it's a sad world
So I was going to friendslock this, but on further thought, I decided it's an important story I want as many people to hear as possible. As long as I don't use any names, I figure it's alright. If any of you do know or figure out who I'm talking about, please keep it to yourselves and respect her wish for some privacy.


I have a friend, who is 13. Let's call her Sparky, because she has a marvelously strong spirit. She comes from a seriously screwed up family. She is the seventh of nine children in a religious family. The oldest child in the family, a boy we shall call Pervert, sexually abused all of the girls in the family when they got to be around 6-8 years old, except the oldest, because she is too close to him in age - he would have only been 9 when she was 7. Nothing was done until the eighth child, who is now ten, was seen by Sparky coming out of Pervert's room, and it was clear something was very wrong. At this point, Sparky told her oldest sister, who started trying to involve the police. A case worker was assigned to the family, and there were some investigations and interviews, but pretty much nothing was done. Pervert now has his own apartment in the city, but is still allowed to visit home. The parents seem to prefer protecting Pervert from the police to protecting their daughters from Pervert. In addition to this, the father of the family is controlling and both verbally and physically abusive, while the mother stands by and does nothing.
I have known this for some time, but what can you do? The police were notified; I really had no idea what else could be done.

Fast-forward to Saturday night, when Sparky called me. (Sparky and I are close, she calls often and comes to visit fairly regularly.) She was in tears, and told me her father had been hitting her, she wanted to get away, she wanted anything but to stay in her house with her family. I told her to come to my place. When she arrived she was her usual cheery self, but she had nasty black and blue marks on her arms, and told me they were worse on her legs.

I had no clue what to do next. I called my friend Anna, who is a social worker. She told me that I should bring Sparky into the emergency room the next day. So I did, arriving there around 4pm with Adam, who was wonderful and came with us. We were interviewed first by the triage nurse and then by a pediatric nurse, and then by a social worker. We were admitted into the ER ward at around 10, at which Adam headed home, and told that Sparky would have to spend the night, which she was naturally less than thrilled about. We both spent a rather unpleasant night, she on her examination table/cot, me on a bench in the waiting room outside.

At around 8 in the evening, when it must have become apparent to her that Sparky was not coming home that night, her mom called. I had written Sparky's oldest sister to find out if she knew anything like what social worker had been on the case last time, what Sparky's national identification number is, and any other relevant information. The sister had raised the alarm among other members of the extended family, and somehow or other it had gotten back to the parents. Sparky's mom began yelling at Sparky, who put her on speaker phone so that I could also hear what was being said. Her mom was accusing Sparky of lying, and yelling at her for telling people about private family matters. Finally I couldn't take it anymore and I took the phone. I informed the mother that Sparky hadn't told anyone at all. When she had come to visit me, I had seen the bruises on her and had alerted her family and taken her to the hospital, where we were currently awaiting the social worker. Her mother asked that I have the social worker contact her, and then abruptly hung up.

The next morning we were scheduled to meet with the standard social worker, as opposed to the on call one we had met the night before, and with the police investigator, along with, possibly, a doctor. (This was all in Hebrew, so my understanding may be imperfect.)

At 11, Sparky decided enough was enough, packed her bag, and tried to exit the building. Unfortunately, that is now illegal. Because she is a minor and has been admitted to the hospital, she can't leave except in the custody of a guardian, and right now she has no guardians anyone would care to give custody to. So, she has nowhere to go. It was looking pretty ugly, and I was wondering how they were going to justify hand-cuffing a 13 year old child abuse victim, but she gave in right before that became necessary. After a watching a movie sullenly, she bounced back and became more her normal self.

Around this time, Miki (described below) called and said the doctor had called Sparky's father. He had given his usual explanation, which is that there is nothing wrong in the family, but that the oldest sister is mentally unstable, and has brain washed the younger children into thinking they are abused, when really they are no such thing. Whether the sister also brainwashed the bruises onto Sparky, I don't know. I asked Miki if she and the doctor believed the father's story, and she replied with a resounding no, which heartened me. She also said that the father showed no interest in coming to see Sparky or take her back home, and in fact seemed just as happy to have her off his hands.

