Suffer the Children : TURNING STONES: My Days and Nights With Children at Risk.<i> By Marc Parent (Harcourt Brace: $25, 366 pp.)</i>

Not too long ago, I watched a ponytailed cop approach the defense table in Los Angeles Juvenile Court, put his arm around a 15-year-old kid sitting there and wish him the best. The boy grinned back. Then the kid--arrested by this very same policeman a few weeks earlier for dealing crack and packing a pistol--left for a long stay in juvenile detention.

Now, what’s wrong with this picture? The boy, it seemed, was no ordinary junior felon. He had turned himself in, presented his cocaine and weapon to the cop and basically begged to be taken away. His parents had put him on the street to sell drugs, forcing him to carry a gun to prevent rip-offs. The young man was their main source of income for more than a year. He didn’t go to school, he could barely read, but he was a good, decent kid who just couldn’t take it anymore--the kind of child who, in this cop’s way of thinking, should have been treated as a victim of abuse, not as a criminal.

But when the policeman tried to get the child welfare authorities interested, they said no, the kid was a lawbreaker, not a victim. And the district attorney wasn’t interested in prosecuting the parents--the best evidence went against the kid, not the adults. In the end, all the cop could do was read him his rights, then haul him to jail. That was the best the system had to offer this child. How is it that this system we’ve created to protect kids in danger manages to let so many slip through the cracks? Why are children left to suffer and die at the hands of crazed or addicted or violent parents well-known to authorities? And in the rare instances when such tragedies touch the public consciousness--the terrible deaths of baby Lance Helms here in Los Angeles and 6-year-old Elisa Izquierdo in New York are among the most recent examples--why are the predictable promises of reform so resoundingly hollow? Why, in short, does it have to be this way?

Into this vacuum of unanswered questions steps Marc Parent, who attempts to bring the uninitiated inside the gritty, frustrating, glass-strewn world of the people whose job it is to rescue children from neglect, violence and death.

Parent, who worked for four years as a caseworker in New York’s Emergency Children’s Services, reminds us that inside even the most enormous bureaucracy are human beings trying to do what’s right. In a vivid, often beautifully written but ultimately frustrating book, Parent has provided a rare glimpse of what it is like to man these front lines of the war on child abuse--and what it does to a person’s soul to be there day in and day out. “Turning Stones” is a visceral read, at times enthralling, at other times painful enough to have to be set aside: “It’s one thing to read about a little girl with gonorrhea,” Parent writes, “and it’s another thing entirely to look into her face, listen to her voice, or feel her breath on your cheek as she speaks to you.”

It is Parent’s vivid, conversational tone that makes “Turning Stones” such an absorbing piece of narrative nonfiction--though it should not be confused with a journalistic report. It is more of a memoir, and Parent is at his best when he sticks to his first-person account of trying to save kids. His job is analogous to an ambulance driver’s--when child abuse is reported by a neighbor or a teacher or doctor, Parent and a partner materialize at the door, assess the situation, then make a decision on the spot to remove a child or to leave the family intact. Then he moves on to the next case.

In between these high-pressure house calls, Parent provides a devastating portrait of his emergency unit, a tiny operation for so vast a city, with a mix of dedicated caseworkers and outrageous rubes who are too inexperienced or too insensitive to properly question a reticent child, who have seen too much too quickly to care anymore. The emergency foster homes, Parent writes, are little better than Turkish prisons, and he gradually realizes nothing he does will make anyone’s life better in the long term. He watches as the best caseworkers become desk-bound, eggroll-munching supervisors while the neophytes get sent into the arena to face the lions. The experienced few who choose to stay in the field are eventually ground down. Indeed, it is Parent’s own inevitable drift from idealistic newcomer to dazed burn-out that comes closest to explaining why it is so hard for even the most well-meaning among us to put a dent in child abuse.

If Parent’s personal journey from save-the-world naivete to depression and burnout form the narrative bones of this book, it is the stories of the children he meets along the way that provide the meat. They are vivid snapshots from the nether world, of addicts who haul their pitifully thin infants into basement crack houses, of babies left to die in toilet bowls. Parent’s view of them is always brief: Go in, make the life-and-death decision, then leave. It is this episodic quality of the job and his story that simultaneously brings him a wealth of often mesmerizing material, yet never lets him--or the reader--see what finally happens to the children he rescues.

This failure is in part deliberate--Parent clearly wants his readers to feel the same frustration he experienced on the job. But it is also due in part to the highly confidential nature of child welfare cases. Not even an insider like Parent is entitled to know what happens to a child after his brief involvement in the case ends. The system protects its small charges--and itself--with secrecy.

“Turning Stones” ends with a note of hope amid the frustration, but it does not provide answers, policies and prescriptions. Indeed, most readers will probably find themselves asking that same old question: Why does it have to be this way?