More on Child Abuse: Pecking-Order Abuse

When I first moved out of my parents' home 30 years ago, I moved to an apartment of my own on the first floor of a residence at the intersection of Penn and Overington Streets in the Frankford section of Philadelphia.

A husband, a wife, and a little girl, about six years of age, lived in the apartment above. Every few nights it was the same routine. The husband would scream at and hit the wife, and then he would go to work. After the husband's departure for work, the wife would then engage in pecking-order abuse, screaming at and hitting the little girl.

I heard the slapping through the floor.

The little girl would show up with black eyes and black and blue marks. When the wife screamed at the little girl, she screamed like a banshee. It was unearthly, in its quality. I could believe that the screaming did more damage to the little girl's personality than the slapping and punching.

Back then, I was stupid. I believed in minding my own business. It did not even occur to me to be afraid of retribution if I called the authorities. I just wasn't interested in calling the authorities.

In the course of the events described in the previous article on child abuse, it occurred to me, later, that when the wife, Trang, agreed in advance to Thanh's use of a fiberglass rod to whip their daughter, it was pecking-order abuse. It was worse than what I used to hear coming from the apartment above my head on Penn Street. This time, it didn't just happen for no reason at all. The little girl was whipped with a fiberglass rod for being good !!!

It also had some bad, evil structure to it, in another way.

Once Trang called from her cell phone for help. We ran over to the house, and found her on the floor, curled-up in the fetal position, wild-eyed, shaking, shaking, shaking. Thanh was walking back and forth in the hall, like a robot, head tilted to one side, smiling oddly, eyes open but not seeing. To this day I don't think that he understood that I was there. I picked Trang up, carried her out, and handed her over to my wife, to be brought to our house, where she and their daughter stayed for about a week.

When Trang recovered, she told me how Thanh had grabbed her by her hair and held her down in front of the bedroom mirror and screamed at her, for 5 or 6 hours, total, "until I smiled like a good Vietnamese wife should smile."

Last year, after their separation, Thanh had visitation with their daughter, one day, over at his sister's house.

I went over to the house to discuss something with the sister, unaware that Thanh and Trang's daughter was there. Outside the front door, I heard moaning. I thought, "The sister is punishing her child." I knocked with my "shave-and-a-haircut" knock. Inside the moaning voice said, "Come in, Mr. Peter." I thought, "WHAT! IT'S THANH'S DAUGHTER!" I went in, and there she was, all alone in the house, kneeling straight-up-and-down on the wood floor, crying from the pain of kneeling a long time on wood. I said, "What are you doing??? This is crazy!!!"

She answered, through her tears, "Mr. Peter, my dad says that I can't get up off this wood floor to stop the pain until I start smiling like a good Vietnamese daughter should! If I get caught getting up before I am smiling in front of my dad, my aunt or my grandmom, I will be punished even worse!"

I thought, "He is doing the same thing, now, to his daughter!"

But it wasn't just the dad, Thanh, who engaged in the abuse. Once, when I called the daughter or she called me -- I forget which -- last year, after her mother's separation and divorce, I heard a very, very odd sound in the background, in her house.

I thought, "What the Helll???..." So, I said to the little girl, "What is that strange sound I hear on your end???"

The little girl answered happily, "Oh, it's okay, Mr. Peter. My mom does that all of the time. That's what my mom sounds like as she is screaming, screaming, screaming at me. She is careful to never let you hear that screaming. She just doesn't know that I am on the phone, right now, so you get to hear it!"

Just then, I remembered the unearthly screaming of the mother, screaming, screaming, screaming at her little daughter, who lived in the apartment above me, 3 decades ago.

It was the same.

Parents, stop destroying your little ones.

Just love them!

Please!

Child Abusers: Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child, Right?

Wrong.

There are probably some fundamentalistically-oriented who are upset at my rejection of the proverb, but Scripture isn't meant to always be taken literally. Sometimes, it teaches spiritual truth through stories of human error and through proverbs that are wrong.

The spiritual meaning of the Biblical verse underlying the proverb...

He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes. Proverbs 13:24

....is not "whip your kids with a stick if they are bad."

The Hebrew term translated "rod" generally means "branch" of a tree, or "stick" -- a piece of wood.

And tree or part of a tree, in Bible typology, refers to the cross of Christ.

"Son," here -- ben in Hebrew -- refers to a male child, where children in Bible typology generally refer to converts, and maleness refers to being God-empowered, or godly.

So, the verse, at the spiritual level, is saying, "Apply Christ's cross to them, to preserve their faith" -- teach them about Christ, love them as Christ would.

Not "beat them with a stick."

The worst example of such beating of children I ever saw was in the house of my Asian neighbors, a few years ago.

