I wish I could be very far from here - pretty much. I am secretly afraid of a lot of
things - very much. I feel alone even when there are people around me - pretty much. I worry
most of the time - very much. I worry about what my parents will say to me - very much. Often
I have trouble getting my breath - very much. I have trouble swallowing - very much. My
feelings are easily hurt - very much. It is hard for me to go to sleep at night - very much. I
feel someone will tell me I do things the wrong way - very much. I often feel sick in my
stomach - very much. I worry when I go to bed at night - very much. I often worry about what
could happen to my parents - very much. I get tired easily - very much. I am nervous - very
much. These answers were given by a 9 year old as he responded to questions on a
psychological battery of tests that measured the mental health of children. Another section
had to do with emotional support: "Who do you talk to when you're upset?" An innocuous
enough question, as was his answer: "My brother." Then I asked, "How old is your
brother?" "4."
In 1991 I moonlighted as a research assistant on a study to look at the
mental health of children between the ages of 6 and 12 living in homeless shelters in Los
Angeles County. The objectives of our study were threefold: to describe the mental health
and academic problems among sheltered homeless children - depression, behaviour problems,
severe academic delays, witness to violence; to identify which homeless children have more
problems; and to relate the use of health services and mental health interventions to
children's needs.
In our sample of 169 children, the following emerged in the battery of
child mental health problems: depressive symptoms - 37%; total behaviour problems - 28%;
receptive vocabulary delay - 47%; reading delay - 39%; and witness to violence - 42%.
Fifty
six per cent of the children were between the ages of 6 and 9; 44% were between 10 and 12.
They were evenly divided between male and female. The ethnic breakdown was 44% black, 35%
Hispanic, and 21% white. The mean age for the onset of homelessness was 7.6 years; 28% had
been homeless for more than one year; 36% had been homeless for more than two months in the
past year; and 48% had had two residences in the past year.
Of the parents we interviewed
61% had an income of less than $10 000 (£15 000) and their mean age was 34.
Where
home is the car
On my first day I sit in a church shelter in Venice, California, where I
watch a child left in a corner of the sanctuary, wrapped in his shelter swaddling clothes.
The woman who drops him there puts a bottle at the sleeping child's feet and shuffles off.
When the apartments on the periphery of this shelter fill the overflow sleeps in the church.
On the second day I interview a mother with six children, all of whom at one time or another
interrupt for the car keys she keeps on a shoelace around her neck because her family lives
in their car.
In a shelter in a Los Angeles barrio, there is a
boy of about 7 whom the psychiatrist concludes is a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. As his
mother attempts to tutor him with his homework, I watch as he cringes under her touch. The
mother divides her attention between him and his 6 month old brother. She insists that her
son has potential: "I know he can do it," she says, her voice raised in a kind of protest.
Against what? Her present circumstances? The past? An uncertain future? It becomes obvious
to me that the boy is going to be hit, has been hit, that the mother is preoccupied with the
younger child who is thin and not breathing properly. I ask if I can help the boy with his
homework. The mother acquiesces, then informs me that she is scheduled to see a doctor for
her drug problem. But her words turn into a discontinuous babble of rage, as the boy comes
over to his brother and winds up the musical toy in his hand.
I sit with the boy for an
hour. His attention span is limited, his comprehension of simple maths abysmal. When I place
my hand in comfort on his tiny shoulders, he is still and unyielding, his body armoured, at
his tender age, against the belligerence and bullets of life. This image is strong, as the
talk that day in this shelter is about the driveby shooting of a boy that some of the
children witnessed the night before.
"Ugly. Sorry!!"
In another shelter on the
eastern outskirts of the county a 9 year old girl becomes increasingly agitated as her
mother talks about her in the interview. The girl notices the writing on my left hand. I
write there to remind myself of things I have to do. The girl's actions are swift and
impulsive as she begins writing on her arm. Hard. Deep. To break her obsessive, hurtful
scripting, I scramble for paper and ask if she can write with her left hand, the hand she
does not usually write with. She ravages the paper like a hungry child a loaf of bread, then
runs out of the shelter, "away from home," as she has done countless times
before.
