A Crucial Connection : How to bridge the language gap between hearing and deaf family members-- especially when the risk of abuse is so high? Local agencies think they have the answer: opening the lines of communication.

The worst thing about deafness is not the lack of hearing, but the inability to communicate.

“Being blind cuts you off from things (but) being deaf cuts you off from people,” Helen Keller, who was both, said a century ago.

Since then, much has changed. Actress Marlee Matlin and Miss America Heather Whitestone are just the best-known of the many deaf people who have overcome difficulties to achieve their goals. But still very real are the frustrations that occur when deaf children are born to hearing parents--or when hearing children are born to deaf parents.

In such cases, how can parents and child connect?

Unless a means of communication is quickly established, experts say, deaf children today are at greater risk than others of being abused or neglected. Not because they can’t hear, but because they lack something hearing people take for granted: the ability to express their feelings and thoughts, to understand what is happening around them. And to be understood.

About 90% of deaf children are born into families where everyone else can hear. In some of these families, there is emotional and economic stress, there are other siblings to care for--and there is little time for individual attention.

It is these deaf children, experts say, who are at greatest risk of being ignored, excluded or abused. Because such children communicate so poorly, abusers often rightly assume that their crimes will not be discovered.

Problems are no less daunting for deaf parents, 90% of whom give birth to children who can hear. In these families, too, the inability of parents to communicate with their children may lead to frustration--and sometimes to neglect or abuse.

For these and other compelling reasons, some local institutions that deal with child abuse have recently created special units to help families in which there is a deaf parent or child.

Three months ago, a special Deaf Unit was set up in the L.A. County Department of Children’s Services. All cases involving deaf parents or children will be handled by social workers who are also deaf and who are trained to deal with problems unique to deaf people.

Two courtrooms in the Los Angeles Dependency Court have also been set aside this year for cases involving abused or neglected deaf children. Judges, attorneys and other court personnel undergo training to better understand these children’s problems.

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The forerunner of all this was a Deaf Services program started in 1990 at Five Acres in Altadena, a nonprofit treatment center for abused and neglected children. The program offers therapy, in-home counseling, in-home parent-skill training, family communication assistance and aid in obtaining medical, social or other services.

“Typically, hearing parents don’t discover their child is deaf until the child should be learning to speak,” says Deaf Services Director Rick Mitchell, 37, a psychotherapist who specializes in abuse issues of deaf children. “Then there’s a period of grief. Next comes the confusion--what world should my child grow up in? The world of the hearing or the world of the deaf?”

To join the world of the hearing, children must learn to speak and to read lips. To join the world of the deaf, they must learn sign language.

The decision is crucial. But for parents suddenly propelled into a culture about which they know nothing, both options have daunting drawbacks.

“Most parents start out wanting their kids to join the hearing world--that is, to read lips and to speak. That is the only world the parents know,” Mitchell says.

They quickly learn that for toddlers who have never heard sounds, the effort to produce speech is slow and exhausting. First, children must understand that those mysterious lip movements people make are shaping sounds into words. Then they must learn to make those word-sounds with nothing to guide them, no way to imitate what they have never heard.

Mitchell says it can take months of patient training to teach a child to say a single word as simple as ball. It is “enormously difficult,” he says, for any deaf child to learn language, speech and lip-reading simultaneously, even under the best circumstances.

Whitestone, the first deaf Miss America, was blessed with a schoolteacher mother who spent thousands of hours teaching her to speak. Even so, she has said, it took her six years just to learn to pronounce her own last name.

Mitchell says another downside of choosing the oral method is that deaf children often wind up with ongoing developmental delays.

“There is a critical phase of development during which children learn language,” he says. “Deaf children can learn as quickly as hearing children if they use sign language. For example, they learn the word ball in about two minutes and go on to the next word. But with the oral method, the child gets stuck trying to pronounce the word and delays are inevitable.”

The other half of the oral equation--learning to read lips--is no less harrowing, Mitchell says. Dozens of words look exactly alike when spoken, even though they sound different and mean different things: Cat and hat . Mat and bat . Mama and Papa . No new taxes and Go to Texas. Imagine the problems trying to decipher sentences.

Mitchell says even the most proficient adult lip-readers catch only 50% of what is being said. They must intuit the rest.

The option of sign language begins to sound better. But parents and siblings must learn it too, Mitchell says. “You are then encouraging them to join the foreign world of the child.”

And even if they are able, he adds, the rest of the world will not oblige. How will the child ask the ice cream vendor for a vanilla cone with sprinkles?

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Given all these challenges, it is easy to see why deaf children are easy targets for abuse. Without committed parents and appropriate assistance, they cannot comprehend what is happening to them or around them, nor do they develop self-protective mechanisms or the simplest social skills. Their mere presence in an already dysfunctional family can cause added friction, frustration, confusion, guilt--any of which can trigger abuse.

Kristin Murphy, 25, is a counselor in the Deaf Services program at Five Acres. She goes into homes in which children have been abused or are at risk of abuse and “tries to break the cycle of violence.”

A recent case, she says, involved deaf parents with four children under age 7--all of whom could hear.

“The first couple of visits, I observe what is going on. I see no structure, no discipline, no communication. A toddler lights the gas stove and walks around with flaming paper. Another plays with knives and jumps on furniture.

