by Kim Brooks
He’d been trying to reassure me, and I’d been so desperate for reassurance that I didn’t stop to think about what he was implying. Now I wanted to ask him, “Well, what kind of person are they after? What kind of mother do they throw the book at?”
I decided to ask Diane Redleaf, founder and legal director of the Family Defense Center. She told me that they’ve represented parents from all socioeconomic stratums and that in her view all parents are vulnerable, but she concedes that “the cases tend to go away more quickly if they involve upper-middle-class or middle-class people … the whole way the police and prosecutors interact is different when they know there’s going to be a fight about it.” As Redleaf sees it, the biggest problem is that individuals, the people who called the police on Debra Harrell, are trusting a system that is inherently biased (as most systems are in this country) against poor people and people of color.
“There’s an assumption,” Redleaf told me, “among the general public, that it’s always better to make a call, even if you’re not sure what you’re seeing, because these people are professionals and if there was no real neglect, then the system will sort it out. Well, what we find is, they often get it wrong when they try to sort it out. The caseworkers at protection agencies aren’t licensed social workers. They often have minimal training. Police certainly aren’t experts on parenting or childcare. So basically we as a society have entrusted people who have no real training or serious knowledge about children and families with critical issues involving children. And they are making decisions about who gets to be a parent and who gets to raise their children and whether you’ll be labeled a child-abuser and unable to work.”
In other, more ubiquitous words, if you see something, say something.
As I spoke with her, I began to understand what I’d first been able to ignore. I knew perfectly well what kind of parents they went after, what kind of mother they threw the book at—the kind who works at McDonald’s and hasn’t gone to college and can’t hire a lawyer the moment she senses danger—the ones, like Debra Harrell, who aren’t in a position to fight back.
* * *
When I contacted Harrell, almost two years had passed since she was arrested, but her case had only recently been dismissed. Even after so much time, she still found it difficult to talk about the incident and the emotional toll it had taken on her and on her daughter. She was held at the jail for only one day, but her daughter was sent to a group home, a foster care facility, for fourteen days. Eight days passed before the nine-year-old was allowed to speak to her mother. The hardest part, Harrell told me, was that until that day, her daughter had never spent the night away from her. She was in fourth grade, but still a mama’s girl. Harrell slept in her daughter’s bed, crying, every night that she was gone.
It’s possible that no one outside her own circle of friends and family would have ever heard about her experience if it weren’t for the fact that a few days after her arrest, the North Augusta Police Department shared the story of Harrell’s prosecution with a local news station. The station aired the video of her interrogation, along with the tagline “Mother Confesses to Letting Her Daughter Play Alone in the Park.” People were appalled by this public shaming, and the case came to the attention of Lenore Skenazy, who helped find Harrell pro bono legal representation with Robert Phillips, a South Carolina attorney.
But even with Phillips’s services, her case dragged on for nearly two years. After all this time, when I spoke to Harrell, it was clear that she still didn’t entirely understand why this had happened, what purpose it had all served. “When I was a child,” she told me, “I would walk two miles to the park. We rode our bikes up there every day with no problem, me and my friends. I don’t see why parents shouldn’t have the say-so if their own child is ready to go out there in the world. My baby, she’s very responsible, so I wasn’t worried. And when Robert, the attorney, came down and went to the park on a Friday to see what it was like, there were seventy-five people in that park. They had cameras. My daughter knows everyone there. Everybody knows each other at the park.”
It simply never occurred to Harrell that one of those seventy-five people would assume she had abandoned her daughter and would call the police.
Now, finally, her case has been dropped, but still, the ordeal has had a lasting impact on Harrell’s and her daughter’s lives. After the arrest, Harrell was out of a job from the McDonald’s where she’d worked for almost five years. The court proceedings took longer than she could have imagined.
“It was just a waiting process,” she told me. “Everything was a wait. We went to court. They passed it off and we’d have to come back thirty days after I went to parenting classes. I was trying to go every day to get through it faster, but they wouldn’t let me. I had to go once a week. I had to go there and listen to them tell me how to talk to my daughter, how to treat my daughter. But I didn’t mind doing it. I just wanted it to be over.”
At first, Harrell worried that she wouldn’t be able to find another job. She applied for a position as a nursing aide, but when a background check was ordered, they found that she’d been charged with abandonment. Luckily, the woman interviewing Harrell remembered hearing her story in the news.
“Arrested for letting your daughter go to the park,” Harrell remembers the woman saying. “I thought it was ridiculous then, and I think it’s ridiculous now.” She got the job and was able to move on with her life.
But for Harrell’s daughter, the episode has had a more lasting impact. “It affected her more than it affected me,” she told me. “She’s been wanting to go on a vacation, go on a summer trip with me. But I still can’t leave the state after two years. She’s scared to go outside too, to walk up the street. She won’t go nowhere. She won’t go away with friends. She’s too scared. They put fear in my baby’s heart, and I don’t like that, but I just talk to her and say, ‘Baby, you’re old enough now to go outside and live your life. You don’t have to be in this house on a computer.’”
