Community Essay : Once Abused Himself, He Confronts an Abuser

An L.A. County report says 12 children died last year at the hands of their caretakers, despite warnings to authorities. In some cases, inattentive social workers were blamed, but in others the report could not specifically place fault.

The author of this article took personal action when he saw a child being beaten, but also parcels blame to urban society for too often failing to grapple with the issue of children being harmed within their families.

When an adult beats a child, all that is evil about the human condition crystallizes for any who would look at it.

Last week, I looked, and was overwhelmed with rage and remembered pain.

I was coming home from work, had just stepped out of my car and was strolling into my apartment complex when I heard a woman inside an apartment to my right screaming at the top of her lungs: “Who picked up the phone?” I looked in that direction. Through the open windows I saw the woman set down her portable phone and grab her little girl, who appeared to be about 11. The child was earnestly exclaiming that it wasn’t she who had picked up the phone, it was her younger sister, who looked to be 4 or 5.

I flashed back to my childhood and remembered how I would say the craziest things trying to avoid a beating. When I was 10, my mom was married to a man who for 2 1/2 years acted violently towards me, my brother and my mother.

At age 12, I stopped living with my mother and was taken in by my aunt and uncle, who lived in a better neighborhood. Where we had lived in downtown Los Angeles, child-beating was commonplace. If it wasn’t me, it was the kid down the hall. But I had not had any first-hand experience with this sort of thing since my youth, nearly 20 years ago.

The next thing I knew, the woman in the window was pummeling her little girl with straight rights. As the girl slid down the wall to the floor, her mother kicked her again and again. I’d estimate the duration of the hitting and kicking at about 20 seconds each.

I actually started to walk away afterward. Then a wave of anger swelled inside me.

I’ve always thought that people with bad tempers were just ignorant, that they used this “temper” thing as an excuse for not thinking before they acted. So the righteous rage I felt at that moment was startling to me, and I had to take a few steps to gather myself together.

When I was a kid and I knew I was going to be in trouble, i would stay down the street at the school shooting baskets until 9 or 10 at night. Staying away like that would sometimes keep me from getting slapped around because the man who hit me, Sammy, was a junkie. I didn’t understand the chemical machinations of heroin at the time but I knew that at night, Sammy often was a very sedate beast.

I turned back to the window. The woman was now pushing her daughter into her room. She slammed the door and fumed back to the living room, where she stared at the television, ignoring the trembling figure at her window.

“I’m calling the cops to come down here and have a talk with you.” I said.

“Do it,” she responded with swaggering bravado, carefully avoiding eye contact.

The odd thing is that, had she peered into my eyes, she would have found more pity than blame. What terribly evil things must have happened to her to cause her to act this way toward the child?

As a society we have no choice but to hold an individual responsible for his or her actions. Still, I don’t know if I have the right to judge this woman. I have not walked a mile in her shoes.

I felt so powerless because I live in a society that prefers to ignore and walk away from such atrocities.

I felt disappointment, too. The trend in America today is to ignore the poor in spirit, the meek, the lonely, the confused and the unwealthy, particularly if they’re on welfare. I was also disappointed because the comfort zone I had developed and maintained since I left my own brushes with violence behind was compromised.

Perhaps out of fear, the woman still wouldn’t look at me. After uttering my brief rebuke, I didn’t stand there for more than three seconds. Her younger daughter was standing between us, staring at me. Fear, confusion and innocence radiated from her gaze. I felt like Samson returning, helpless, from the barber.

I called the cops, told a couple of deputies what I’d seen and escorted them to the window. While I stood out of view they asked the woman if they could come around and speak to her about the discipline she had just used on her daughter. I went home with instructions from the two officers to call the Department of Children’s Services the following morning, which I did. They never called me back to say what happened.

I think I have a healthy perspective about my childhood. I mean to gain no pity from relating my personal experience, then or now. I share this story in the hope that someone else will benefit from hearing it, and with the intention of pushing at all of our comfort zones.