Many Asians come to this country with what amounts to 1950s American values -- including the bad ones, having to do with hitting and whipping children.

My Vietnamese neighbors were in the thick of their native culture's values.

At one point, the wife was sick of being abused by her financially-responsible but brutal husband. She left him, flying herself and their daughter to the home of her own mother in Florida.

A few weeks later, feeling unwelcomed by her mother in her mother's home, she returned to the house next door, and after cleaning-up the mess left by her husband when he ransacked the house to express his anger at her departure, she resolved to give her marriage one more try.

She entered into an agreement where in return for concessions by him, she would allow his values connected to discipline of their little girl to reign supreme in the house.

Now this wasn't a bad little girl. Their daughter, 8 years old at the time, was an angel.

Despite her good character, their home suddenly became a House of Terror.

While the husband was at work one day, I went to the house to talk to the wife about a real estate settlement I was managing for her real estate business, as her lawyer.

As we walked through the cleaned-up living room, I saw a yellow fiberglass rod leaning in the corner.

I said, "What's that for, Trang?"

"That's for our daughter, Peter."

"What???!!!," I exclaimed with shock. "Trang, your daughter is wonderful!!! She loves both of you. She obeys. She's good in school. Her grades are good. Why in Heaven's Holy Name would you prepare to punish her with a special weapon???!!!"

"Peter," she answered, "We only have to do it once. Then, she'll never forget it!"

"Trang," I said frostily, "She's beginning to enter the age where it is 'respect time,' not 'whipping time.' You are so wrong! And Thanh won't stop at doing it once!"

That night, at around 9:00 p.m., Trang called me over to their house to help their daughter with special math homework -- 25 time-consuming math problems of a variety which neither Trang nor her husband Thanh understood.

When I knocked on the door with "a-shave-and-a-haircut" rhythm, their daughter, recognizing my knock, ran to the door and threw it open and held out her arms. "MR. PETER!" she declared, with a broad smile, knowing that her happiness gave me such joy!

Inside, I immediately "smelled" something "sober" about the situation. Thanh was in the kitchen, for the first time doing doing household chores -- the dinner dishes -- but in silence. I wanted to tease him about the frilly apron he was wearing, but I kept my mouth shut for the sake of peace. Trang was in the living room, sweeping the floor. Their daughter was her usual happy, funny, hardworking self. We began the math problems. The daughter paid close attention, while the parents worked with mysterious silence. I looked up and saw the fiberglass rod still in its corner in the living room. We worked hard, over the next hour. Because the daughter had missed so much school during her parents' separation, I had to teach her a variety of math completely foreign to her. I apologized to Trang and Thanh for taking so much time, but they said, "It's okay, Peter." At 9:55 p.m., we were on math problem #25 -- the last one, and also the most difficult. From the kitchen, Thanh spoke to his daughter in Vietnamese...

"Dah di dah di dah di dah di dah di dah," and he held out the dish towel, obviously asking her to dry the rest of the dishes. I realized that he had been listening, and was testing his daughter just to see if she would blindly obey a difficult order.

Their daughter answered in a mix of Vietnamese and English, in a pleading voice, pointing at the clock on the wall...

"Dah di dah di dah di dah Mr. Peter, dah di dah di dah di dah go home, dah di dah di dah di dah last math problem, dah di dah di dah 5 more minutes. Please, Dad, otherwise I can't finish this last problem. It is the hardest problem."

"THAT DOES IT!," Thanh growled. He dropped the towel to the floor, and ran toward the fiberglass rod.

I jumped up and ran over to Thanh. "Thanh," I whispered, "She's just trying to be a respectful neighbor. She is balancing -- doing what you do every day! She's trying to finish homework now, so that a neighbor giving free help is not forced to wait!"

"STAY OUT OF THIS, PETER!," he growled, picking up the rod. I ran over to Trang. "Trang," I whispered, "He's about to whip your daughter for being good, not bad!"

"Peter," she whispered, "Go home. This must be done."

Upset, I picked up my books and papers and left. As the door closed behind me, I heard their daughter scream loudly and cry.

Two days later was "babysitting Saturday," when my family took care of the daughter while Thanh and Trang were at work.

Since I had tried to save her, their daughter, when she came over, lowered the waist of her pants and raised her shirt just enough to let us see a part of a deep red gash running from her buttocks below the waist of her pants to her back beneath her shirt.

"Mr. Peter," she said, "Look!"

Last year, when I was still babysitting their daughter, she asked me, "Mr. Peter, do you remember that time my father whipped me with that rod?"

"I can't forget it, honey," I answered sadly.

"Mr. Peter, can you tell me why I was whipped? I don't know. I never knew why."

