The child comes first
McCarthy, Abigail
THE CHILD CONES FIRST WHEN FAMILIES CAN'T BE FIXED r ashington has been in a mild uproar since late September over a series of articles in the Washington Post. The result of four years of...
...Rosa Lee, still a rather attractive woman if one can judge by news photos, has had eight children, five by different fathers...
...Still others, more thoughtful, saw the series as a call to action, to face up to the spread9 OF SEVERAL WIMPS Abigail McCarthy ing infection of families like Rosa Lee's and to seek again to find solutions to the problem they present...
...In fact, if we truly care, each of us could make ourselves part of that effort right now...
...Let's start now...
...Leon Dash in a subsequent article pointed out that two of Rosa Lee's children had turned out all right and were stable members of society...
...In one lifetime Rosa Lee has brought into being three generations of petty criminals and social misfits...
...How can we deal with such an enormous and fast-growing problem...
...All I could say is, it's a court order.' It's nothing but slavery" (Catholic Standard, September 29...
...I agree with Reynolds...
...This takes me back again to a column written by Barbara Reynolds of USA Today (May 13,1994) at the time Mandela became official leader of what she called "Africa's rainbow nation...
...As Commonweal readers know, this is a remedy that appeals to me...
...The result of four years of research by the highly regarded reporter Leon Dash, they chronicled the life of Rosa Lee Cunningham, a fifty-seven-year-old grandmother who has been convicted twelve times for shoplifting for which she has intermittently spent five years in jail...
...According to Reynolds, a USA Today survey ranked our nation's capital as one of the deadliest places for children to live in the country...
...The reality is that most of these children from the inner city are the offspring of the second- and third-generation of teen-aged mothers isolated from any extended family and living in extreme poverty...
...As I write, Nelson Mandela and the Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams are visiting Washington, the former a triumphant example of the overcoming of a social pathology, the latter hoping to...
...She has also been a prostitute and a drug pusher, is a drug addict, and is now HIV positive...
...But the problem is not confined to the bringing up of asocial and neglected children by parents like Rosa Lee...
...She challenges the belief of the present child welfare system that every family can be "fixed" and that a biological family is always the best place to raise a child...
...They can provide teachers' aides who will insure that no child is pushed on until he or she masters the basics of education and gains the self-confidence such mastery promotes...
...Among the alternatives she lists are long-term group homes, another term for Barbara Reynold's orphanages...
...He asked why we were sending him back home when we knew what was going to happen to him...
...Predictably, a storm of protest came from middle-class black citizens (Rosa Lee is African-American, as is Dash): Why portray the degradation of such a woman...
...The purpose of the series, according to the Post and Dash himself, was to illuminate the life of the underclass that increasingly populates our cities but lives outside our main culture...
...They are beaten, burned, battered, sold, used, and abused—just as were the slaves of years ago...
...Our leaders must refocus the struggle, she wrote, and suggested ways for that to be done...
...She never bothered with their schooling but she taught them and a number of her grandchildren, too, how to steal...
...Tommy's 'mommy-sores' from an electric cord beating took months to heal," wrote Sister Josephine, administrator of Saint Ann's Infant Home recently...
...And yet a misguided, supposedly family oriented system does return them to these nonhomes willy-nilly...
...There are ways...
...There are no real biological families or homes to which they may return ("The Least of These...
...It is time we considered this alternative seriously...
...In D.C...
...Why not profile those hard-working and successful African-Americans who strengthen our communities...
...At the risk of being thought a Joanna-One-Note, I cite some of the arguments for orphanages of which I wrote some years ago ('The Least of These," December 1, 1989 and "Orphans Need Homes," January 26, 1990...
...Sister Josephine describes this slavery vividly...
...Reynolds proposes that orphanages should be built to protect children from abusive adults...
...We are years late in facing up to this problem...
...If we put the child's needs and best interests first, we must seek alternatives, certainly for abused children (and perhaps for the children of neglect, too) until, and if, the parents can be rehabilitated...
...Apparently, too, the lack of such intervention in the lives of the other six was compounded by the fact that the educational system allowed them to become failures in the early and most crucial years of schooling...
...The welfare system in most cities and states still addresses the problem of neglected and abandoned children on the basis of an outworn and probably never realistic thesis—that the problem of each child must be worked out according to a permanent plan which will result either in reunification with the biological family or adoption...
...in the other, a social worker...
...All but two of her children followed her into drug dealing and drug addiction...
...10...
...Others saw Rosa Lee as a victim, her life a result of racism and poverty...
...They can adopt the schools in which parents like Rosa Lee Cunningham have little interest or involvement and see that each and every pupil has the interest and help of a mentoring adult like her two successful children had...
...She contrasted the achievement of bringing democracy to South Africa—the result of a long struggle waged both within the country and abroad—to our national failure to cope with the desperate conditions in our own inner cities, especially in the District of Columbia, "the city the nation shares...
...The growing incidence of physical abuse by parents as well as the incidence of parents who provide no real care and love (a form of abuse) often produces emotionally stunted and murderous children...
...Government will be slow in doing so but churches and businesses can move more quickly...
...Why indeed...
...In both cases helpful adults had taken an interest in them and intervened in their lives—in one case, a teacher...
...this year city officials estimate 2,500 kids will be abused," she writes...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 19
