Preying on Preschoolers

After policemen arrested three employees of a Bronx day care center on child-molesting charges, shouting parents milled angrily in front of the center. Thirty of the 135 children at the center had told investigators that they had been sexually abused. No sooner had the city-funded facility reopened last week than it was revealed that four other Bronx institutions were under investigation for similar reasons. Criticism centered on New York City's mammoth agency, the Human Resources Administration, which oversees 385 day care programs. The long-controversial HRA had been under a shadow since last May, when a city investigation found a subagency "seriously negligent" in the deaths of nine Brooklyn children between 1979 and 1981. The HRA director and one of his top deputies resigned after harsh criticism from Mayor Ed Koch.

Cases of child abuse also made headlines elsewhere in the country. New Jersey prosecutors are investigating reports of child molesting in nine state-supported and private facilities. In California, preliminary hearings got under way in the case of a private Manhattan Beach preschool that was shut down last November; seven teachers were indicted on 207 counts of rape, sodomy and sexual abuse. The prosecutor charged last week that one of the defendants drugged a seven-year-old boy to make him sexually compliant. Such horrific tales are becoming depressingly familiar. Said Bronx District Attorney Mario Merola: "This kind of child abuse has been going on for a long time."