Those who persecute others, whether they be members of a racial mob or child-abusers acting alone, must in some sense dehumanize their victim, imagining him as less than human and deserving of attack. In all too many cases, child-abusers claim and apparently believe that the child deserves the mistreatment because he is out of control and has been acting inappropriately.
What the abuser believes is no justification for the attack. The reality is that a helpless child is suffering violence from a much stronger and more powerful adult or adults — and all too often a spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend collaborates in the abuse. One of the more disgusting facets of child abuse is that so often, not just one abuser, but two or more are, at the same time, incapable of empathy and unwilling to bring the abuse to an end. Even if some individuals refuse to participate in the attacks, they stand back and allow them — and, in effect, become accomplices.
On August 2, California police entered a motel room and found an 8-year-old girl lying unresponsive in the bathtub. Reportedly, she had been tortured and killed by her father and his girlfriend, “working in tandem” for days while the child suffered injuries almost too horrible to report. She had extensive burns and blistering from scalding water, and, according to police reports, her hands had been crushed by placing her fingertips in a door frame and closing the door, “causing her fingernails to separate from her hands.” One offficer reported that “it seemed as if she had been whipped multiple times, causing her flesh under the skin to be exposed.”
In this case, the girlfriend, Graciela Bustamonte, stated that the father, Ray Mata, Jr., was a habitually abusive person who had beaten his children for years, but that she “did not call the police because she was afraid to go to jail. ... [She] stated she would have intervened if that happened to her biological children.” Why did she not go to police and report the abuse at the beginning? What difference does it make that this was not her biological child? And why didn’t others, who must have been aware of the abuse, step in and prevent a child’s suffering and death?
According to the news report, Mata admitted to punching his daughter and causing her to die, but he claims that the burns and injuries to the child’s hands were his girlfriend’s idea. Sadly, Mata’s was an open case with Child Protective Services, who had been alerted to the abuse by staff at the daughter’s school. But as in many other cases, it appears that the CPS agents were not quick enough to intervene. As in so many other cases, no one acted effectively until it was too late.
The reports of abuse just from one week are far too many to list. In one case, a Florida mother, Naikishia Williams, allegedly “stomped her seven-year-old daughter to death after the child spilled her cereal.” The mother has been charged with first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse and faces the death penalty. According to an affidavit, the dead child, Nia Williams, had suffered abuse, including burn marks from boiling water and broken limbs and lacerations, dating back years, and the child had been in and out of foster care along with the mother’s other three children. But in 2023, the mother regained custody after completing a “parenting course.” Even when the daughter came to school three days before her death and complained of being “very sick,” school officials were unable to treat her because the mother had not signed a consent form. The mother of Nia’s foster parent is said to have expressed frustration that no one acted to prevent Nia’s death. “There wasn’t one person who was not aware of this young lady being a dangerous mother,” she stated.
Then there’s the Arizona father who alledgedly killed his four-week-old daughter because she kept crying and then texted his wife saying he had “messed up.” An autopsy report “stated that the newborn’s ‘catastrophic’ injuries were likely caused by ‘slamming, crushing, or stomping.’”
Certainly these cases are disgusting, but they are not by any means unusual. According to the World Health Organization, “it is estimated that up to 1 billion children aged 2–17 years have experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence or neglect in the past year.”
Our media are more focused than ever on cases of horrific attacks, especially on children, and for good reason. But it may be that with so many reports of child abuse in the media, we have become inured to violence, even violence against children. The Serbian novelist and essayist Svetlana Velmar-Janković even claimed that society is addicted to what she called “the pornography of death.” One characteristic of this addiction — like all addictions — is that it produces and feeds off of a sense of withdrawal from reality and thus undermines our will to stand up against violence. Velmar-Janković herself was very much the lone victim amid an unfeeling mob: At the end of WWII, when she was still a child, she and her mother were literally thrown out onto the streets after her father, who had worked with the Nazis during the occupation, fled for his life. Should the child have suffered so terribly because of the actions of her father?
Even as I write, hundreds of millions of children around the world are at this moment suffering the torture and pain of abuse. We as individuals and as a nation must not just “look on” as these children are abused and attacked. Those of us who are in a position to prevent further abuse must act to prevent it, even if this is just making a phone call to the police.
The time for standing by and doing nothing has passed. America was not always a land of indifference, especially when it came to child abuse. It is time for Americans, as individuals and as members of a nation, to stand up and oppose the abuse of helpless victims.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
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