Who knows whether prevention and early intervention will ever be glamorous enough to grab our attention. Maybe the terms or the concepts are just too starchy for mass consumption.

Who knows, maybe we’re content to wait for the screaming headlines from future front pages to remind us of our failings.