* * *
A case like Debra Harrell’s, or like Shanesha Taylor’s, the homeless single mother who was arrested and charged with two counts of felony child abuse in 2014 in Scottsdale, Arizona, and sentenced to eighteen years of supervised probation after leaving her two children in the car while she went on a job interview, demonstrate how class, race, and cultural bias can both motivate and complicate trends toward the criminalization of parenthood.
After I wrote about my arrest, I was surprised to find my story was being retold, sympathetically, in libertarian publications, such as Reason. The Free-Range Kids movement and the parents’ rights movement has been adopted by this corner of the political universe as yet another example of how hard it has become to exercise one’s freedom—in my case, the freedom to parent as one sees fit, within the confines of an oppressive and infantilizing nanny state. The problem with this argument, the movement’s detractors are quick to point out, is that parenting, by definition, involves the well-being of minors whose rights must also be considered. We don’t parent in a vacuum, just as we don’t own guns in a vacuum or waste fossil fuels in a vacuum. Our actions as individuals affect other individuals and communities. The parent-child relationship makes it impossible, in other words, to talk about parenting strictly in terms of individual liberty. But cases like Harrell’s reveal the issue to be more complicated than a conflict between individual freedom and parental responsibility.
David Pimentel explained it this way: “If you make it a crime to leave a child out of your sight or the sight of a nanny or another paid professional for a second, then you’re basically saying that poor people can’t be parents.”
In a country that provides no subsidized childcare and no mandatory family leave, no assurance of flexibility in the workplace for employees, no universal preschool or early childhood education, and minimal safety nets or state-subsidized support services to parents and families, it is impossible to make it a crime to take your eyes off your children without also
making it a crime to be poor. And not only does such a mind-set criminalize poverty and single, working-class parenthood, it also criminalizes Latino parenting cultures, European parenting cultures, African American parenting cultures, and all parenting cultures with a tradition of sibling care or informal community care or independent childhood activities.
“When you make it a crime to let your child play in a park or wait in a car,” Pimentel says, “you’re saying that good parenting is the kind of parenting practiced by affluent white people in suburban America at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” Civil libertarians might disapprove of this criminalization because they see it as impinging on individual freedoms, but those on the other end of the political spectrum should be incensed by it too. I think of Debra Harrell sitting in that room with a white, male officer hovering over her, lecturing her on how to be a responsible mother, taking down her “confession” as she sits there crying, asking to please be allowed to speak to her daughter.
Pimentel is never surprised by such “confessions.” He describes the immense fear and intimidation parents feel in these situations, their tendency to play it safe when it comes to the possibility of losing their children: “People are being intimidated into waiving their constitutional rights,” he says, “which means, in effect, that they have no constitutional rights.” This, I realized, is one of the most damaging consequences of new, intensive parenting mores. It is the price we pay for our fears.
* * *
Class-based animosity may be a strong motivating factor in the desire to teach “bad mothers” such as Debra Harrell a lesson, but in an odd way, it has also led to a different kind of vilification of middle- and upper-middle-class mothers. One mother who reached out to me not long after I wrote about my experience epitomizes this other kind of hostility. A white, affluent, stay-at-home mother living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she was charged with felony child endangerment when, on the way home from visiting family in Connecticut, she left her sleeping four-year-old daughter in the car with the windows open for five minutes while she ran into a store. She hired a lawyer, traveled back and forth to Connecticut numerous times to appear in court, was subjected to a thorough investigation by Child Protective Services (which found no evidence of neglect or abuse), and eventually pleaded her case down to a lesser charge that could be satisfied with education and volunteering. She knew that it could have been much worse, but told me that all in all, it was one of the most humiliating experiences of her life. And perhaps the worst part of the whole ordeal came when she had to go to the local precinct to be fingerprinted and formally charged. “There was this female officer working at the station,” she recounted, “who had to interview me for the report. And I could tell from the moment she realized what I was there for, she had decided I was a worthless, terrible person. She literally looked me up and down, looked at my clothes, my car. ‘Stay-at-home Mommy’s too busy shopping to take care of her kid?’ she said. ‘Does your husband know that’s how you take care of his child while he’s out earning the big bucks?’”
One of the findings of Barbara Sarnecka’s study on risk assessment and moral judgment, the study in which people were asked to evaluate the danger children were in when left alone under different circumstances—and the moral “wrongness” of the parent who had left them—was that when participants were told a father had left his child for a few minutes to run into work, the level of risk to his child was equal to the risk when he left the child because of circumstances beyond his control (when he was struck unconscious by a car). When a woman was running into work, the moral judgment was closer to the level expressed at her going shopping or having an affair. I’ll admit it—I love this finding. I relish the way it makes plain and undeniable something we all sort of know but aren’t supposed to say: We might accept that mothers occasionally want to do other things besides mothering, that they might want to have a career, a social life, a full human existence. But we don’t like it. We hate it, in fact. A father who is distracted for a few minutes by his myriad interests and obligations in the world of adult interactions is being, well, a father. A mother who does the same is failing her children.
