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At Winchester High School in a cozy Boston suburb, clinical social worker Michele Diamond hears it all: the drug use, the alcohol, the eating disorders, the suicide attempts by children who are viewed as privileged. "Kids are left alone a lot to cope," she says, "and they sense less support from their families." Pressured to succeed, to "fit in," to be accepted by top colleges, the students handle their stress however they can. Some just dissolve their problems in a glass. In nearby Belmont, a juvenile officer finds that parents shrug off the danger. When their kids are caught drinking, he notes, "they say, 'Thank God it isn't cocaine. It's alcohol. We can handle that.' "
All too often it is cocaine, the poisonous solace common to the golf club and the ghetto. It is not only the violence of the drug culture that threatens children; it is also the lure of the easy money that turns 11-year-olds into drug runners. "Alienated is too weak a word to describe these kids," says Edward Loughran, a 10-year veteran of the juvenile-justice system in Massachusetts. "They don't value their lives or anyone else's life. Their values system says, 'I am here alone. I don't care what society says.' A lot of these kids are dying young deaths and don't care because they don't feel there is any reason to aspire to anything else."
Violence in the neighborhood is bad enough. Violence in the home is devastating. Reports of child abuse have soared from 600,000 in 1979 to 2.4 million in 1989, a searing testimony to the enduring role of children as the easiest victims. In New York City, half of all abuse reports are repeat cases of children who have had to be rescued before, only to be returned to an abusive home.
When two-year-old "Rebecca" accidentally soiled her underwear, her mother and the mother's boyfriend were not pleased. So they heated up some cooking oil, held Rebecca down and poured it over her. Then they waited a week or so before Rebecca's mother, unable to stand the stench of the child's legs, which were rotting from gangrene, took her to the hospital. After a month's stay that saved her legs, Rebecca was able to move to a foster home. From there she went to live with her paternal grandmother, who had plenty of room: all four of her sons were in state prison.
Around the country there are hundreds of thousands of other children who scream for help from overburdened teachers, understaffed social service agencies, crowded courts and a gridlocked foster-care system. To dismiss child abuse as a personal, private tragedy misses the larger point entirely. If children are not protected from their abusers, then the public will one day have to be protected from the children. To walk through death row in any prison is to learn what child abuse can lead to when it ripens. According to attorneys who have represented them, roughly 4 out of 5 death row inmates were abused as children.