THE BOYFRIEND PROBLEM
BARNES, JOHN A.
THE BOYFRIEND PROBLEM By John A. Barnes On the night of February 23, 1997, Dallas paramedics were summoned to the apartment that Dionne Pickens shared with her son, 2-year-old Devonta, her...
...But the boyfriend problem is something new...
...Well, fathers are not simply sperm banks, or ATM machines, or pinch-hitters for when Mommy gets tired...
...Or the husband in Farrah Fawcett's The Burning Bed...
...These findings mirror a 1993 British study by the Family Education Trust, which meticulously explored the relationship between family structure and child abuse...
...The boyfriend's interest is in the child's mother," says a New York Police Department detective who specializes in domestic-violence cases and who asks not to be identified...
...At his trial, Blackmon admitted hitting the boy but not intending to kill him...
...It found that the risk of a child's dying at the hands of an adult living in the child's own household was eight times higher if the adult was biologically unrelated...
...Remember Ted Danson's portrayal of such a father in the made-for-TV movie Something About Amelia...
...And 50 percent of adults with less than a high-school education lived in cohabitation arrangements...
...A March 1996 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics contains some interesting findings that indicate just how widespread the problem may be...
...Prof...
...It is their duty to keep their children safe from the harm others might inflict on them...
...It is the great unmentionable," says David Blankenhorn, president of the New York-based Institute for American Values and the author of Fatherless America...
...Mommy, make me pretty," were Justina's last words...
...Indeed, you will search in vain the Web sites of the major organizations supposedly dedicated to combating child abuse for any mention of the boyfriend problem...
...And since it is relatively recent, we have a fighting chance of being able to do something about it...
...The boyfriend has no emotional or biological interest in the kids, so they are frequently seen as being 'in the way.'" The boyfriend's uncertain status in the household makes the potential for explosion exceptionally high when he attempts to discipline the children...
...It's easy to see why irresponsible sexual behavior militates against responsible parenthood...
...Fagan has a theory: "It is extremely politically incorrect to suggest that living together might not be the best living arrangement...
...and 18 percent lived with their mother and an unrelated adult (double the 9 percent of all children who live with their mother and an unrelated adult...
...Why, then, do we ignore the problem...
...she asked...
...This mix—poverty, lack of education, children, and cohabitation—is an incubator for violence," Fagan says...
...A close relationship between victim and victimizer is also suggested by the fact that three-quarters of all the crimes occurred in either the perpetrator's home or the victim's...
...The tot's mother, Denise Solero, testified that she held the child's hands steady while Santiago strangled the life out of her and helped to dispose of the body afterwards...
...Specifically, the British study found that the incidence of abuse was an astounding 33 times higher in homes where the mother was cohabiting with an unrelated boyfriend than in stable nuclear families...
...Heritage also found that in the case of very poor children (those in households earning less than $15,000 per year), 75 percent lived in a household where the biological father was absent...
...The social sanction given to cohabitation is of recent vintage...
...Of the victims, only 28 percent lived with both biological parents (far fewer than the 68 percent of all children who live with both parents...
...Her willingness to admit the gravity of the problem sets a good example for the rest of us...
...THE BOYFRIEND PROBLEM By John A. Barnes On the night of February 23, 1997, Dallas paramedics were summoned to the apartment that Dionne Pickens shared with her son, 2-year-old Devonta, her daughter, 8-year-old Deandrea, and her boyfriend of two months, 25-year-old Abdullah Youself Blackmon...
...It grows directly out of the looser social structure that has grown up in America since the 1960s...
...Are you saying that single parents don't have the right to date or have adult friends in the house...
...Government seems to take a crudely materialistic view of fathers—slighting divorced fathers when it comes to enforcing visitation rights, for example, but noticing them as soon as they become "deadbeats...
...Meanwhile, there is at least one encouraging sign that the boyfriend problem is coming out of the closet...
...This would be a fairly simple and cheap way of establishing empirically the dangers of what used to be called "living in sin...
...At some point, Dionne Pickens testified, she no longer heard Devonta crying but continued to hear the belt striking the child...
...Devonta never regained consciousness and soon died...
...The boyfriend problem is partly a product, too, of the devaluation of fatherhood since the sexual revolution...
...The Heritage Foundation's Patrick Fagan discovered that the number of child-abuse cases appeared to rise in the 1980s along with the general societal acceptance of cohabitation before, or instead of, marriage...
...Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs, though two of its divisions, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Institute of Justice, do nothing but collect statistics on crime-related problems...
...Sadly, children's behavior is often not lovable, except by those with a primal interest in seeing their offspring grow and flourish...
...44 percent lived with their mother only (as do 25 percent of all children...
...And how about a few public-service announcements simply to raise public awareness of the dangers of sharing living quarters with a man who refuses to make a commitment to marriage...
...We don't have anything specifically on that," said a spokesman for the U.S...
...Using data on documented cases of abuse in Britain between 1982 and 1988, the report found a high correlation between child abuse and the marital status of the parents...
...What had prompted his homicidal rage against the 2-year-old...
...What is remarkable about such cases, however, is that they draw almost no systematic attention (much less condemnation) from anyone in a position of authority...
...Just two days after Blackmon's conviction, 3-year-old Ashley Smithson of Miami was disconnected from the life-support machines that had been keeping her alive for a month after her head was slammed into a wall by Juvon D. Pickett, the 18-year-old boyfriend of Ashley's mother, Pecynthia Bradley...