In Perfect Madness, Judith Warner describes a similar strain of thinly veiled hostility toward working mothers in the coverage of one of the nineties’ most publicized child-abuse cases, the trial of British au pair Louise Woodward for the murder of her eight-month-old charge, Matthew Eappen. Warner writes that “public sentiment turned most angrily not against the sullen-faced au pair but against Matthew’s mother, whose crime, in many commentators’ eyes, was that of having hired an au pair in the first place.” She notes how the columnist Mike McManus wondered why the mother wasn’t at home with her infant son when her husband, a physician, clearly earned enough to support them, and talk-radio callers accused her of being self-absorbed and materialistic, one going so far as to say, “Apparently the parents don’t want a kid and now they don’t have a kid.”
When examining cases like these alongside those like Debra Harrell’s, it becomes clear that motherhood has become a battleground on which prejudice and class resentment can be waged without ever admitting that’s what we’re doing. Middle- and upper-middle-class mothers can be excoriated for failing to appreciate the support that so many others lack. Working-class and poor mothers can be pilloried for their ignorance and inattentiveness and inability to provide the kind of care middle-class children receive. And those who criticize them can rest assured it’s not women they hate, or even mothers; it’s just that kind of mother, the one who, because of affluence or poverty, education or ignorance, ambition or unemployment, allows her own needs to compromise (or appear to compromise) the needs of her child. We hate poor, lazy mothers. We hate rich, selfish mothers. We hate mothers who have no choice but to work, but also mothers who don’t need to work and want to do so.
You don’t have to look very hard to see the common denominator.
I said as much to a friend not long ago, and he pushed back, wondering if hate was the right word.
I asked him what word he thought would better describe it, and he wondered if contempt might be more accurate.
“Hate,” he said, “is personal. It’s intimate. You hate the bully who picked on you, the boyfriend who dumped you, the person in the Mercedes SUV who cut you off and gave you the finger. Contempt, on the other hand, is more removed. It involves a level of condescension, a power differential. You feel contempt for the colleague who got the promotion she didn’t deserve, or the panhandlers driving your property value down, or your lower-class relatives who don’t know any better than to put the ketchup bottle on the dining room table with the tablecloth and nice china.”
“So we feel contempt for those beneath us?” I suggested.
“Or those above us who we think belong beneath us.”
As he said this, I thought about all the jabs and digs and thinly or not-at-all-veiled insults I’d heard directed at women throughout my life. I thought of all the mother-directed criticism I’d received, read, uttered, and overheard in my years, too wide-ranging in subject to categorize—and yet, I could, sort of. The mother (and maybe the woman) most vulnerable to attack is the one who doesn’t know her place, the one trying to have or do or be more or less, higher or lower, than she is supposed to be. We want her to know her place, and we have no sympathy if any misfortune befalls her when she leaves it. We might not hate the rich mother, the poor mother, the ambitious or lazy mother, but we fear and scorn her refusal to stay put inside our notions of what a mother should be. We want her to know she should be careful, cautious, conscious that she is not so free to make and remake her own story.
* * *
After my article was published, after I had spoken with Debra Harrell and had heard from so many other “bad moms,” I began to understand what Lenore Skenazy meant when I spoke to her that first time: You don’t have to tell me your story; I’ll tell you your story. After a while, it begins to feel as though these scenarios fo
llow a script. But for one woman I spoke to, the script was different.
“I am the horrible Starbucks mother!” Julie Koehler wrote to me in the subject heading of her email. The Starbucks in question was located in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago. The “horrible” act to which she referred had occurred in a parking lot a few months before when Julie let her three daughters wait in her minivan, watching an episode of Dora the Explorer while she ran into a strip-mall Starbucks to grab a much-needed cup of coffee. By this point, you know how it goes. A concerned citizen. A phone call. A nearby cop approaches the vehicle. Where is your mother? he demands. Julie’s daughter gestures toward the Starbucks, but the officer misinterprets and walks instead into the adjacent nail salon, because of course, there’s nothing a lazy, self-centered mother loves to do more than get her nails done while she’s neglecting her children. Judgment comes first; risk assessment follows. When he doesn’t find her in the salon, he goes back to the car just as Julie is returning with her coffee. She sees him, sees her children are upset. “What’s going on?” she asks. But here is where the story diverges, because Julie is not a writer or a stay-at-home mom or a secretary or a professor or a McDonald’s manager. Julie Koehler is a senior public defender with twenty years’ experience in Chicago’s criminal justice system, and unlike me, unlike Debra Harrell, unlike any of the other mothers I spoke to, she knew what her rights were as she approached the officer; and, as she would tell me later when we spoke in person, smiling a little, almost laughing, “I cross-examine cops all day long. I’m not about to be intimidated by a badge.”
* * *
There is nothing about Julie’s person or children or two-story suburban house in Evanston, Illinois, that reveals her to be a woman who spends her days defending people accused of murder, rape, assault, larceny, and a potpourri of other violent crimes. We’d been planning to meet at her office, but after a late cancellation of a trial, she invited me to talk in her home. The kids had a day off from school. They had friends coming over. “You know how it is,” she said. “They’re at the age where they keep themselves busy while we talk.”