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Jewish World Review Nov. 6, 2000 / 8 Mar-Cheshvan 5761

Bob Greene

Bob Greene
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Consumer Reports


The crime that hides behind a wall of silence


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- IN THE END, the greatest danger to children who need protecting does not come from those people who torture and sometimes kill them.

What Patrick Bourgeois and his girlfriend, Tracy Lynn Bratton, did to Bourgeois' 3-year-old son P.J. -- the beating, the biting into the boy's skin, the taping of his legs and wrists so that he could not help himself as he slowly choked to death on his own blood -- are beyond forgiving. Regardless of how long they would have spent in prison, no penalty is severe enough to adequately punish people who would do that to a child who has absolutely no defenses.

To feel anger at Bourgeois and Bratton is instinctive -- but if ever we, as a nation, are going to be able to keep children safe, the anger toward the torturers and killers of those children, although understandable, is not the solution.

Because -- as we have stressed so often in reporting cases such as this one -- the greatest enemy the children face is not the abuse that is inflicted upon them.

The greatest enemy they face is indifference -- indifference from the courts, indifference from the agencies entrusted to assure the children's well-being, indifference from prosecutors who act as if they can't be bothered with vigorously pursuing cases against people who do this to children, indifference from police departments that don't always consider the grievous mistreatment of children to be full-fledged crimes, indifference from the citizenry.

The reason a judge such as Nodine Miller of Franklin County Common Pleas Court can get away with doing what she did -- releasing the killers of P.J. Bourgeois from prison early, stating without supporting evidence that what they did in killing that child was a product of "ignorance, immaturity and inexperience, more than malevolence" -- is because we allow judges to get away with that sort of thing, just as we allow prosecutors to get away with not objecting to the release of child killers, as the prosecutors in Franklin County failed to object. We allow prosecutors to cut deals with child torturers and child killers, as Franklin County prosecutors cut a deal with Bourgeois and Bratton, agreeing not to oppose the "supershock probation" that let them out early.

Why does this indifference so often prevail?

Because it's easy for the adults in authority -- because the children, with no voices, cannot speak up to say that this is wrong. The children are usually invisible in courtrooms; the judges can see their tormentors asking for lenience, for understanding, but the judges cannot see the children, whose cries for mercy went unanswered in the first place.

And -- perhaps most sadly -- the children end up being blamed, directly or indirectly, for their own torture. It is the ultimate insult -- not only do the children go unheard, but they are treated as if they somehow deserved what was done to them. When Judge Miller referred to P.J. Bourgeois as a "difficult child" whom his father's girlfriend "could not control," a child who "began misbehaving" and thus was punished with the torture that led to his death, she was relying only on the killers' own descriptions of what the boy had been like. It would be bad enough if Judge Miller's decision to impugn the dead child were an anomaly -- if she were the only judge to do such a thing.

But it's rather common. Readers may recall another case we have covered here -- the case of the 7-year-old girl in Calumet County, Wis., who was kept locked in a small dog cage in an unheated basement, left to live in her own excrement.

After her 11-year-old brother walked alone, crying and barefoot on a freezing Wisconsin night to ask police to save his sister -- and after the parents, Michael and Angeline Rogers, pleaded guilty to felonies that could have put them in prison for 40 years -- the time for sentencing arrived.

Judge Steven Weinke gave Mr. and Mrs. Rogers no state prison time at all. He looked at the torturers of that little girl, and in sympathetic tones he said to them:

"I have children, and I know what a challenge it can be even raising good children."

She was caged because, in Judge Weinke's clear implication, she was not a "good child." He had personally appointed a psychiatrist to offer him an evaluation of the case; the psychiatrist used words that were almost exactly the same as Judge Miller's words about P.J. Bourgeois. The little girl in the cage, the psychiatrist said, was a "very difficult child." Only one problem with that diagnosis: The psychiatrist admitted, when we questioned him, that he had never even spoken to the girl, or to any of the Rogers children. He, and Judge Weinke, blamed that little girl without ever spending a single second talking with her.

The indifference is everywhere, and it is the worst enemy the children have. In some states, reporters are not even allowed into courtrooms to cover the cases of abused and neglected children. Judges and state officials often say this is "for the protection of the children," but time after time it turns out that the secrecy serves only to protect the people who are supposed to be looking out for the children.

The lesson of the killing of P.J. Bourgeois is that the indifference still prevails. It always will, until the day we recognize that the indifference itself is a crime against the children.



JWR contributor Bob Greene is a novelist and columnist. Send your comments to him by clicking here.

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