...Blackmon was convicted on October 2, 1998, and sentenced to life in prison, of which he must serve at least 40 years before becoming eligible for parole...
...In other words, one of the main purposes of the nuclear family is to protect children from men who are not their fathers...
...While shelves of books have been written about the impact of the feminist movement on women, few have been written about its impact on men...
...A 1994 paper published in the Journal of Comparative Family Studies looked at 32,000 documented cases of child abuse...
...To bring up the boyfriend problem seems too much like you're passing judgment on the sexual behavior of single mothers...
...Systematic studies of the problem are indeed few and far between...
...This leaves them defensive, looking for and reacting to affronts that are not there...
...The jury wasn't buying the idea that Devonta Pickens's death was an accident...
...If mothers' boyfriends believe they lack legitimate authority in their partner's family, they may anticipate that other family members will not obey or respect them," says Prof...
...The National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect, for example, lists the following as "primary" means of preventing child abuse: (1) "Public service announcements . . . encouraging parents to use non-violent forms of discipline...
...Her mother, too, stood by and watched while her daughter was being killed...
...Margolin...
...In a country that obsesses over the effect of secondhand smoke on its children, that worries incessantly about "at-risk" youngsters, and whose chief executive is wont to use children's welfare as a justification for virtually any policy prescription of the moment, this is a significant oversight...
...Margolin found that boyfriends were 27 times more likely than natural parents to abuse a child...
...One effect, it seems, has been to encourage a sense that fathers are expendable...
...While all this was going on, the children's mother was in the next room...
...So it sets up an almost automatic tug-of-war-type contest almost from the get-go...
...Thompson-Scretching herself is the product of a boyfriend-problem household, and she has written a raw and emotionally charged night of theater that explores the horrific consequences of a mother's allowing her no-good boyfriend to move in with her and her family...
...These findings are consonant with those published a year earlier by Leslie Margolin of the University of Iowa in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect...
...short life, the little girl had already been hospitalized twice after punishment at Pickett's hands...
...In a nationally representative survey of state prisoners jailed for assaults against or murders of children, fully one-half of respondents reported the victim was a friend, acquaintance, or relative other than offspring...
...The kids' interest, of course, is also in their mother...
...The boy's 30-pound body was covered with welts, including no fewer than five sites of blunt-force trauma to the head...
...Michael Stiffman presented at the latest meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in October, studied the 175 Missouri children under the age of 5 who were murdered between 1992 and 1994...
...In fact, culture-shaping vehicles such as movies and television shows as well as public-service announcements are more likely to imply or state that a child's father or stepfather (almost invariably portrayed as a respectable suburbanite) represents the greatest threat to the child...
...It can be reversed...
...It wasn't long ago that a woman sharing living quarters with an unmarried man was considered prima facie an unfit mother...
...Even when the boyfriend was the children's biological father, the chances of abuse were twice as high...
...In Brooklyn last December, Luis Santiago was convicted of manslaughter for his role in the death of Justina Morales...
...3) "Public awareness campaigns informing citizens how and where to report suspected child abuse and neglect...
...As a consequence, boyfriends may be quicker to use violence against the children than natural fathers would be and may use it with less restraint when they do...
...If that were true, then child abuse and domestic violence should have decreased along with the rise in cohabitation...
...Parenting has come to be identified more than ever with "maternal" qualities— emotional nurturing, the easy expression of affection, and discomfort with discipline...
...Social-service agencies can begin flagging kids living in such circumstances for special attention and, where necessary, even removing more children from such situations...
...During her John A. Barnes is an editorial writer for the New York Post...
...The latter, he said, had wet his bed...
...Child abuse is as old as the family itself, and it is true that in absolute numbers, far more children are abused by their parents than by anyone else...
...That runs counter to the radical-feminist view, which holds that marriage is an oppressive male institution of which violence is an integral feature...
...Open virtually any big-city newspaper and you will find a depressingly large number of such stories...
...A young child, living with his mother in a cramped apartment, is beaten to within an inch of his life—or, as in the cases cited above, meets death—at the hands of Mom's boyfriend/ex-husband/live-in, often while Mom looks on...
...A quick examination showed that couldn't possibly be true...
...He also admitted beating Deandrea earlier in the evening...
...Government agencies that are on the front lines, dealing with abused children daily, should begin systematically gathering information on family structure...
...An off-Broadway play, "You Shouldn't Have Told," by Anne Thompson-Scretching, has been packing them in at various New York venues since January 1997...
...All but 3 percent of those who committed violent crimes against children were men...
...But to build a consensus for restigmatizing cohabitation, and thus to start reversing the boyfriend problem, we need more information...
...2) "Parent education programs and groups teaching parents age-appropriate expectations...
...The few studies that have been done, however, confirm what common sense already dictates: The statistical danger to a child is vastly increased by the presence of an unrelated man in the household...
...While acknowledging that abuse by boyfriends is a problem, Joy Byers, then-communications director of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, became defensive when pressed as to why her organization doesn't highlight it...
...For a long, long time, this was a taboo subject, especially in the black community," the playwright says...
...Blackmon claimed the boy had fallen into a wooden bed railing...
...Once this information is gathered, it will be possible to act on it...
...Medical examiners said later the injuries were comparable to what a person would receive in a severe car wreck...
...The next-riskiest group, siblings, were only twice as likely as parents to abuse a child...
...More recently, a report by Dr...
...Little Devonta Pickens was unconscious...
Vol. 4 • December 1998 • No. 13
