The One About An Abused Child
There are some things that I just do not understand and one of those things is people who beat up little kids.
Last week we received word that a child had been flown to Le Bonheur in Memphis after being kicked in the stomach. Pictures of the child were sent to cell phones in the area, including mine, and in a word, it was disgusting.
The child’s GI tract had to be removed from the intestinal damage created through the beating. This little girl is 3-years-old.
I was writing the story yesterday, calling my contacts to check on her well-being (I won’t lie, I was wondering if she survived the weekend) and it washed over my chief staff writer and I just how horrible it is to remain detached while writing articles of this nature. Yeah, we are supposed to be all tough and crap, but as I sat listening to how they couldn’t sew the child back up after her first operation and how she will never really be healthy, I had to sort of retreat into that place we all go to when something upsets us deeply.
Wanna know why she was beaten? I’ll tell you anyway. She wet the bed and dropped an orange juice. She pissed off her mom’s boyfriend and he admitted he became angry and lost his temper.
Losing your temper is throwing your wallet, it’s not beating a little kid.
After the paper went to bed, I went to see some of my local bromances (yes, women can have them as well as men) and just stared for awhile. There was a lot of laughter, Dirk Diggler made fun of my cooking skills (he just needs to be my personal cook) and folks were having a good time. I tried to lose myself as folks were raising about two types of hell because these people tend to always cheer me up but I finally just went on home. They were a hoot but I just had things on my mind. And it’s not like you can go up to your friends and say “Yeah, I saw a kid who was sliced open from neck to stomach and it makes me want to barf. Oh yeah, they couldn’t sew her back up. Yeah, she is going to require about a gazillion more surgeries. How was your day?”
I knew if I started talking about it, I just might not be able to stop. You know what I mean.
I couldn’t shake the image of this kid.
Yes, sometimes these things stay with you. You try to get it out of your head but you can’t.
The perpetrator confessed. He waived his rights and he admitted beating this child. He’s in jail on a $150,000 bond. He’s standard range one offender, so he will get some time for his crime but probably not a lot. But what about the kid. This child who will never get to be a child as more surgeries are scheduled. The mother of the child was also charged because she didn’t seek her daughter medical treatment for five days.
There really aren’t any easy answers to things of this nature, just a glimpse into my cranium and what goes on sometimes in the newsroom.
There are some stories that just haunt you and always will. When you lose the capacity to care, that’s when you start to worry.
As a reporter, the only way I could handle stories about abuse of children and animals was to think of the good I was doing by exposing these monsters.
As an adult who was abused as a child, I don’t understand other adults who victimize me or others who have been abused all over again by telling vicious lies. It hits those buttons that no one believed you when you were a kid trying to get help and they do it to you all over again. It’s like high school, and it baffles me that anyone would participate in that.
It’s nothing short of cruel.
But exposing anyone who abuses is a good thing–that makes what we do worth it–especially if we can help bring some sense of justice to the person (or animal) being victimized.
Lord knows the system rarely works, so (real) journalists are the only hope for a lot of those who can’t defend themselves.
The only way I got through those stories was a) publicizing the living daylights out of them and b) knowing that somebody in the jail, or prison, would pretty much do to the perp what he/she did to the victim. I still reassure myself, sometimes, with that thought, when I read stories like yours.
Those are the days that I find myself more of an Old Testament gal than I’d like to be. I wave the eye-for-an-eye flag a lot higher than the turn-the-other-cheek banner when it involves children. Or animals.