o There were 678,810 different, verified victims of child abuse and neglect in the U.S. in 2012.
o An average of four children die of abuse in the U.S. every day.
o There were more than 3,700 reports of suspected felony child abuse in Clark County in 2013.
SOURCES: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services; Legacy Salmon Creek Medical center; Arthur D. Curtis Children’s Justice Center 2014 report on child abuse in Clark County
o There were 678,810 different, verified victims of child abuse and neglect in the U.S. in 2012.
o An average of four children die of abuse in the U.S. every day.
o There were more than 3,700 reports of suspected felony child abuse in Clark County in 2013.
SOURCES: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services; Legacy Salmon Creek Medical center; Arthur D. Curtis Children's Justice Center 2014 report on child abuse in Clark County
For more information, go to legacyhealth.org
For more information, go to legacyhealth.org
There were no laws, no precedents, nothing to protect Dave Pelzer from abuse when he was a child. There was only a culture of privacy and silence, of everyone knowing their place.
“It’s a private family matter,” was Pelzer’s mother’s reply to questions about little Dave’s well-being. “It’s not your concern.” That was good enough for most grown-ups — even Pelzer’s own father, a respected local firefighter, who was raised to believe that women ruled the roost while men brought home the bacon and stayed above the fray, Pelzer said.
So Pelzer spent years suffering his alcoholic mother’s abuse, which was eventually judged some of the most spectacularly awful mistreatment California authorities had ever seen, he said. He was beaten, poisoned, malnourished, burned and degraded. He was isolated from the rest of his family.
Most appalling of all, Pelzer told 530 people at a fundraising luncheon for Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center’s Child Abuse Assessment Team on Friday, was this: “They knew. Everybody knew.” All along, he said, there were schoolteachers, neighbors and even local police who understood what was going on in the Pelzer household.
They couldn’t avoid knowing, he said, because young Dave was silent, starving, smelly and scared. He didn’t speak for years, he said. School staff tried to fortify him on the sly with fast-digesting food — white bread, Twinkies — so it wouldn’t be obvious that he had eaten anything if his mother called him home and forced him to vomit.
Nowadays, Pelzer, 53, has concluded, “My mother was just sick.” But he was too little to know any different at first, he said. “I thought it was normal. One troubled kid in the family.” Eventually, he realized that his mother was trying to kill him — she admitted as much later in life, he said — and that he had at least some power. He could trick her, delay her, distract her. “I was learning how to work it,” he said. He could play the game and survive.
He was all of 8 years old when he started summoning that inner strength. He was 12 when authorities finally rescued him and placed him in foster care. He was 17, and still feeling “repulsive,” when his foster mother insisted on a special project: He was going to stand in front of a mirror, look himself in the eye and start speaking. It was agonizing, he said, but in the end he came through.
“She cried, and I cried,” he said. “And now, we can’t shut (me) the hell up!”
Pelzer enlisted in the Air Force and served during the Gulf War; he also became a dedicated volunteer and won awards like California Volunteer of the Year and Ten Outstanding Young Americans. That was all before he wrote “A Child Called ‘It,’ ” a memoir that became a runaway bestseller when it was published in 1995. Since then, Pelzer has written six more books that combine memoir and self-help inspiration, several of which have been best-sellers.
Loving life
Pelzer is a full-time lecturer whose slightly off-the-wall, wisecracking style was on display Friday. He invoked the memory of two beloved comedians who recently passed away — Robin Williams and Joan Rivers — and proceeded to zip through sound-bite imitations of celebrities like Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger and President Bill Clinton in unmistakably Williamsesque fashion.
Williams and Rivers may have had their demons, he said, but they always found a way to give joy and love to their audiences. Likewise, Pelzer said, the ghastly past that should have destroyed him has only grown his appreciation for the good things in life.
“I am the most blessed person I know,” he said. His own son is now 28 years old, married to a loving woman and working in law enforcement. All that’s a miracle for a father who easily could never have made it this far, he said. “I am loving life,” he said.
A few weeks ago, she said, an 8-year-old girl had come to the team for a sexual abuse evaluation. When it was time for her physical exam, the girl was told she had no options except to wear the standard, plain, one-size-fits-all hospital gown.
But she wanted a princess gown, and not just for herself. You really need princess and superhero outfits for boys and girls, she insisted.
Staff response, Copeland said, was: “What a great idea! We’ve all had our own behinds hanging out a time or two” from those awkward, unattractive standard-issue gowns. It was one of the nurses who designed an initial gown pattern and even sewed a few prototypes for the young princesses and superheroes facing medical examinations.
Copeland said she can’t get over the way that little girl was so “worried about other kids” and their exams on top of her own. “If that’s not a superhero,” she said, “I don’t know what is.”
