by Gay Courter
As people milled around the courtroom waiting for the proceedings to begin, I felt as hollow as a dried gourd. This was not a dramatization. A man was charged with a heinous crime, and if judged guilty of sexually molesting his daughter before her twelfth birthday, he would be subjected to a minimum mandatory sentence of twenty-five years in prison. His accuser—his daughter—was a troubled child. She would have to take the stand, and with her father’s eyes boring into her, reveal her humiliating story in public. Her younger brother, Cory, whom I also represented, did not believe her and was going to testify against his sister. Her older brother, Rich, sided with Alicia and was scheduled to describe his father’s sexual molestation of him as well. There were other children, including Alicia’s friends and a stepdaughter from a previous marriage, who were willing to testify that they had been raped by Alicia’s father, but it was uncertain whether the judge would allow them to come forward.
In the preceding months I had gotten to know the three Stevenson children and care deeply for them, but now it was out of my hands. The trial had been set in motion. The complaint centered around the few times Alicia could recall dates and circumstances. Since having sex with a child under twelve brought a much stiffer sentence, her father’s guilt hinged on pinpointing the exact dates that incidents took place as well as giving the precise locations of any crime that occurred within the boundaries of our county. This was complicated by the fact that until very recently Alicia had never told anyone of the abuse or tried to run away. Would a jury understand how a child could feel that these experiences were an expression—albeit a distorted one—of her father’s love and not want to be separated from him?
Alicia and her brothers were not permitted in the courtroom because they were testifying. I was there for them, and the magnitude of the responsibility made me tremble as I saw the door from the judge’s chambers open. I consciously had to release my fingers from gripping the edge of the maple bench so I could respond as the bailiff called out, “All rise!”
The afternoon I first met Alicia I was at least as apprehensive as she was. The file—the first I had ever received—revealed that she had confided her father’s sexual molestation to a neighbor, who had contacted the child abuse hotline. Police had been summoned and she had been removed from the home. After a week in a shelter, she was placed in Ruth Levy’s foster home.
“You’ll love Alicia,” Ruth said with conviction when I called to introduce myself and set up an appointment to visit Alicia.
Ruth mentioned that Alicia’s younger brother, Cory, who had not wanted to leave his father, was in a foster home more than forty miles away, and her older brother, Rich, had become uncontrollable in the latest of his many foster homes, and nobody knew where he had been transferred.
“Why are the kids separated?” I asked naively.
“There’s not a foster home in the system that will take three mixed-sex teen siblings,” Ruth explained as if she were patiently teaching a child. “Long before Alicia’s problem was discovered, I had Rich here for two nights. Never again. We must have had a hundred kids at one time or another, but he’s the only one my husband won’t allow back in the house. In fact, when he heard the name ‘Stevenson,’ he almost didn’t give permission for Alicia.”
“The file doesn’t say much about Alicia’s mother. Do you know anything about her?”
“She hasn’t been around for at least ten years. Her father remarried four or five times since. The guy must have something, but when I saw him in court he looked pretty creepy to me.”
“Are there any other relatives?”
“A grandfather, but he is siding with the father against Alicia.”
The trip to Mrs. Levy’s home took forty-five minutes. I didn’t understand why Alicia had been placed so far from her residence, neighbors, friends, and school, not to mention her brothers. Her foster home was a U-shaped ranch house on a suburban cul-de-sac across the street from a pond.
Ruth Levy wore tight black knitted slacks and an oversized T-shirt hand-painted with daisies. Her figure might be described as maternal and her voice had a decided Long Island honk. Ruth explained that she was an experienced foster parent, having cared for foster children in New York before moving to Florida, where her husband had taken a job in the electric power industry. Right now there were four other foster girls under her care, each of whom had a laundry list of serious problems.
Although nobody else was home yet, Ruth’s voice dropped. “I don’t know how to say this, but Alicia displays some inappropriate behaviors.”
“What do you mean?”
“She kisses people full on the mouth, even her brothers. And some of the other girls have seen her showing her breasts off to boys in school.”
Before I could respond, we heard the sound of the front door opening. When Alicia walked in the house her eyes were cast down. Ruth waved her over to meet me and she reluctantly took a seat.
“Hi, I’m Gay, your Guardian ad Litem. Do you know what that means?” Alicia shook her head. I told her that I would be there through the entire court process, including a trial if there was one, and that I would still be involved until she left foster care at eighteen.
“Are you going to tell me what to do?”
“No, in fact I will try to tell everyone what you think is best for you.”
Alicia looked up for the first time and stared at me with her cobalt blue eyes. “What if you don’t agree with what I want?” As she blinked her naturally thick lashes, her lower lip protruded with a Bardot-like pout. I was taken aback by her beguiling expression, first because it was so winsome, but also because it had such a smoky, sensual quality.
“We’d talk about it and I would try to understand your point of view.”
Her lower lip receded slightly and her eyes widened. She gave Ruth a sidelong glance. “Let’s say I didn’t want to live here anymore.” She sat back and crossed her arms.
