Salty, I witnessed a similar incident between a teenage girl and her stepfather last week. The most shocking thing to me was how many adults sided with the stepfather immediately. This is what I wrote on my blog about it:
I am still outraged about an incident that happened at the library Thursday afternoon. For some background, let me tell you about this group of girls who frequents the library. I think of these as the "sassy girls". Some might call them fast. They're not the group of sweet girls who dutifully check out every book I put on the New Books shelf in the teen area, and they don't attend my programs. These girls mainly come to the library to flirt with boys and check their myspace pages. However, as the teen librarian, I have tried to connect with them. My attempts at friendliness are most met with blank stares or eye rolls.
So Thursday afternoon I'm sitting at the reference desk when two of the girls, S and K, who are using a computer, suddenly shriek and run at top speed across the library. I lamely called, "No running in the library", then heard one of the girls screaming, a grown man yelling, and a loud crash. This occurred out of my sight behind some shelves, so I hurried over to see what happened. A man was directing one of the girls, K, out of the library, while screaming at the top of his lungs at her. A woman who I assumed to be K's mother trailed along behind.
I asked a group of teenage boys who had seen the incident what had happened. These boys are pretty unflappable. A fistfight is a source of entertainment for them, but now they looked stunned and scared. "That's messed up what he did to her", one of them said. I asked them what happened and they said that the man was beating the girl. I immediately called the police. Meanwhile, the man continued to scream in the girl's face on the sidewalk in front of the library, while the girl's mother stood by. A crowd of adults, teens, and children began to gather. To my horror, the adults in the crowd were siding with the man! It seems that the girl had run away from home and he had found her at the library and was telling her what a ****ty piece of garbage she was. What a ****, hanging out at the library, right? One woman said, "She'll be thankful for this. She could have wound up in a ditch!" So the options for this girl are to live with this crazy monster or to wind up in a ditch? No wonder she was willing to risk the ditch.
The man continued to scream at the girl at top volume until the police came. At this point I went back inside. Someone told me that S, K's friend, was in the bathroom and was very upset. I went in there to check on her and asked her what was going on. She said that the man was K's stepfather and that he was physically and verbally abusive to her. She didn't know what to do. Should she tell the police what she knew about K's stepfather? Like me, she was upset that everyone was taking his side. She was terrified of going outside, afraid of what K's stepfather would do to her. She was afraid that she would be arrested and sent to juvenile hall because she happened to be friends with a runaway. I suggested that she call her parents and ask them for advice. She called and her mother answered. "Mom, if I know that K's stepfather is abusing her, should I tell someone?" she asked. Her mother sighed and said, "Just stay out of it." A female police officer came and talked to S to find out what she had seen. As I walked away, I could hear the annoyance in the police officer's voice at having to deal with the situation.
I was and am still outraged by this situation and the responses of most of the adults who witnessed it. Am I the only one who was raised to believe that men do not put their hands on women in anger, period, no excuses? Do these people really think that because this dude happens to be married to K's mother that he, a grown man, has the right to assault a 14 year old CHILD? And don't get me started on the piece of crap mother. I've never seen this woman in here with her kids checking out books or helping them with their homework, but she can find time to come in here with her husband so he can slap the kid around? I suspect she's been too busy running around town trying to find her next husband to actually raise her children. And people, if your kid is running away from home, it's not because they're some inherently bad seed---it's because YOU failed them somewhere. YOU screwed them up. YOU failed to give them love or discipline or some combination of the two. Is it any wonder that we live in a culture where teenage girls think it was okay for Chris Brown to beat the crap out of Rihanna, that she deserved it because she threw his car keys out of the window? (BTW, this morning I read that Rihanna has gone back to that jerk.) As children, we are constantly told, "If you or someone you know is being abused, tell an adult", but when they try to tell us, we ignore him. I guess it is easier to put our heads in the sand than to contemplate the horrific lives that some children live.
I became a librarian because my mother was a school librarian and I saw the impact that she had on teens. So many people have told me things like, "Your mother was the first person who told me I was smart" and "Your mother was the only person who told me that I could go to college and make something of myself." I remember some of her favorite students--the pregnant 16-year-old girl, the girl with a mustache who wore camo all the time, the boy who had made it to ninth grade with none of his teachers realizing that he was illiterate. She loved the misfits and troubled kids. It is hard for some of us to imagine, but many children and teens do not have a single adult in their life they can trust. They have never had anyone tell them that they are smart, that they can be anything they want to be. If anything positive comes out of this situation, maybe it will be that this group of "sassy girls" will realize that I am on their side. The next time I see them, I'm going to tell them that if they have a problem and want to talk to an adult without being judged, they can talk to me. I can't solve every problem, but maybe I can at least point them toward some kind of help.
As an update, my coworkers said that the police and a social worker stayed for several hours at the library and interviewed the family. The police issued the stepfather a citation for something, although I'm not sure what. Disturbing the peace? Being a waste of space?