Alphonsine was twenty when the genocide began. She thought that the barbarism had broken out only in her village, so she fled to relatives in a neighboring village. The killing had started there, too, so she and her relatives decided to seek refuge across the border in Burundi. They were near their destination when shooting broke out. Alphonsine kept running as the rest of her family were gunned down behind her. She bolted into a house, where an old woman promised to hide her. That night, the old woman’s son, an Interahamwe, came home. When he saw the elegant woman his mother had sheltered, he announced that he would make her his “wife.” For three weeks he raped her repeatedly, and she did all she could to appease him, because without his protection she would probably be killed.
A month later Alphonsine realized that she was pregnant. After her son, Jean-de-Dieu Ngabonziza, was born, life became increasingly difficult. She moved in with a man who demanded that she “get rid of that child” or leave. Alphonsine made sure her son knew that he was a burden, beating him mercilessly and occasionally throwing him out of the house. If they went out in public, she would say, “Call me your aunt. Never call me your mother.” Meanwhile, her consort beat her day and night. Finally, she summoned the courage to leave and moved to the slum where I found her. “And then,” she recalled, “I saw that my boy was all I had. And sometimes he would laugh, despite everything, and it was when he laughed that I began to love him.”
• • •
The 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (commonly called the war-crimes tribunal), lists as a crime against humanity “the unlawful confinement of a woman forcibly made pregnant, with the intent of affecting the ethnic composition of any population or carrying out grave violations of international law.” It does not stipulate that damages are due to the victims; it is concerned primarily with the punishment of the perpetrators, especially those of higher rank who have initiated rape campaigns. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda achieved a breakthrough in 1998 when it found Jean-Paul Akayesu, a local mayor who had encouraged police to rape Tutsi women, guilty of crimes against humanity and torture. It was the first time that forced pregnancy was prosecuted as a form of genocide. But the statute and the legal precedent imply that the issue is genocidal intent, rather than mass rape. For women who are raped and become pregnant as a result, the parsing of motivation is irrelevant; to their children, it is meaningless. “Male victims of torture are received by their own society as heroes,” Benshoof said. “Female victims of torture are considered prostitutes who have dishonored their families.” In Iraq, more than half the women who reported being raped in the year after the American invasion were killed by their own families.
Legal scholars have worked toward establishing protections for women raped during war, but little work has been done toward providing for the resultant children, who are commonly abused, abandoned, or both. Rimmer has argued that such children should be reclassified as veterans, “publicly accepted as having valid claims on the Government, rather than seen as by-products of a crime or sin.” This classification would give the children a pension; it would acknowledge the women’s bravery and the children’s challenges. Jeanne Muliri Kabekatyo, a regional manager for HEAL Africa who works with these mothers on building their relationships with their children, said, “We want to make out of these children artisans of peace.”
• • •
Christine Uwamahoro’s proud, erect carriage was not typical of the violated women I met in Rwanda. She was eighteen and living in Kigali when the killing started. One of the Interahamwe broke into her house and said, “Undress and lie down, or I’ll kill you and your family.” He came back repeatedly, and after each rape her father would give him money to go away. The family fled, but soon came to a bridge with a roadblock. They sat by the side of the road for two hours, waiting and watching as other people were slaughtered. As dusk fell, one of the Interahamwe approached with a murderous look, and they ran, but Christine’s mother faltered. Christine’s brother tried to help her. Over her shoulder, Christine saw them both being chopped up with machetes. Christine and her father walked sixty miles to the city of Gisenyi, hiding by day and stealing quietly along the road by night. By the time they arrived, however, the killing had spread there, too, so they walked another few miles into Congo, where they waited out the war. There, Christine realized she was pregnant.
She feared that she had become infected with HIV, but couldn’t bear to find out and never did. She would pummel her infant daughter out of sheer loathing and gave the baby to her own father so she would not have to see her. Even ten years later, the child’s existence filled Christine with sadness. She visited her sole surviving sister every day, but she visited her daughter once a month at most.
Unlike most women with enfants de mauvais souvenir, Christine remarried. Her new husband is a polygamous Congolese man who keeps another wife. “I couldn’t marry a Rwandan after what had happened, not even a Tutsi,” she said. “At first, I tried to hide my history from my new husband, but eventually I told him all about it, and he has been very kind. When I get sad, he takes me out for a walk. When I have flashbacks and bad dreams, which happens often, he reminds me that I could have been killed, and he comforts me.” He even proposed that the rape-conceived child live with them, but Christine didn’t want that.
I sometimes ask interviewees, especially those who seem profoundly disenfranchised, whether they have any questions for me. The invitation to reverse roles helps people feel less like experimental subjects. In Rwanda, these mothers’ questions tended to be the same: How long are you spending in the country? How many people are you interviewing? When will your research be published? Who will read these stories? At the end of my interview with Christine, I asked whether she had any questions. “Well,” she said a little hesitantly, “you write about this field of psychology.” I nodded. She took a deep breath. “Can you tell me how to love my daughter more? I want to love her so much, and I try my best, but when I look at her, I see what happened to me and it interferes.” A tear rolled down her cheek, but her tone was almost fiercely challenging when she repeated, “Can you tell me how to love my daughter more?”