Did Alicia want to leave Ruth’s, or was this a test? “If you really don’t want to live here, then you and I would talk about why you are unhappy, look at the possibilities, and ask HRS to move you to a situation you would prefer.”
“And what if they refused?” asked Alicia, who already knew the system far better than I did.
“Then we would go to the judge and tell him what you wanted. Don’t forget, though, he makes the final decision.”
Alicia reached over and hugged Ruth. “You know I was kidding, don’t you?”
Ruth made a playful fist and pummeled her cheek affectionately. “You had better have been, Ally-Oop, or I would have lost my best girl.”
I decided to take Alicia out for a snack so we could talk privately. Alicia pranced down the walk, swinging her pocketbook and her rear in time to a song in her head. Her foster sisters looked on jealously.
“I’m the only one who has a guardian,” she said, tossing her head in their direction as she slipped into my car. When I turned on the motor, the preselected classical music station blared a violin solo. Alicia made a sour face and pulled out a tape. “Mind if I put this in?”
Without waiting for a reply, she did. The beat was insistent, the vocalist screeching, but I made out the words: “Youth gone wild.” I glanced over at Alicia, who said, “Sometimes that’s how I feel.” The next time we were together, Alicia brought another tape, already reeled down to a new song called “Here I Am,” with another message for me. Soon I learned to expect the tapes, for they were Alicia’s way of telegraphing what was happening with her. That first time, however, before I could follow the lyrics further, Alicia stopped singing and said, “I guess I should tell you that I have been doing something illegal.”
We had turned onto the main highway from the Levys’ subdivision. I kept my eyes on the road and steadied my voice. “What’s that?”
“My boyfriend, Lou, and me, we’re … you know … doing it.”
“What’s illegal about that?”
“He’s nineteen.”
“Then he’s the one
who is illegal, not you. And if you want it to happen, nobody’s going to prosecute him.”
“Oh, I want it all right. I love Lou.”
“Tell me about him …,” I began, while my mind was spinning with concerns about birth control and AIDS as well as the implications for the court case. When we pulled into Hardee’s parking lot, Alicia was gossiping about where they had gone, what they had done, when and how. Suddenly any preconceived notions of what I would do as Alicia’s guardian dissolved and I was swept along in her chattering tide.
What had I expected? Someone more withdrawn, someone who seemed like a victim? Someone less overtly sexy? If I was struck by her blatant sensuality, how would a jury feel? Was she receiving counseling that would help her understand why she had affected this persona? I realized I didn’t know very much about her at all. Even though she was the center of the abuse complaint, I did not have much about her history. The Stevenson file was mostly filled with papers relating to her older brother.
The case of Richard Leroy Stevenson, born September 2, 1972, had been opened officially in 1977 when he had been placed in a residential treatment facility for severely disturbed children. From that time he had undergone an exponentially multiplying series of examinations, programs, placements, and interventions.
There were hints that Rich was a troubled child from the moment he entered kindergarten at the Sawgrass Primary School. After a few months, he was taken out of the regular classroom and placed in a group for emotionally handicapped children. Notes in the file indicated that he arrived at school with multiple bruises. His parents had said he was an active, uncontrollable child. Soon he became so disruptive in school, the family agreed to allow the state to place him in the family cottage section of a psychiatric hospital, then he was switched to their high-risk treatment center. After two psychiatric evaluations, seven-year-old Rich was returned to his home and attended the Treetops School, a county facility for chronically emotionally and physically challenged children. When Rich became unmanageable there, it was decided that his home life was too unstable and he was placed into foster care. A year later, Rich’s foster parents rejected him, so he was admitted to Wilson Hospital’s inpatient psychiatric unit. When he improved after only a month, he was transferred to the state’s most expensive residential psychiatric program: Panther Ridge.
Almost a year passed and he was returned to his family. Out-patient counseling was provided by the county mental health center, and Rich remained home until he started to attend Sawgrass Middle School. When his classroom work faltered in the middle of sixth grade, the school established an individual tutorial program for him, but his behavior became more disruptive both at school and at home so he was admitted to the Riverside Ranch for Boys, one hundred miles to the north, where he lasted the summer. To keep him closer to home, a space was found for him in a companion facility only five miles from his family. Amazingly, Rich remained there through the fall until the following Easter vacation, which he spent with his father, who then kept him at home. By August, though, he had been placed in an emergency shelter near the university, where he underwent a fresh series of tests. In the midst of these evaluations he attempted suicide by jumping out a third-floor window. After further therapy, a more “homelike” setting was recommended and he was sent to another foster family. But there was no mention of where he was presently living.
Once I had the raw chronology sketched out in my computer—the only way I could make sense of Rich’s peripatetic placements—I read every narrative, looking for the genesis of this child’s nightmarish journey through the world. Perusing the test scores over a ten-year period, I listed the IQ results next to the testing dates and noted that this measure of potential slid from a high of 103 to a recent score of 86. Every school, every hospital, every doctor, every teacher had rendered this boy’s mind stupider and stupider, yet they never offered him what he needed most: a warm, loving, accepting, permanent family.