"Little one," I answered, "You were whipped because your dad, at 10:00 at night, asked you to make me wait to help you finish the last of 25 math problems, while you took over drying dishes. You gently pleaded that I was a guest in your home at 10:00 at night, rendering a free service by helping you with your homework, and so it made more sense for you to finish the homework first, so that I could go home, and then you would dry dishes."

"What!!!" she responded. "But that means that my dad whipped me for being a good person!"

"That is correct, little one. You were whipped with a stick because rather than hurt a neighbor who was helping you, you tried to do things in a good and moral way.”

"Did you know that he did not stop whipping me after that? He whipped me again and again and again, with that stick, with hangers, and with a belt."

"Well, I warned your mom that he wouldn't stop."

"What did my mom say to you, when you whispered to her that night to stop what was about to happen?"

I lied to their daughter in my response -- and I wish I hadn't. I have never stopped feeling obscene for my lie: "She told me that she felt that whipping you was unjust, but that for the sake of keeping the family together she would force herself to put up with this."

I didn't tell their daughter that her mother agreed in advance to support her whipping, and that all she told me to do was leave.

The whipping just isn't necessary.

Just love them.

Please.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Sometimes, it's the little law cases which are the most interesting.

In Magnolia, New Jersey, one night, around the year 2000, a client who owned a gasoline station asked me to pick up some documents he had left in the gas station in the custody of one of the attendants.

Because the gas station was open all night and on the White Horse Pike, a very busy road, it tended to attract a high proportion of the robberies in the area, by masked men seeking money for drug purchases. It was the "robbery victim of choice" among bad guys, so to speak.

To deal with the robbery problem, the owner purchased the biggest, meanest German shepherd attack dog he could find, and chained him up to a dog house not too far from the gas pumps. Whenever a customer came the dog would come out of its doghouse to inspect. If the customer did not bother it, it ignored him. If it hated the customer, it would start barking wildly, pulling on its chain to try to sink its teeth into the customer's throat. It was really, really mean!

And he was very, very good at deterring robberies. The robbers apparently worried that the dog made too much noise, and that there might be a way to easily release him. Robberies stopped.

When I drove into the gas station at around 10:00 p.m., and got out of my car to retrieve the papers, the dog saw me, recognized me and ignored me.

As I stood talking to the attendant, a woman drove her car up to the gas pumps and got out. She was 40ish, and heavy, and very sober-looking.

The dog did not like her at all. He jumped up and and growled and barked viciously, pulling on his chain with all of his heavily muscled strength.

Suddenly, as I walked with the attendant over to the woman's car, the dog's chain snapped, and the dog ran full speed toward the woman, jaws opened wide. As he got close to the woman, he jumped and flew through the air toward her, his teeth aimed squarely for her neck.

The gas station attendant simultaneously ran forward to the woman. He raised his fist, and just as the dog's teeth were about one-quarter of a second from being planted in the woman's throat, as she stood there, paralyzed, with a look of fright on her face, the attendant punched the dog hard on the side of the head, interrupting his attack, splattering him to the pavement. Shocked, the dog got up and ran into his dog house.

I saw the incident. The woman could not deny it -- she was less than a second away from getting a mouth full of teeth planted into the flesh of her neck, and her throat torn out, but the attendant had saved her.

She turned around, reached into her car, brought out a pad of summonses, and issued to the attendant an SPCA summons for Cruelty to Animals!

I put my hand on the attendant's shoulder. I said, "What this woman just did is evil. Don't worry. Your employer will hire me to represent you."

Technically, if I was a witness I should not be representing the Defendant. But that was really not a problem. In night court a few weeks later, I conferenced the matter with the prosecutor as follows.

"I saw what happened. What the SPCA representative is doing in this case is just plain evil, to put it bluntly. By punching the dog hard on the side of the head just before the dog's teeth reached her neck and ripped out a mouthful of her neck and killed her, the Defendant saved her life. He clearly saved her life. I would describe the woman from the SPCA as morally disgusting, and as more of an animal than the attack dog.

"If she proceeds with this case, then I am resigning as defense counsel and I will testify for the Defendant."

The prosecutor whispered what I had told him to the woman from the SPCA. She said that she wanted to go forward with the case, anyway. I resigned. As we waited for the case to go on, she sat there, staring at me. Finally, she asked for a postponement because she said she felt sick.

And she never came to court again after that.

We had to appear two more times. At the third session, the Court dismissed the charge, but imposed $30 in costs upon the Defendant. I found this insulting to human dignity. I jumped up and said, "Your honor, my client did punch the dog, but he did it to save the woman's life. I saw it happen. He did save her life. Rather than withdraw the charge, to keep me from resigning and corroborating the defense, she made us come to court three times, in my opinion to punish us for being honest."

The judge said, "Costs on the SPCA."

And then he looked at the Clerk and said, "And make sure that you collect the money."

So, there is justice.