After her return, she attacks her younger sister. She has
done this before, even when the mother holds the child in her arms. I do not find her
crumpled words on the floor until I am ready to leave: "I am stubid, I am ugly, I am crazy,
I am trash, I am not special, I am not." Self deprecation colours another of the drawings
one of the girls did for us. It is a picture of herself, captioned, "Ugly. Sorry!!"
Often I find that I do not want to think about what I am witness to, but I am pursued in
a way I do not anticipate in that I take the homeless home with me: they invade my dreams
and ask if they can sleep in my study. They speak in Spanish, capturing me in a language I
do not comprehend. Images, sounds, smells, dreams of children who have no voice, who believe
they have no rights, whose innocence is wounded daily, where overcrowding, for example,
contributes to abuse on all levels because families cannot protect their
children.
Happy with her feet in the air
There is a girl
at the Salvation Army shelter who can tell her biggest secret to no one, who can talk to no
one when she is really upset. She feels alone even when there are people around her. She was
last in school five months ago. She does not get to wear what she wants and thinks her
clothes are disgusting. She has to sleep under the heater so she always feels hot. She is in
the shelter with her mother and sister and tells me she "takes care of them," yet when
asked about how her family gets along says, "My mom and my sister are together but I'm
always to the side." She likes to do her homework: "It makes me happy because it makes me
feel like a teenager." This is because she gets to lie on her stomach [on the bed] and put
her feet up in the air.
After she correctly identifies a picture of a marriage ceremony
as an example of the word "ritual," she begins to improvise abstractly: "I don't much
like funerals. I had to go to a funeral once. It was the funeral of my friend. And I didn't
really want to go. She had one of those things around her neck [a brace], and she was in a
wheelchair. And she couldn't walk. Her father, he drinks sometimes, he's a drunk, but he
wasn't drinking this time. And one night he comes home, and he wasn't drunk, but somehow he
accidentally knocked my friend out of her wheelchair and she fell over and died." There is
a momentary silence before she continues: "My father cries sometimes. And sometimes he
fools me and only pretends to cry. And it makes me so angry when he does that because I
can't tell when he's fooling."
I discover later that she was sexually abused at the age
of 18 months by her mother's boyfriend, that she has seen a man shot. But for now, what I
see is a young girl facing womanhood, who, like any teenager, likes to do her homework on
the bed, her feet up in the air.
In a Watts shelter I interview two brothers. The younger
speaks of his brother in adoring, stuttering words. He describes his coat to me (it is dirty
and ugly), as "lovely." When his brother comes in his eyes are red. After I read the
consent form to him his words come out in a flood. He talks about a fall he has had in the
bathroom and is quick to say that his mother does not hit him, except when he is bad. His
talk becomes animated and fevered. He asks me if he would be taken away if he told. He is
direct, frightened. When his mother comes into the room he stiffens, as do I. She is loud
and abrasive, she does not have the time for the interview, she wants to do it tomorrow. The
boy is restless, cannot focus or concentrate, and seems short of patience. He complains that
his back hurts during the interview, and pulls up his shirt to show me - the bruise is
halfway up his back. I report this to the psychiatrist, who, after questioning me, decides
to file a suspected child abuse report with the county's social services.
Differences
between surviving and flourishing widen
The litany of stories and the barrage of images
begin to coalesce; the differences between surviving and flourishing widen. I see a woman
haphazardly toss her child on to a sofa. The child's asthmatic cries are unrelenting, and
his mother takes many minutes to return to him. She has had other children taken from her
and placed in foster homes. She does not know where they are.
At some juncture the
homeless stop asking to sleep in my house and the dreams in Spanish subside. I am left with
the voices of children who will have no voice unless it erupts in violence or into the
underbelly of our society. When you see the homeless, when you read about shelters, there is
a stratum you do not see: invisible crisis children staring at you from the other side of
statistics.
And I keep seeing the animation and fear on the faces of those children in
east Los Angeles. These children of tender age, vulnerable spirit, wait for an advent of
healing that will allow them to seal the bullet holes. Their stories are ones of violated
innocence. And violated innocence is a crime against the spirit, a crime against our common
humanity. As Emily Dickinson wrote: The Things that never can come back, are several -
Childhood - some forms of Hope - the Dead.
Health Sciences Program,
Santa Monica,
California 90407 - 2138,
USA
Barbara J
Genovese,
research assistant