Only afterward, too late to tell Christine, did I marvel that she did not know how much love was in that question itself. It is what anyone asks herself who lives with a child ignominiously conceived, who wishes to disentangle her own ambivalence. It calls starkly into question how much of any woman’s love is inherent in mammalian DNA, how much it is a matter of social convention, and how much it is the result of personal determination.
• • •
More than any other parents coping with exceptional children, women with rape-conceived children are trying to quell the darkness within themselves in order to give their progeny light. For no other exceptional families is there less coherent support than for these. These mothers and their children need an identity community, a place to find more dignity than can be achieved in the piecemeal world of online supports. The children described in the rest of this book sustain injuries; these children, through no fault of their own, are injuries. But the ordeal that produces them does not shrink their mothers’ hearts so much as those mothers themselves often fear. Maternal love can entrance these women even as they guard against it.
X
Crime
Unlike most of the conditions discussed in this book, criminality is the child’s fault, something he has done deliberately and with choice. It is also the parents’ fault, something they could have prevented with decent moral education and adequate vigilance. These, at least, are the popular conceptions, and so parents of criminals live in a territory of anger and guilt, struggling to forgive both their children and themselves. To be or to produce a schizophrenic or a child with DS is generally deemed a misfortune; to be or produce a criminal is often deemed a failure. While parents of children with disabilities receive state funding, parents of criminals are frequently prosecuted.
If you have a
child who is a dwarf, you are not dwarfed yourself, and if your child is deaf, it does not impair your own hearing; but a child who is morally culpable seems like an indictment of mother and father. Parents whose kids do well take credit for it, and the obverse of their self-congratulation is that parents whose kids do badly must have erred. Unfortunately, virtuous parenting is no warranty against corrupt children. Yet these parents find themselves morally diminished, and the force of blame impedes their ability to help—sometimes even to love—their felonious progeny.
Having a child with physical or mental disabilities is usually a social experience, and you are embraced by other families facing the same challenges. Having a child who goes to prison frequently imposes isolation. Parents on visiting day at a juvenile facility may complain to one another in a friendly way, but aside from those communities in which illegality is the norm, this is a misery that doesn’t love company. The parents of criminals have access to few resources. No colorful guides posit an upside to having a child who has broken the law; no charming version of “Welcome to Holland” has been adapted for this population. This deficit also has advantages: no one trivializes what you are going through; no one uses learning centers with colorful crepe-paper decorations to try to turn your grief into a festivity. No one proselytizes that the only loving response to your child’s crime is gladness or urges you to celebrate what you want to mourn.
Thousands of institutions have been designed to assuage the challenges attached to many horizontal identities: schools for the deaf, mainstreaming programs, hospitals for those afflicted with schizophrenic psychosis. Most juvenile criminals are institutionalized in state facilities intended more to punish than to rehabilitate. Many can’t be turned around; the idea of near-universal rehabilitation is a liberal fantasy. But there are enough young convicts in whom the damage is situational that the moral imperative is to treat them all. An oncologist can tolerate the deaths of most of his patients because of the ones he saves; if we can redeem even 10 percent of would-be career criminals, we can reduce human suffering and economize on prosecution and prison. Jails draw on the popular belief that the more we punish people, the safer the country becomes. This resembles the assumption that the more you whip your children, the better they will turn out.
The three cardinal principles of imprisonment are deterrence, incapacitation, and retribution. Deterrence works to some degree; the prospect of jail can discourage those contemplating a crime, but it does so less than most of the general population thinks. Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, an organization led by more than twenty-five hundred police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors, and others in law enforcement, states, “Those on the front lines in the fight against crime know that it’s impossible to arrest and imprison our way out of the crime problem.” A meta-analysis that collated two hundred studies found that while the best rehabilitative programs—behavioral therapy, teaching family programs—achieved a 30 to 40 percent reduction in recidivism even for serious offenders, punitive therapies had null or negative effects. The National Institutes of Health advised, “Scare tactics don’t work and may make the problem worse.”
Incapacitation works insofar as people behind bars cannot easily commit further crimes. But unless one plans to keep offenders in jail for life, the problem remains of how they will behave when they get out. Prisons are often the locus of contagion, where first offenders learn criminal ways from more experienced peers. Joseph A. Califano Jr., chairman of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, recently said, “Juvenile justice systems have become colleges of criminality, paving the way to further crimes and adult incarceration.” More than 80 percent of those incarcerated under age eighteen will be arrested again within three years of release. If you want your son to stay out of jail, then keep him out of jail, because once he’s been in, he’s likely to be in repeatedly.
Retribution is a fashionable euphemism for revenge, the schadenfreude a wronged person feels from seeing his tormentor disciplined. Retribution is a way of indulging the victims; they feel powerless, and seeing their adversaries jailed or executed sometimes makes them feel enfranchised. That has a limited merit; interviews with people who have fought to have others put to death reveal that execution did not afford them the satisfaction they had anticipated.