My confusion was compounded when I found two birth certificates with different last names. Was Rich adopted? It took a while to discover the answer, but here is the simplified version of his background. Tammy Stevenson was the maiden name of Rich, Alicia, and Cory’s mother. When she became pregnant with Rich, she married the baby’s father, Richard Leroy Hamburg, a few weeks before Rich was born. (Apparently she had been married to someone else at the time of the conception, with the affair contributing to the grounds for divorce.) “Red” Hamburg’s first wife had died, the second disappeared. His marriage to Tammy Stevenson was his third. (Red claimed his mother had been a prostitute, and she had allowed him to observe her sexual alliances with customers, some of whom also abused him. He had never known who his father was.)
Tammy’s father, Jeremiah Stevenson, had managed his family’s boot factory in Vermont. When his father died, he sold the business, bought citrus groves in central Florida, and moved there with his adopted daughter, Tammy, but not his wife, who refused to leave her family in New England.
Tammy quit high school and ran off with the man who would become her first husband, but then she met Red Hamburg. Soon she was expecting their child. Jeremiah Stevenson welcomed Red Hamburg and even gave him money to invest in a boat repair business. Alicia followed Rich eighteen months later, and then Cory was born about a year after that. By this time little Rich was a hellion running barefoot through the groves, and Alicia had a digestive disorder that gave her the pervasive smell of vomit. Tammy’s approach to her children’s problems was to do the minimum possible, then run off to spend time with her friends.
Jeremiah began to think of what would happen if he died. Tammy was too flighty to ever manage the grove, and it would be twenty years before the grandkids could take over. There was Red, but he wasn’t legal kin. Then Jeremiah Stevenson had an idea: he would adopt Red and make him, and his kids, equal heirs with Tammy. Red was thrilled. At last he would have a father. The adoption documents were prepared, and at age twenty-six, Richard Leroy Hamburg, Sr., changed his name to Richard Leroy Stevenson. The children’s birth certificates were reissued to reflect the new name and Tammy Hamburg became Tammy Stevenson again.
Once I had this figured out, the various names on the paperwork made sense to me. More important, I had a sense of the family relationships as they had been in place during the crucial months when these children were very small, for this is the time that a child either learns to attach and trust or does not.
If there is a common microbe that festers in almost every household where abuse and neglect flourish, it is something that prevents caregivers from bonding to their children. But what is this ephemeral glue popularly called “bonding”? Bonding involves the emotional transaction from the parents to the child and actually it is nothing more than falling in love. Parental sensitivity to the child’s wants and needs is what signifies effective bonding. If you really fall in love, the person whom you love comes first. When a parent ignores, or is unable to meet, a child’s need for comfort and protection, bonding has not been successful. People who never made these attachments as small children have blanked out their feelings toward others as well as themselves. And they pass on the disconnection they suffered. If you have not been loved, you cannot love. Those denied empathy find themselves devoid of empathy and thus perpetuate the cycle of abuse.
Every child requires—and is entitled to—nothing less than the unqualified love and attention from someone who thinks she is the most important individual in the world. Only from this secure place can she function optimally in life. Unfortunately, many children have more tenuous attachments, which result in different degrees of maladjustment. When a parent offers affection in small doses, or is inconsistent in providing for the needs of the child, the result is a child who is anxious about what to expect and resistant to people. The next level of disturbed attachment occurs with parents who are actually insensitive to a child’s needs. This child may actually feel threatened by other people’s approach. Her anxiety may be coupled with avoidant behavior, wi
th the child cringing, or avoiding the caregiver and others. In the worst cases, when the child is abused by the caregiver, the child is not only insecure but also so disorganized emotionally that she cannot function or develop normally. Sometimes parents are so immature that they turn to their child to supply their needs and blame the child for not being loving or caring toward them.
Attachment disorders, and their subsequent effects on children, are standards of psychological literature, but for some reason the basics are often ignored by courts, which focus on the narrow rights of biological parents rather than the essential entitlements of the child to have a safe, secure place to be. After months of piecing together bits of the Stevensons’ story, it became clear that these three small children had spent their first precarious years isolated in the groves with minimal parental love or attention. Tammy had given her babies only as much care as did not interfere with her social life. Her husband left home early in the morning and returned late at night to work at his marine repair shop, and his hobby, boat racing, often took him out of town on weekends. Jeremiah adored his grandchildren, but did not see himself as their primary caregiver. When I asked Jeremiah about these early years, he recalled stopping by to see his daughter only to find no adult in the house. Cory was in his crib and Alicia in her playpen, both with bottles of curdled milk and reeking with the smell of feces. Toddler Rich was locked in the house with some bread, juice, and a television to keep him company. When Rich could not tolerate the pestering sounds of his younger siblings, he would make feeble attempts to amuse or feed them. Sometimes, in confusion and frustration, he would whack them to shut them up.