IT WAS A STORY OF ALMOST UNSPEAKABLE HORROR. A bright, vivacious six-year- old was brutalized by her mother and stepfather, sexually abused, hung from a shower rod “just to see if she would die,” tattooed with ring imprints that police first thought were cigarette burns, and beaten until her bones were protruding from her fingers. When the girl lost control of her bowels under this torture, her mother smeared her face with feces, used her head to mop the floor, and finally threw her against a concrete wall, killing her.
Yet it took only three days for the New York Daily News to find the real culprit — Newt Gingrich and the Republicans. They were responsible because flinthearted budget cuts had left harried social workers unable to deal with the overload of cases. It is, apparently, unacceptable for Newt Gingrich to implicate the welfare system in some grisly murders, but it is entirely acceptable to implicate him in this one — him, and a general social malaise that had the papers talking of Kitty Genovese. “She was not killed by an individual, but by the silence of many,” proclaimed Time, carefully excerpting a statement made by the Rev. Gianni Agostinelli at the funeral.
If indeed New York City’s Child Welfare Administration (CWA) had been neglectful, no one would ever know. Hiding behind state confidentiality laws to protect complainants, its executive deputy director, Kathryn Croft, refused to open files on the case. Someone in her offce, however, did manage to leak a memo from Croft to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in which the deputy administrator blamed budget cuts. “The child and her family should have got services,” argued Croft.
“With appropriate interventions, services, and follow up, [Elisa] would be alive today.”
In fact, as the records showed, CroftS agency and other government agencies were intimately involved all along. Their efforts, however, lad been on the side of the child’s killer — her mother.
Elisa Izquierdo was born in 1989 while her mother, Awilda, was living in a Brooklyn homeless shelter. The father, Gustavo Izquierdo, was a cook at the facility. Awilda — who had two older children by another man — was addicted to crack. When Elisa was born addicted, hospital social workers immediately gave her to Gustavo. Miraculously, the young Cuban refugee turned out to be a good father. He placed Elisa in a Montessori school, where the vivacious girl was introduced to Prince Michael of Greece, who promised to pay Elisa’s tuition to the exclusive Brooklyn Friends Academy.
In the meantime, Awilda had married Carlos Lopez, a crack addict and small- time criminal, and managed to regain custody of her first two children from relatives. She also secured unsupervised visits with Elisa. It was on these visits that the beatings and torture began.
As Elisa told her father of the beatings, Gustavo became alarmed and petitioned the family court to end the visits. Officials at the Montessori school also filed a complaint with the CWA, to no avail. Then Gustavo contracted cancer. As his condition worsened, he made plans to leave Elisa with relatives in Cuba. He died before he could make the journey. A cousin, Elsa Canizares, who also knew of the beatings, tried to prevent Elisa’s return to her mother and offered to adopt her.
Here is the way Time describes their confrontation in family court: ” Canizares arrived for the June 1994 custody hearing alone. Awilda, by contrast, brought a small army. Her lawyer that day was from the Legal Aid Society, which maintained that its case workers had visited the Lopezes and found that ‘Elisa expressed a strong desire to live with her mother’ and siblings. Also backing Awilda was the CWA. . . . Finally, there was Project Chance, a federally funded parenting program for the poor run by a man named Bart O’Connor.”
In other words, the whole federally funded poverty estab ishment lined up for Awilda, doing what it does best — aiding and abetting the worst instincts of the poor. It was no contest. Awilda got the child. From there it was all downhill. Husband and wife beat her daughter so badly that she began to regress. She lost control of her bowels and refused to communicate. This convinced Awilda that the child’s late father had “put the devil in her.”
At one point, in a moment of rationality, Awilda pleaded with O’Connor of Project Chance to take the girl off her hands. O’Connor visited the apartment, found urine and feces everywhere, and agreed. Then Awilda changed her mind. O’Connor contacted CWA (which reportedly said it was “too busy”), but found himself hogtied by federal regulations governing his own agency, which forbade him from filing Awilda’s statements to the CWA without her permission.
Meanwhile, pleas and warnings to the CWA from school authorities, neighbors, and relatives were all brushed aside. Then in November, Carlos went back to prison for violating his drug parole. Awilda apparently cracked. After Elisa’s murder, police said they had never seen a child so brutally beaten.
The epidemic of child abuse that supposedly reveals the hard-hearted core of America in fact has nothing to do with the size of social-services budgets or the caring or non-caring of institutional bureaucracies. No government agency, no matter how draconic or intrusive, could possibly police every home for child abuse. Rather, the real problem is the breakdown of other social institutions — all too often facilitated by government programs.
To be specific, the much touted epidemic of child abuse is in fact the result of one thing — the growing number of children who are living with adult men who are not their fathers. As David Blankenhorn points out in Fatherless America, the prevailing ideology among social workers and academics has become that “fathers don’t matter.” Anyone can supposedly be a father, and as long as there is a “male role model” somewhere on the horizon, single mothers can be entrusted with a growing portion of the nation’s children.
Yet this is manifestly untrue. One of the most carefully hidden facts of the ctrrent “crisis” is that the vast majority of child abuse is being committed by stepfathers and “boyfriends” who are “filling the male role” in single-parent households. According to one recent study, a child living with an unrelated male is 40 times as likely to be the victim of abuse or incest as one living with its natural father. Yet the creation of these deadly constellations is continually aided and abetted by welfare, a $ 25-billion-a- year subsidy that enables women to have children by a series of men without worrying much about social or economic consequences.
When such a “serial mother” finally hooks up with a man, that man is likely to be indifferent, even hostile, to the welfare of her previous children — as testified by the “wicked stepmothers and stepfathers” that populate the fairy tales.
The Elisa Izquierdo story was a heartbreaking example of this brutal logic. Carlos Lopez, the third father in Awilda’s life, seeras to have been particularly resentful of Elisa, who ws an interloper and nearly the same age as his own two children. He was bad enough in any case.
A month after the birth of his second child, he stabbed Awilda 17 times, putting her in the hospital. But he seems to have concentrated on Elisa. (He was the one who hung her on the shower rod.) As usually happens in such dysfunctional families, the weakest, most vulnerable member becomes the scapegoat. Awilda soon became convinced that Elisa was “possessed by the devil” and (perhaps to placate her husband) began abusing her as well.
The death of Elisa Izquierdo, then, is a tragic tale of lower-class life — the inertia of poverty, the emotional chaos of families that fail to form, the inability of people with even the best of intentions to make much of a difference. But all this is much too complex for public discourse. And so it is easier to blame “uncaring bureaucracies” and argue for more funding.
Two weeks after Elisa’s death, the city’s attention was riveted once again when another six-year-old girl was stabbed with a hypodermic needle by a crazed vagrant on a midtown subway platform. The public will have to wait months to see if the girl has been infected with AIDS. (Privacy laws precluded the three-time escapee from mental institutions from being tested himself.)
Probably this one will le blamed on the government’s failure to provide enough sterilized needles.
William Tucker, a writer living in Brooklyn, contributed “Why We Should Decriminalize Crime” to the Nov. 27 edition of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