• • •
Cora Nelson was verbally and physically abused as a child in rural Minnesota. Her early marriage, which produced two daughters, Jennifer and Mandy Stiles, was a disaster; in her mid-twenties, she developed cervical cancer and was told she would never again conceive. When she fell in love with Luke Makya, a handsome, alcoholic Native American, he didn’t mind that they would be unable to have a family. Then, to the astonishment of her doctors, Cora became pregnant and delivered what she called her “miracle baby,” Pete. For Jennifer, Cora’s eldest daughter, her new half brother was “my living doll that talked and walked.” Luke, however, became increasingly alcoholic and vicious. “Something happened to him,” Jennifer recalled. “The good man my mother had married, and that we all loved, ceased to exist.”
When Luke went on a rampage, Jennifer would keep Pete in bed with her to protect him. Nonetheless, Pete witnessed his mother getting hit and choked, and he was walloped, too. “There were times when it was going to be a bad day—but there were times when it was good,” Pete recalled. “The first time I ever shot a rifle, we were aiming at pop cans in the water, and the first one I shot at, I hit. He just scooped me up in his arms, like he was so proud of me.” Once, Luke crawled into Jennifer’s bed and put his hand on her thigh; Jennifer, who had already been the victim of sexual abuse from a male babysitter when she was six, fought him off. “I have more good memories of this man than I do bad,” she said, “but the bad ones are so bad.”
One evening when Luke was wasted, he beat Pete badly, then drove off to hit the bars. For Cora, this was the end; she packed their bags and left with Pete, then six, and Mandy, who was a teenager; Jennifer had already moved out. Cora had Luke evicted and moved back home. Luke broke into the house, cut up Cora’s dresses, and took his guns. Cora obtained an order of protection and filed for divorce. In the months that followed, Pete would sometimes visit his father on weekends, but Luke would usually be wasted. Cora started seeing Ethan Heinz, a bus mechanic.
One week before Cora’s no-fault divorce was supposed to come through, Mandy returned from school to find Luke at the kitchen table. She called Cora, who called the police, but Luke had fled before they arrived. Cora took the family to stay with Ethan. When they returned a few days later, they found the door open and called the police. Again, they found nothing unusual; Cora asked them to check the basement. “They go down, and he’s in there,” Pete remembered. “He’s got a shotgun, a .22 rifle, and a .30-30 rifle. He comes out with the rifle in his hand, like he was going to shoot ’em. The gun was jammed, so he couldn’t get a shot off—but they didn’t know that. They shot him three times, and they killed him.” Cora and her three children were upstairs.
Luke’s plan had been to kill both Cora and himself. He had left his son a note, saying that what was to happen was not Pete’s fault, and that if Pete should ever miss him, he need only “look at the constellation Orion, because that’s me. Always the hunter, never the hunted.” Pete said, “He had depression but wouldn’t get help because he thought they’d make him give up his alcohol, and he loved his alcohol more than anything else. I wish so much he’d chosen me over alcohol. But he didn’t.”
After that, Cora would be fine some days, but on others, Pete recalled, “she just couldn’t do much, and I’d have to take care of her a lot.” That was a steep task for a grieving six-year-old—especially one who “felt like if I’d done something different, maybe he wouldn’t have tried to kill my mom.” Pete ached for the loss. “My father wasn’t tall like me,” he said to me. “But there’s this jacket he had that fits perfectly. I wear it when I’m lonely.”
The whole family went to live with Ethan. “Who wants to sta
y in a house where there’s bullet holes in the appliances?” said Jennifer. She had gotten pregnant in high school and dropped out after her daughter, Sondra, was born. When her relationship with Sondra’s father ended, she and Sondra moved back in with the family. Jennifer developed chronic migraines. “I retreated to my dark room, for years,” she said. “If Sondra didn’t share a room with me, I don’t think I would have done anything for her.” Just as Jennifer had been Pete’s childhood companion, so six-year-old Pete was now Sondra’s. “Pete picked up the slack, paid attention to her,” Jennifer said.
But Pete was often sullen and withdrawn. In third grade, he got annoyed at a girl and stabbed her in the thigh, deeply, with a pencil. He developed attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and had trouble in school despite his obvious intelligence. The family moved to a pleasant working-class suburb, and the counselor at his new school tried to combat Pete’s inattentiveness with Ritalin. But the ADHD was mingled with serious depression, and Ritalin made him more agitated. Antidepressants provoked hypomania in him. By then, his teachers had labeled him a troublemaker.
Pete rejected Ethan as a father figure; as time passed, he began to rebel against his mother as well. Cora found it difficult to discipline him. “She loved him to the point of not seeing him,” Jennifer said. At thirteen, Pete broke into a store, stole some cigarettes, and was charged with a gross misdemeanor. A year later, he tried to walk out of the Mall of America with a shoplifted skateboard and went briefly to jail. By then, he was also getting in trouble for truancy. Cora requested a psychiatric consultation for him from her HMO, but Pete was denied treatment.
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