Another in a series of child neglect horror stories.

The BBQ Pit
21

I can just imagine the reaction of the guy who turned her in.

:They are watching the news. A picture of Murphy is shown on the screen. She jumps up and turns it off.:

Her: I hate the news.
Him: Wasn’t that you?
Her: I get that all the time now. She just looks like me.
Him: Uhh… Ok. <awkward pause> I’m gonna go get some chips. You want some?
Her: Sure.
Him: Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.

:He edges out the door, and runs frantically down the street.
:5 min later:

:He sticks his head around the door.:

Him: I brought some friends…

:He opens the door fully, and we see half of the Newark PD crammed in the hallway:

End Scene

22

i jsut read this, sitting here at work, and cried. i don’t cry much, maybe tear up on rare occasion, but i don’t cry. took me 15 minutes to be able to even type this.

i love my babies so, so very much. nothing in this world is more important to me than their happiness and well being. if anyone did something like this to my kids, i would have to do it back to them. maybe pull out some of their teeth. scoop their eyeballs out with a spoon. slowly peel the skin off their body. then rub alcohol on the raw flesh. let in some of those flesh eating lizards to snack on them. even that isn’t horrible enough.

i just want to take these abused kids and hold them until it all goes away. i wish that would help.

i gotta move to another thread. i am crying again

23

Link?

24

You are complete idiot, you know that?

You honestly think that they just had a hard time prioritzing? ‘Bruised knee’ was ahead of ‘heinous torture’ alphabetically? I think 90% of your brain is a bullshit case.

Yes, there are false accusations of child abuse. But IMO, the reason cases fall through the cracks is that there are far too many real cases of terrible abuse and far too few people and other resources to deal with them.

25

I’d like to point out that while a large proportion of reports are unsubstantiated, an unsubstantiated case is not necessarily a bullshit case. In my experience as a (former) child protective worker, there were a tiny number of obviously malicious reports, a tiny number of “cover your ass” reports (school reporting a bruise that they have no suspicions about, etc.), and a huge number of reports that may or may not have been true, but for which no evidence was found. For example, I get a report that a 2 yr old and a 3 yr old are being left home alone. I never find the kids home alone, the reporter is anonymous, the neighbors either won’t talk to me or say they’ve never seen the kids home alone. No evidence, unsubstantiated case. But it doesn’t mean the kids are not in fact being left home alone. And those are often the cases that seem to fall through the cracks. The ones where there were previous unsubstantiated reports, and then a kid ends up dead. In retrospect, it seems obvious that the prior reports were accurate, but that doesn’t mean the evidence was there at the time.

26

Nothing to say about the case referenced in the OP, or the ones following with links. I am sick to fucking death of reading about and discussing this kind of shit. I feel like I’m wasting time addressing it as it only gets worse each time a new case pops up.

I wondered about that Dave Pelzer book myself, when I read it. I’d heard of the book before, and when my mom started back to college two years ago, it was the first book she was assigned to read in some kind of Psychology 101 class. I read it one day at her house (it’s pretty short) and the whole thing sounded like forwarded email glurge. Some of the injuries the boy sustained at the hands of his mother, like being gut-stabbed and thrown in the basement, and being locked in the bathroom deliberately with toxic fumes from cleaning supplies, sounded a bit “much” to me. Yeah, I realize kids have survived worse, but this kid was sent to school every day (for a long time, anyway). Any kid hungry enough to eat vomit is, IMHO, going to be noticed by a teacher doing something desperate like that in, oh, say, at least a year or two. I also found it rather difficult to believe that all this family’s neighbors, who were familiar enough with the boy to return him to his house for stealing food, never noticed that he was being beaten, tortured, and starved by a screaming lunatic of a drunk-ass mother RIGHT NEXT DOOR. Must have been those soundproof walls. :rolleyes:

27

Or maybe, since it “wasn’t their problem”, as long as he didn’t bother them they didn’t bother him.

And he’s only going to be noticed by the teachers if they care, or are willing to risk a possible shitstorm if they’re wrong about their perception of his maltreatment. In the time I was in high school, very obviously being bullied and very obviously unhappy with the entire situation, I remember being asked once by any teacher if I was okay, and that was regarding my emotional well-being when my grandmother was dying in a hospital room some 500 miles away.

That was the one time. And I got out by graduating. Many teachers are excellent about dealing with possible cases of abuse. Many others are less than good.

28

Hey, Spooje, at least he got this far:

That’s a far cry from his usual boilerplate.

29

punha, while I know how you feel about being bullied - an experience I went through for far too many years myself; ask me sometime - I expect that teachers and so forth don’t see it quite the same way as parental abuse, and for good reason. The horror stories in this thread about parental abuse are, unfortunately, all too common. But how often do you hear about a kid being bullied to death? I know it’s happened, but much more rarely.

So I can understand why a teacher who would regard it as his/her duty to report evidence of parental abuse would take a pass on protecting a student from the school bullies, even though I agree that they should do something in both situations.

30

RT, if I’m understanding what you’re asking, it’s a good question:

To put it rather bluntly and somewhat mathematically, “What is the ratio of children who suffer from abuse by their parent(s)/guardian(s) to the extent that it ends in death/children who are bullied to death?”

I have absolutely no idea. I can’t even give you anything near a good guess on this country alone. Due to my membership on Ravendays (a support group/news list site for survivors of bullying), I hear about them (bullying-related deaths) a lot more than most of y’all, and I don’t post them probably as much as I should. Incidentally, in norinew’s IMHO thread from within the past few months on her daughter is a post of mine detailing several suicides blamed exclusively on bullying (that is to say, the bullying continued to the point where the student killed herself [all female cites, and the reason for which you’ll see in the thread], as opposed to dying because of, say, being physically beaten to death by another student). It looks like only three links but as I recall it’s at least a half-dozen.

It would be my mostly speculative guess that bullying is more common than child abuse, but child abuse—at least, that we hear about—is generally worse (that is, done on a case-by-base basis to a more extreme degree) than bullying. However, I’m talking more about the exceptions to that, where the bullying is as bad or worse than the child abuse cases. And in some of those cases (this is informative, not meant to be a "You’re wrong, so I’m telling you) you literally do have teachers turning their heads so they don’t see and feel even more guilt-ridden than they already did. In the past few years, for example, several students (supported by their parents) in this country and in (IIRC) Canada and I think Sweden have filed suit against their respective school boards for various things they (parents, and sometimes also children assuming the kids haven’t committed suicide already) believe were caused by bullying. If you’re interested I can dig around on the Ravendays website. It’s fairly user-friendly, there’s just a lot there. There’ve been updates to it fairly frequently (I’d put a conservative guess at around 1-3 per week since 1998).

There is also the fact that parental abuse of children is often much more glaring (it would seem that the recent abuse-related deaths of children would rise in opposition of this point:(), as bullying is orchestrated specifically to be where a teacher will not see it, whereas with child abuse it is not quite so easy to hide. A lot of bullying (a lot, in my experience) is also more verbally/psychologically grounded, and to catch that you either have to care a lot or know where to be. And with thirty kids in a classroom that can be less than easy.[sub]Or at least that’s what I have to tell myself sometimes.[/sub]

Link to bullying-related deaths.

Court cases brought due to bullying.

Fuck. This shit is too depressing to read right now.