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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

What a few good women can do
On Mother's Day, a million mothers will march for gun control.
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
[03/13/00]

My brother's keeper
I have saved him all my life, but now there are too many miles between me and the paraded condoms, the muffled awe.
By Chris Colin
[03/10/00]

"Terminus"
A harrowing poem about rape and murder in the Balkans.
By Nicholas Christopher
[03/09/00]

Witness for the persecution
Croatian novelist and journalist Slavenka Drakulic tells a story of breathtaking brutality. We interview her about her new novel and her experiences.
By Kate Moses
[03/09/00]

Abortions in TV land
Good girls don't get them; bad girls do and pay a price.
By Audrey Fisch
[03/08/00]

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Two weeks ago, 6-year-old Kayla Rolland was shot and killed by a first-grade classmate. The child who fired the gun found it at "home," which happened to be a crack house where a second gun and drugs were found. The boy lived there with an uncle who was supposed to be caring for the child after the boy's father went to jail and his mother was evicted.

Also Today What a few good women can do On Mother's Day, a million mothers will march for gun control. By Jean Hanff Korelitz   When liberals lie about guns Zealots are polarizing the debate over how to stop violent crime -- and whether firearms can help. By Cathy Young

Immediately after the killing, there were some perfunctory expressions of pity and a resurrection, now almost reflexive, of the gun debate: Kids shouldn't have them; guns should have safety latches; schools should have metal detectors even for kids who are 6 years old.

But where were the 100 volunteers -- before or after the tragedy? Where were the people who recognized this boy's misery, who would hold him so that he might heal, so that he wouldn't suffocate from neglect?

Amazingly, there has been very little public outrage about the child neglect in this story, other than a finger-wagging condemnation of the boy's parents and uncle for allowing him access to guns and drugs. And that is frightening, because this is a story about neglect. The gun is merely a prop, an attention-grabbing finale to an epic tale of mistreatment and pain.

The easy response, the knee-jerk reaction that temporarily quiets that nagging feeling that the world is intrinsically unsafe for our children, is to assign blame. We can point at those bad parents, who obviously screwed up, and then feel good, because we are better parents. We do not allow our children to roam free in a crack house in a bad neighborhood.

The distance we put between ourselves and those people is created out of a lie that prevents us from getting angry enough to do anything about child neglect and abuse. We can dismiss the abusers as criminals, and we might even convince ourselves that there's nothing we can do to keep them from hurting their children.

But we can't escape the fact that the way their children are raised affects our children, too. If we understand that rescuing pilot whales is, ultimately, an act of self-preservation, why can't we make the connection with our own species?

We are letting abuse happen. Children are abused and neglected because we are unwilling to spend the money on programs to prevent it, and because we look away when we see a kid who is hostile and violent or extremely withdrawn -- two classic signs of a kid who is being hurt.

We are surprised and horrified when we hear about the worst cases: the child locked in one room for several years, the father who poured gasoline on his daughter and set her afire in the desert. But it's hard to conceive of how this applies to us, until something like the Michigan shooting grabs the headlines.

Next page | Broken bones, fractured skulls, cigarette burns