In Massachusetts: A Hot Line to Tragedy

By Phil Blampied

When the phone rings in the screening room, Dick Belisle grabs the receiver, takes a long, practiced drag on his cigarette before placing it carefully on the edge of his ashtray, pulls up his notepad and begins asking questions.

The screening room has wall-to-wall carpeting. Spider plants spill down from pots hung near the windows. A poster urges lucky tourists to ski the slopes at nearby Westford. Belisle's manner is businesslike. At 35 he is already graying and his narrow face has a mournful, clerkish look. But the transactions he records in this brightly furnished office in Worcester, Mass., deal not with commerce but with cruelty. And cruelty of a kind that few people can contemplate with any measure of equanimity--the torture of small children by their parents.

A casual, understated man with a slight New England accent, Belisle has spent the past nine years working for the Massachusetts Children's Protective Service, trying to prevent adults from beating, maiming and sometimes murdering children. He lives with the knowledge that such efforts are often unsuccessful. He also knows that reported incidents of child abuse in the state of Massachusetts have jumped from 122 in 1967 to 15,000 last year, an increase only partly due to a 1974 law redefining child abuse to include "neglect." "Nine years ago," he admits, "I thought I could go in and talk to parents and correct mistakes they'd been making for the past 33 years of their lives. But there's no way."

Belisle describes himself as a "burnt out" case. The condition is familiar to child-abuse workers, whose divorce rate is above the national average. They suffer a notably high proportion of nervous breakdowns. After a few years on the job, many leave the service to earn a living in totally different fields in order to escape the tension and responsibility. Belisle, at least, still works for the protective service. But he does not go out on cases. He sits at the phone in the screening room. Phone work, screening incoming reports on child abuse, is at least one remove from the desperate daily reality confronted by field workers. And that is where emotionally exhausted veterans like Belisle take refuge.

Under law the children's protective, or child defender, service is part of the welfare department of Massachusetts. And like similar services elsewhere in the U.S. the state's child defender force has lately been expanded and given a larger budget, partly because public concern about battered children has grown dramatically, along with increases in reported abuses. In the state of Massachusetts the subject now seems particularly urgent because of recent cases, especially that of an eleven-year-old Braintree girl whose father sued to get her back from a state-run shelter where she had been placed for her own protection. A judge gave in to his demand. The girl went home on Aug. 1. On Sept. 23 she died in a hospital, apparently after being beaten repeatedly over a period of weeks.

In most states parental rights to discipline their children are limited only by a patchwork of legal injunctions against serious physical injury and flagrant neglect. Members of the protective service must hide their own anger and proceed with a blend of cajolery, compassion and very limited powers of compulsion as they try to protect abused children. The welfare department's official charge, though, is with nothing less than "preserving healthy family life" in the state. Often, helping children means trying to bring parents to such a condition of emotional stability that they will no longer want to beat their kids.

Child-abuse cases go through screeners like Belisle to an "assessment" worker, the job Belisle used to handle. Eventually they reach the various social workers and services (counseling, referral to day care centers and Alcoholics Anonymous in local neighborhoods). Having been abused as a child seems to lead to a repetition with one's own children. Beyond that, the causes of child abuse seem to be deep-rooted anger and frustration and an intolerable sense of physical or emotional inadequacy. Anger most of all "They don't know how to control it," says Belisle's co-worker Anna Ferzoco. "And when they get angry they hit." Some women can be taught not to hurt their children simply by getting instruction, literally, in such things as how to do housework efficiently, care for the child properly, cook meals. Women who have been abandoned by husbands are frequent child abusers, though they often depend emotionally on the very children they hurt. Sometimes the emotional role is tragically reversed. Belisle recalls a hearing before a judge in which a mother was fighting a protective service attempt to put her small son up for adoption to protect him from her beating. The child fell while getting into the benches and hurt his head. The mother didn't flinch. "A few minutes later," says Belisle, "the judge decided to take the child away, and the mother burst into tears. And the little boy leaped up and started comforting his mother."

When known counseling methods fail, the child should be taken from its parents. With a rueful laugh Belisle recalls that when his own daughter was in first grade and the teacher asked what her father did, she replied, "My daddy swipes kids." Separating child from family is always a horrifying and legally difficult matter. "It's like being a member of the Gestapo," says Belisle. "As bad as you know the parents are, there they stand, in the doorway, screaming 'I love my child.' The neighbors gather, whispering and pointing. The mother starts calling you four-letter words. You may be helping the kid in the long run, but it's a nightmare for any child."

At such times Belisle, like other field workers, tries to concentrate on the pain the child has endured and is likely to endure again if it does not escape from home. The screening room file cabinets are filled with case histories: babies with cigarette burns on their tongues; small children whose backs have been scarred with human bite marks; innumerable children with the classic child-abuse injury: the telltale "spiral fracture," a twisting, lightning-shaped bone break caused by extreme twisting of a spindly arm. But having invoked the memory of such things. Belisle gets a measure of relief by correcting the statistical record. "Those are the most dramatic cases," he adds. "Mostly we get kids with bruises whose parents hit them too much."

Approaching a family on a first childabuse report is also a touchy, and often a profoundly harrowing, moment. The worker is instructed to be cordial, helpful, as direct as possible. And never to show anger -- which is likely to destroy any chance there is of parental cooperation. "I used to sit in the car a few minutes before going in, psyching myself, making a deliberate effort to be calm," Belisle recalls. "But I almost ruined one case by blowing my top." That was when he entered the house to discover that the parents had tied a baby hand and foot to a bedpost.

"I used the tactic of, well, I'm a parent and I know what it's like, how kids can get on your nerves," Belisle continues. "Meanwhile, I'd watch the kids, see how they behaved, how they reacted to their parents." Adds Joanne Zannotti, Belisle's unit supervisor in Worcester: "The healthier parents are already feeling guilty and they'll bend over backward to cooperate, seek counseling." But some parents "go on insisting the child fell down a flight of stairs long after it's clear they've been hurting the child." Claims of parental love, denials of guilt, promises to reform, all inevitably affect the findings of judges when child defenders go to the courts attempting to take children away. "I think my biggest problem with the job," says Ferzoco, who like Belisle now acts as a phone screener, "was going to court all the time and seeing the judge return kids to parents who I knew for certain were going to go on hitting them."

The work of trying to help must go on, and, as Massachusetts welfare administrators point out, the new program is responding quickly to more and more abuse cases. But the case workers, drowning in individual woe, do not find much personal reassurance in statistics. Nor do they have much faith in the capability of most of the social means available to cure repetitive cruelty to children. As a group, child defenders seem to be afflicted, in fact, by what is, or used to be, a most un-American emotion, a tormenting sense of the ultimate futility of even their most constructive efforts.

Ferzoco points to a row of children's photographs lining the top of her desk. Picking out one of three smiling, hand someblond children, she says, "These were all from the same mother. The youngest was only six weeks old when I got a call from the hospital. The mother brought it in because it wouldn't stop crying." The child had a broken collar bone, and when the doctor examined it further, he found several other partially healed fractures. "Only six weeks old and she'd done that already," Ferzoco says. "We finally took the baby and the other children away from her. Then last year she had another child and now this year that baby, too, is up for adoption. You know, the mother isn't even 25 yet." -- Phil Blampied

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