this woman’s work

When I was about thirteen the little girl who lived across the street told my mother that her parents were abusing her. She was about eleven and had grown up in foster care so it is true that at some point in her life she’d experienced horrific abuse and neglect. What was not true was that she was experiencing it when she asked my mom for help. My mother knew that her story – that she was only allowed to eat the food scraped into the garbage disposal – was probably not true but my mother called child protective services anyway. First she invited the neighbor girl to spend the night and then she called CPS. When the report turned out to be unwarranted, she apologized to the family but said she hoped they understood why she called. She wasn’t taking any chances, my mom explained, because no one called when she was a child and so the abuse continued.

Our chances of being saved from dire straits through the intervention of another person go down as more people become involved. That’s the lesson of Kitty Genovese. Instead of making a call to CPS, most of us would ask a friend first. “What should I do?”

My mom was brave to take in the neighbor girl and make the call. She also didn’t have any friends in the neighborhood to consult with first — no one to give advice or make her doubt herself. It’s ironic that if my mother had had more support that she might not have acted. The act (reaching out to protect a child) is morally separate from the results (an embarrassed and loving family forced to defend themselves to the state). But if she’d had more friends to talk to, they might have focused on the imagined results and talked my mom out of acting. I don’t know. I can’t ever know.

It’s less clear if there is no one saying, “Help me.” It’s hard to know what to do when you can see that there is something not quite right but there is a lot of noise in the way distorting the situation. I keep talking to people who know about as much as I do and who are just as conflicted and we all keep talking ourselves in and out of action. We keep looking for an opening because we don’t want to press. We keep, reluctantly, hoping for a crisis so that we know, yes, the situation demands our intervention.

Mostly we talk because talking almost feels like action. Analyzing every little thing seems a little bit like figuring out what to do next. Only it’s not and instead it feels like we are more mired than ever in doing nothing.

I’m frustrated. And sad. And angry at myself.

Maybe I’m too hung up on results. I want the outcome to be a certain way (where help is accepted, where the truth comes out, where change is made) and I know from past experience with this situation that I’m likely going to be as frustrated after as I am now. I also know that the situation is murky and that it could be argued that our concerned take on things is more about our values than about any moral truth. We all know we intervene if a child is eating out of the garbage disposal. What if there is no child and no garbage disposal?

Argh.