“The parents are trying to deal with one child at a time, using sign language,” Murphy says. “But the kids don’t know how to sign back--except they’ve figured out how to ask for milk and crackers.

“The parents were hitting the kids because it is the only way they can impose order. That doesn’t work because the kids never got an explanation of why they were being hit. The mother can take the flaming paper away and hit the child, for example, but she has no way of explaining to him the dangers of playing with fire. They do not share a language. It is total chaos.”

Murphy, who cannot hear and uses sign language, says she suggested ways to punish the children without using force, advised the parents on how to relieve stress, and is working on improving communication within the household. “These parents and kids never had a conversation. They had no way to communicate with each other.”

Murphy says many deaf parents don’t want their hearing kids to learn sign language because they want them to join the hearing world.

“They tend to leave the radio and TV on all the time, so the children will learn. They invite relatives and friends over to converse with the kids. All that is fine. But there must be a relationship and communication between parent and child--which can (only) be accomplished by the children learning sign language.”

Murphy was 3 when she lost much of her hearing to spinal meningitis. Doctors recommended hearing aids and said she would be fine. But her hearing continued to worsen until, at 14, she became deaf.

“I was devastated. I knew no sign language and the hearing aids no longer helped.”

But she had already learned to talk and was learning to read lips. Murphy was “mainstreamed” through high school, struggling to stay with the hearing culture in which she had grown up. To survive, she tried to lip-read what her teachers said, then studied her friends’ notes at night. (“It is impossible to lip-read and take notes at the same time,” she explains. “Your eyes cannot be on two different places at once.”) At 17, she finally decided to learn sign language, registered at Cal State Northridge--and her life altered dramatically.

The university provides sign-language interpreters for deaf students. “I learned more in one semester at CSUN than I did in all four years of high school,” she says enthusiastically.

“It was the first time in my life that I knew everything that was going on. And for the first time in my life, I could understand 100% of everything said at the dinner table with my (deaf) friends. Growing up, I’d just accepted the fact that I would not understand 70% of what was said in my home and at school. I never knew there was a deaf world out there, a deaf culture of which I could be a part.”

Murphy, an energetic young woman who loves sports, is training her “hearing ear” dog, a German shepherd named Sierra, to tell her when the phone or doorbell rings, or when there’s a danger signal, such as a siren or someone breaking in.

“The dog alerts me to the noise and takes me to it. She even picks up my keys if they drop and I don’t know it. And most important, she can let me know when my baby cries.”

Murphy has no baby--yet. “I don’t even know who I’m going to marry.” But she’s planning ahead, she says with an optimistic smile.

“It would be nice if my child were born deaf,” she adds, because deaf parents with deaf children have comparatively few communication problems. The child learns sign language from parents at the same time and pace as a hearing child would learn to speak with hearing parents. “And the deaf culture is very rich, very satisfying,” Murphy says.

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Maria Banda, 21, is just beginning to learn about all that good stuff.

Born deaf into a family with seven children in Mexico, Banda was thought to be retarded because she didn’t learn to speak. She remembers a childhood of total isolation: “I talked to no one. Everybody made fun of me. I really thought I was the only person on Earth who couldn’t hear. I felt really alone,” she says.

She still shudders at the terror she used to feel awakening in the dark to an empty house. “They’d wait until I fell asleep, then all leave without telling me. They thought I was dumb and wouldn’t care. I wasn’t dumb; I just couldn’t hear.”

Her father brought her to the United States when Banda was 14. An aunt enrolled her in the deaf program at Alhambra High School, and “when I saw people talking with their hands I was shocked. I had no idea that was possible,” Banda says. She had never been to school and began by learning simple words, such as the names of animals, she says.

Eager to continue learning, she enrolled in summer school, where friends noticed that she cried a lot and never wanted to go home. She finally told one friend that she was being abused by a family member. The friend told a teacher, who called the Department of Children’s Services. Banda was placed in foster care with Jan and Don Harwick. It was love at first sight, says Jan Harwick, who was fluent in sign language because her mother couldn’t hear.

Since arriving at the Harwick home, Banda has received counseling at Five Acres, has graduated from high school and has just learned to drive. She works three days a week cleaning houses while going to school part-time. “I want much, much more education,” she says. “I want to go to college and everything.”

And she continues to live with the Harwicks because “we love her,” Jan Harwick says. “She is part of the family,” she says about Banda. “To this day, if I go out and she’s asleep, I leave a note. I remember how she used to wake up and cry and cry.”

Harwick has grown children of her own and has provided long-term foster care for deaf youngsters in the past few years.

“Communication is the key,” she says. “So many deaf people grow up angry because their parents never learned to talk to them. Too many parents say, ‘I don’t have the time to learn sign language.’ The deaf child interprets that to mean, ‘You don’t love me.’ ”

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For More Information . . .

If you are deaf or hard of hearing and would like assistance or information related to child abuse or family communication problems, call Five Acres Deaf Services program, (818) 798-6793 (voice) or (818) 798-9006 (TDD).

If you are interested in becoming a foster parent for a child who cannot hear and know sign language, call Five Acres at the above numbers.

To report child abuse, call Department of Children’s Services, (800) 540-4000 (voice) or (800) 272-6699 (TDD).