But back to the story: Around 3pm, she was admitted to the children's ward in the regular hospital (no longer in the ER) and was told she would probably be there a few days. She hates it and wants to leave, but seems to realize that she doesn't have much of a choice at this point. I have to say, she is holding up amazingly well, not just for a 13 year old, but for anyone. She didn't have her melt-down until around 20 hours of waiting around in the ER, and she told her story to three different people before clamming up and refusing to talk to anyone else. Honestly, it's a story no one wants to tell at all, let along to four different strangers in the same day. And she calmed down fairly quickly afterward and was up to making mature decisions about hard questions like where she wants to live now.

From my point of view, it was also a tough 26 hours, with about 3 hours of sleep on a bench. Sparky was alternately fine, bored, extremely depressed and telling me she didn't want to live anymore, hopeless and telling me she knew she would just end up back with her family only worse off because now her dad would be *really* mad, and angry at me for putting her in this lousy situation in the first place. I was just as stir-crazy as her, trapped in that room forever and ever, and because she is 13 and thus obsessed with privacy, we had to keep all our curtains pulled shut the whole time. In addition, all the official people seemed to slip easily into the assumption that I was in charge of the situation. When Sparky tried to jump ship at 11am, Estee, the nurse, tried to tell me it was my responsibility to keep her there, because I was the big and responsible one, and she is too little to understand. I told her I was under no circumstances tackling the girl to keep her in the building, and if Estee wanted Sparky within the premises, she was going to have to do something. Appropriately enough, Sparky strode by with her bag right at that moment and Estee was forced to physically bar the door.

No one else was quite that extreme, but all of the social workers (by this time there were three - Ylena, the on call one we talked to at first, Miki - the one assigned to the peds ward, and Tali, who seems to be based in the city Sparky's family lived in when they first moved to Israel) took my number and called me when they had questions. They asked me where Sparky should go next, (friends, relatives, something) and even asked if I would take her. (I can't, first of all because my life is not set up to take care of a young adolescent even for a few days, and second, because I'm leaving the country on Wednesday.) My phone was ringing every five minutes with someone else wanting information I didn't have. Tali set up a meeting with me for 9:30 tomorrow morning, and the police investigator, who in the end isn't coming until tomorrow, also expects to meet with me. Because Sparky refused to speak to Miki at all, not even to acknowledge her name (this was right after the 11 o'clock melt down) Miki directed all her questions to me. The nurses also all asked me anything they needed to know about Sparky, and seemed to be under the impression that I was going to stay with her the entire hospital stay. I realize that she is in the peds unit and generally someone stays with them at all times, and I also realize that she is only 13 and shouldn't be left alone in a hospital with no one in the world, but unfortunately I am only one very human girl who doesn't feel much older than 13 herself, and was completely worn down by the last 26 hours. To make matters worse, Sparky's Hebrew is only so-so, and the different workers had varying levels of Hebrew, so I was doing a lot of translating in my own not-so-perfect Hebrew.

Tali called and told me that she had spoken at length to the father, who was very helpful and suggesting places Sparky might go to "take some time for herself." She commented that he did not seem angry at all. This set off a bunch of alarms in my head. Given that the man goes into rages and beats his children and then covers it with a story about his eldest daughter being mentally unwell, while choosing to completely ignore the all too real and disturbing mental problems of his eldest son, I trust his eagerness to help and cooperate about as far as I can throw it. I hope Tali has a bit more skepticism than I detected from this conversation, but I guess I'll find out tomorrow morning.

The worst of all of it is that I don't know if I am, in the end, doing Sparky any favors. What is going to happen to her? She has said that she prefers foster care to returning to her family, but that's always a risky venture. What if, indeed, she's forced to spend a few days scared and bored out of her mind at the hospital, and in the end goes back to the same situation she started in, only with yet another strike against her? It seems that other people over the years have known about the abuse, but have generally just patched up the kids as best they could and sent them back home. I seem to be the first to have taken one of them to the ER and demanded a social worker. It is a slightly different situation than when the oldest sister tried to call police attention to Pervert's activities, because Sparky bears very obvious physical signs of the latest physical abuse episode, and Sparky is older and much more verbal and self possessed than her younger sister, who was more the focus of the earlier investigation. But, in the end, that investigation ended nowhere and with nothing changed, so why should anyone believe this one will end differently? Maybe I would have done Sparky a better service by letting her stay here the night, buying her some ice cream in the morning and sending her home. I just don't know, and the whole situation makes me feel slightly sick.