WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS, CHILDREN!

I had almost left the tent without seeing her. When do we ever look up? Except that she started crying, I turned and there she was: a little kid of eight or nine wobbling in the middle of the tightrope fifty feet above the center ring of the three. No net, just her, a rope, a hard floor and me. I’ll never know how she got to the middle, but there she was, precariously balanced, terrified, crying out. Arms outstretched, little toes clenched from the stress of keeping her balance. Doing her best up there not to fall.

And I was apparently the only one left to help her. The audience was gone, the lights were dimmed, there was no more sparkle. The circus workers had finished and the clowns had plodded away. Leaving just me and a little girl on a rope up above: her tears, my rising panic and a vein pumping adrenalin not to let her die. I called out carefully, I asked her name, I told her not to move. I never took my eyes off her while I dialed 911 and I kept her up there by willpower until the fire boys came and their ladder went up and she came down on the shoulder of a burly guy in a yellow hat. We applauded him and her both. They wrapped the little girl in a blanket and took her away in an ambulance, but not before she looked up and smiled and said thank you. I thanked God she didn’t fall and that I had my cellphone and that 911 worked and that there was a 911 to call. We have a system for emergencies, and it worked.

We Americans are great at dealing with crisis. We can fix anything. Rebuild a city, replace a heart, rescue the toddler from the well: if a town has bad guys, we’ll send in a steely-eyed sheriff to clean it up. But what we are really, really lousy at doing is preventing bad things from happening in the first place: we just won’t take the time, spend the money or develop the political will…. We’d rather pick up the pieces nobly after the next catastrophe. Last April in New Orleans I asked the Sheriff about the levees. He said they were around 23 feet tall. I asked about the biggest storm surge they expected and he guessed it would be around 30 feet in his lifetime. I just looked at him. He tossed it off, “There’s no political will to spend ten billion dollars to build the levees higher”. And he laughed, even though the cost of rebuilding the whole city would be twenty times that. Go figure. Cowboys must have invented our philosophy of life: Count on us to kick anything broken back into shape, but prevention is for girlie men.

The child on the tightrope is a victim of abuse or neglect, one of three million a year in these United States. The swaying, frayed tightrope is our nation’s unnecessarily crappy child welfare system, a disgrace among the civilized nations of the planet. 1500 children a year fall off the rope on our watch and die. Tens of thousands are harmed by foster care and protective custody systems that are supposed to help them. We ask our social workers, the vast majority of them inadequately trained, to keep safe as many as a hundred kids each on the Children and Family Services tightrope. In Texas, the number of weeks of training required to be a state certified manicurist exceeds the weeks of training to be State certified as a social worker.

And what is the swaying, frayed rope? A system that is broken in most of the 2200 jurisdictions which under State Rights have self-invented solutions oftentimes as bad as the dysfunctions they seek to cure. Systems with no institutional memory because the social workers burn out from overload and leave and because many of the Judges can’t wait to escape from Dependency Court postings which they see as the bottom of the career totem pole, just one notch above Traffic Court. And so many of our major cities put kids back into harm’s way by bureaucratic error, where they are molested again, beaten up again and sometimes killed. Sorry, Brianna, Washington DC failed you: they lost the file.

And we deliberately turn off the klieg lights that might illuminate the crappy state of the tightrope: Courtesy of the ruling DeShaney vs. Winnebago County, the Supreme Court decided a child could not sue a governmental agency that put her back into harm’s way and should have known better. If mistakes cost lives but no money, where is the imperative for fixing the broken system? In 34 of our States, we wrong-headedly turn off the searchlights altogether: we seal hearings regarding children, in the misguided belief that this is necessary to protect them. But ask Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz of the Minnesota Supreme Court…. They’ve had open hearings in Minnesota for years; no child has ever been identified in the press, who operate under a protective protocol just as the adult victim is protected in rape cases. But because the press have access to shine their bright lights on the process itself, the bureaucrats charged with helping these special children have nowhere to hide. Repetitive errors are stopped. The system corrects itself, or the eleven ‘clock news asks why. Why can’t we do that in the other two thirds of the country, huh?

Child abuse and neglect costs the United States over a hundred billion dollars a year. Sixty-eight percent of adult male convicts were abused or neglected as children. Fifty percent of obese women were sexually molested as girls. And the awfulness oftentimes rolls on from generation to generation. I asked the Warden at a Columbus Ohio lock-up facility for children convicted of sexual crimes against other children how many he guessed had themselves been molested. 97% or 98%, he guessed. And so the blighting curse of abuse rolls on. Tell me, what actually is the future of the nation we pridefully care about if not through its children? Biologists compare how animals raise each others’ offspring when determining which are the higher species. By their rules, aren’t we down with the trout that lay thousands of eggs and hope a few don’t get eaten by predators? And God bless the children of Iraq: they deserve the extra rights and protections we’ve enabled in their new constitution. Just explain to me please why American children lack most of those rights and protections under our own?

The little abused and neglected girl did not choose to stand on the ratty tightrope: some miserable grown-up put her there. If it is too much to ask that we teach people to parent, can we at least agree to shorten the tightrope and install some handrails? They have them in other countries: Why is an abused child better off in Toronto than in Detroit? We’ve just found a boy placed in 60 different foster homes by age 18: how can he even stand upright after that turmoil? And why can’t we use distance learning to train the tens of thousands of practicing lawyers who will volunteer to serve for free as children’s advocates? Must we always knee-jerk whine at the lack of funds when volunteers just want to be trained? Believe me, kids is kids everywhere. If we have to have 2200 different jurisdictions to protect them, wouldn’t it at least be smart to compare the practices and outcomes in each to determine which models work best? Dare one suggest that if the research klieg light were turned on, well-meaning communities might like to adopt the best protocols rather than the worst?

Suffer the little children. They are the future of these United States. We can do much better by them and so by us. The knowledge exists; we just need the will. Hello? Hello? Anyone else think the wobbling little girl needs catching?

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Peter Samuelson (petersam@who.net) founded First Star (http://www.firststar.org/ ), the national advocacy organization for child victims of abuse and neglect and Starlight-Starbright, the charity that helps seriously ill children (www.slsb.org). In his civilian life he is a motion picture producer and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four children.