Emotional Abuse a Tough Sell to Jurors

There was no dispute over the details.

Grady Machnick and his wife, Deborah, forced their teenage son to sleep outdoors because he had stolen from them and they didn’t trust him in their Yorba Linda home. On other occasions they kept him in the backyard until he finished his homework, and she once sent him to school with dog feces in his backpack.

But a jury’s reluctance this week to call those acts abuse highlights what child advocates see as a stubborn problem: getting society to recognize that emotional abuse of children can be as much a crime as physical abuse.

“We speculate that is due in part to the fact that the lines are not clear,” said Sheila Anderson, executive director of the Sacramento-based Child Abuse Council, which operates in 32 California counties. “Concussions are clear and diagnosable. Emotional abuse may not be.”

An Orange County jury voted Monday to acquit Grady Machnick, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s sergeant, and Deborah, a former elementary school principal, on charges that they conspired to abuse the Machnicks’ son beginning when he was 12 until he ran away from home at age 14. He’s now 16 and living with a foster family.

The couple denied abusing the boy, arguing that they were desperately trying to corral his unruly behavior, including shoplifting and stealing cash from Deborah Machnick’s purse. The dog feces episode followed a showdown in which the boy suggested his parents leave the feces in his bedroom if he failed again to do his chore of cleaning up the yard.

The jury -- most of them parents themselves -- deadlocked on charges over whether the Machnicks’ parenting techniques constituted misdemeanor child abuse, illustrating the fuzzy line between bad parenting and criminal behavior.

Key to the rulings, jurors said, was their reluctance to pass judgment on how other parents raise their children. Prosecutors are due back in court Jan. 3 to announce whether they will try the Machnicks again on the misdemeanor child abuse charges.

Social workers and child advocates said the verdict did not surprise them. Rather, they said, it offers a snapshot of broad social attitudes toward emotional abuse of a child, and the difficulty in deciding when stern discipline becomes cruelty -- and abuse.

The issue is muddied by individual uncertainties over what makes a good parent -- and fear that “there but for the grace of God go I.”

Anderson said her organization has found unease among adults in focus groups when they are presented with samples of discipline that advocates say cross over into abuse. “They become concerned and start to compare themselves,” Anderson said. “They think, ‘I remember the time Johnny forgot his coat and I said it served him right and didn’t drive to school to give it to him. Is that child abuse?’ It increases their discomfort.”

Adults also tend to view abuse differently depending on the age of the child. Young children are sympathetic figures, even though they are unreliable witnesses about things they have experienced.

Teens, though, can elicit fear from adults, who tend to be less likely to look at harsh discipline as abuse.

One social worker said she was less surprised by the verdict than by the fact that the charges were filed in the first place, given how hard it is to prove emotional abuse compared with physical abuse, where the wounds are visible.

“The value from this is that it’s opened up a lot of dialogue about the difficulty of parenting teens,” said Linda Howard, director of youth and community programs at the Santa Ana-based Community Service Programs. “It was a tough case to weigh. Was this an attempt to discipline, or was it emotional abuse? If anything, it got people to think about their own actions when disciplining teenagers.”

She does not think that the verdict will dissuade social workers from reporting emotional abuse of children.

“You always make your best judgment. The outcome is in somebody else’s hands,” said Howard, who has been a social worker for 30 years. “If your job is to protect children from abuse, a verdict like this shouldn’t stop you from doing what’s right.”

For some advocates, the verdict evidenced a general lack of awareness of what constitutes emotional abuse of a child, and of the consequences.

“A child who is emotionally abused believes that he or she is not a good person, is constantly a failure, and so [that] sets the child up to fail,” said Barbara Oliver, director of Prevent Child Abuse-Orange County.

Often, she said, emotionally abused children turn to drugs or other criminal behavior “to get the nurturing and love” missing from their lives.

“I don’t believe most people understand yet the consequences of emotional abuse,” Oliver said. “If they did understand, the verdicts in cases like this can be different.”