Shedding Light on the Dark World of Child Abuse

Child abuse stories don’t usually make for hopeful headlines. “Happy endings” tend to be relative. Still, in a small, well-lit courtroom in the Los Angeles County Dependency Court this week, the news was as good as it gets in these cases: A family of brutalized children challenged the system. And the system, for once, was persuaded to listen to them.

You might recall the back story, detailed last month in this space. It involved a family of immigrants caught last year in Angeles National Forest as they tried to bury a child. The 5-year-old boy, Ernesto, had been beaten so brutally that his legs were deformed and his lip had a tooth protruding through it. His brothers had been forced to dig his small grave.

Gradually, the family members surrendered their secrets, so barbaric that they would later leave the social workers and therapists and lawyers who dealt with them physically ill: the way the father had sired seven children with his undocumented wife and six more with her undocumented younger sister. The squalid garage where he sadistically beat them all.

Eventually, the father--a potbellied man named Marcos Esquivel with small, pale hands and the pinched mouth of a baby--was arrested and charged with Ernesto’s murder, along with that of a 2-year-old daughter who was beaten to death after she wet her pants. His women, Maria and Petra Ricardo, were charged as accessories for allegedly knowing about the killings and failing to tell.

Pending the trials, the children--some teenage, some toddlers--were placed with two foster families while the county searched in vain for a happy ending that didn’t exist. The caseworkers for Petra Ricardo’s children recommended that they be kept together, even if it meant settling for legal guardianship with a foster family. The people handling Maria Ricardo’s children went with “policy”: Split ‘em up and adopt ‘em out.

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This was where we left the children the last time they made headlines. Maria’s kids, with the help of their lawyer, Lisa E. Mandel, had gone in desperation to the press. The eldest daughter, a bespectacled sixth-grader, was especially frantic. Did the county not see how her heart would be torn if she were to lose her baby brothers, her little sister? Did they not realize that, as she put it, “we are all we have”?

They did, the county replied, but it wasn’t so easy. The eldest daughter didn’t want to be adopted, but what about the smaller kids? Even if their mom is acquitted, it is unlikely she’ll regain custody. Though their foster mother had promised to keep them together to adulthood, she also could dump them on a week’s notice. Adoption meant permanence.

This was the company line. Behind the scenes, however, there was yet another drama, according to a caseworker who spoke on condition of anonymity. “In fact, we didn’t all want adoption,” the caseworker said. “But our hands were tied. We had to recommend it because adoption’s the policy.”

Thus, it wasn’t until the children went public, the caseworker said, that the brass bothered to question whether the policy worked at this moment in this case. Forced to reconsider, they conceded that it would only cause more harm to wrench the children from each other. The court agreed this week.

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I noted that child abuse stories don’t usually make for hopeful headlines. Something else about these stories is that they seldom make headlines at all. The dependency courts are closed to the public; confidentiality cloaks their cases. This is supposed to shield the children from stigma, but too often it also shields the system’s flaws.

One of those flaws is the way social service bureaucracies get tempted, if no one’s looking, to try to impose economies of scale on human frailty. Roughly one-tenth of the nation’s abused and neglected children are here in L.A. The stories of anguish run to the unnamed tens of thousands, no two alike. Compassion runs dry.

In a better world, we would spend whatever it took to mend these little lives. But we don’t, in part because we can’t tell what it would take: Current laws make it hard to really see the system at work. So the gears creak along in the dark, helping some, grinding others to ashes. Only the “policy” is held accountable.

State Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) is expected to hold public hearings next month to determine whether the dependency courts really need to be so confidential. The courts in New York, Michigan and Minnesota have already been opened to press and public without apparent detriment. Would openness hurt or help? It’s probably relative. But then, so are most issues worth tackling: the greater good, the lesser evil, the ending that is, if not happy exactly, then happier.

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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. E-mail: shawn.hubler@latimes.com