Reading Eagle
March 26, 2010
http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=208271
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Recent world and national events remind us yet again of the horrendous way grown-ups treat children.
On Sunday, ABC News reported on the sex trafficking of children in Cambodia and the American evangelical Christians who are protecting them, not just from tourists but from their own mothers, who regularly sell their daughters into the maw of sexual degradation.
Cambodia endured a devastating genocide in the 1970s that claimed the lives of one-fifth of the population, about 1.7 million people. One pastor who runs a shelter for rescued kids said Cambodia suffers from a moral vacuum that makes it easy for mothers to sell their daughters, ABC News reported.
From Europe, yet another round of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, this time in Germany, is generating headlines and outrage.
What is drawing the most attention is that not only is Germany the homeland of Pope Benedict XVI, but also when he was Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger in the 1980s, a priest alleged to have molested boys was allowed to transfer to an archdiocese run by the archbishop. The international crisis draws closer to the Vatican itself.
The United States is not left out of the recent drumbeat of news about child abuse.
The New York Times recently reported that files kept secret for decades detail hundreds of claims of abuse by troop leaders of the Boy Scouts of America.
"Lawyers for a victim claim the files show a centralized national effort to conceal abuse while lawyers for the Boy Scouts say the files demonstrate proactive efforts to stop it," the Times reported. "The group has acknowledged that abuse occurred."
A civil trial is under way in Portland, Ore.
In Berks County, hundreds of cases alleging abuse and neglect of children are being handled by dedicated county caseworkers, caseworkers from other agencies, an intrepid trio of lawyers who represent the children (they are called guardians ad litem) and the judges in dependency court who must make difficult decisions about where these kids go.
Do we let them stay at home while mom and dad get their act together or put them in foster care, which has its own risks?
In one of the cases assigned to me as a court-appointed advocate, a determined foster mom withheld food from one of my kids for three days because he wouldn't eat a serving of peach cobbler she served him for breakfast one Sunday.
At lunch, everyone in the family sat down for hot dogs cooked on the grill.
There was no hot dog for Tommy (not his real name). What appeared was the serving of peach cobbler he'd refused at breakfast.
"When you eat the cobbler you can have your hot dog," the foster mother told me she told 6-year-old Tommy, who'd been diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder.
Tommy refused. He ate no hot dog for lunch and the chilling ritual was repeated at every meal for the next 72 hours.
My report to our program director led to Tommy's swift removal from the foster home.
After five years, I still wonder how courageous, resilient kids such as Tommy are able to bear up. Some even smile.
What are we to make of mothers who sell their daughters into sexual slavery, priests who take advantage of children they are supposed to be protecting, Scout officials who abuse and foster mothers, presumably cleared by child welfare officials, who starve their wards in the interest of teaching them a lesson?
The answer rests in the comment by the evangelical pastor in Cambodia.
Child abuse is not a problem caused by poverty or drugs or lack of education or any of the other ready answers that are given by too many bureaucrats and community leaders.
It is a moral problem and it reaches deep into our own community.
The moral vacuum that feeds the sex trade in Cambodia is not just a Cambodian problem. It is our problem, too.
John Fidler is a copy editor and writer at the Reading Eagle. He holds a master's degree in English from the University of Chicago. Contact him at 610-371-5054 or jfidler@readingeagle.com
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