The Culture of Fear (19 page)

When the truth came out that Susan Smith had strapped her kids in car seats and let the car roll into the lake, reporters recast her faster
than you can say “baby-killing bitch” (a neighbor’s description quoted the following week in
Newsweek
)
.
All of the glowing descriptions that journalists had been printing about Smith suddenly evaporated. There was no more discussion of her classmates having voted her “friendliest senior” of the class of 1989, or her teachers describing her as “a good kid,” or the neighbor who said of Smith and her husband, “I saw the love that they had for these children.”
³⁸

Reporters also had to ignore reports that Smith’s stepfather, a six-foot-four, 300-pound man, admitted to sexually abusing Smith ever since she was fifteen, when he allegedly began fondling her breasts and forcing her to rub his genitals. Presumably journalists felt justified in referring to this man’s sexual assaults as an “affair” because Smith herself had called them that. Most failed to point out that she had done so when she was neither legally nor psychologically capable of giving consent: Smith had made the statement at age seventeen, during an interview with therapists at a hospital after she had swallowed thirty aspirin in a suicide attempt.
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As much as we might like to settle on some fatal character or behavior flaw to explain why a woman killed her children, the truth is seldom so clear-cut. The women’s own pathologies are invariably more complex, and other parties usually are involved. Even extreme cases like Awilda Lopez are not as simple as they may seem. To attribute her actions to her crack addiction is to disregard the obvious fact that most crack abusers do
not
kill their kids. Nor do they lose their maternal instincts, as the article in the
Times
suggested. “These women are not monsters. They do not hate their kids, they do not hit their kids any more than their counterparts who do not use crack,” Sheigla Murphy and Marsha Rosenbaum of the Institute for Scientific Analysis in San Francisco, who have studied crack-using mothers extensively, report. No one denies that a mother’s use of crack injures her children, or that children are ignored or abused when their mothers go on crack binges. But many of the crack users Murphy and Rosenbaum followed took great pride in their children’s achievements and worked to steer them away from drugs. During periods when their own drug use got out of hand they placed their children with relatives.
⁴⁰

It may have provided a handy way for the American public to differentiate themselves from her, but Awilda Lopez’s use of crack defines neither what kind of mother she is nor the cause of Elisa’s death. Numerous other parties besides Elisa’s mother and her crack dealer—from Lopez’s husband to the entire New York City child welfare administration—also were at fault.
⁴¹

Like the elephant that vanishes behind clouds of smoke on the magician’s stage, the larger cast of characters that give rise to child mistreatment are obscured amid melodramatic reporting about evil mothers. The coverage can leave the impression that it is not so much social policies or collective irresponsibility that endanger many children in this country but rather an overabundance of infanticidal women.

Making a fairly small number of women appear massive is an impressive feat of legerdemain, and several features of the media’s coverage of child abuse intersect to create the illusion. Coupled with the relentless attention paid to notorious baby killers such as Smith and Lopez, there is an
underplaying
of stories about a much larger and more important group of deficient parents. Michael Shapiro, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, calls these parents “the screwups.”
Screwup parents, Shapiro goes on to explain, love their children and neither torture nor murder them. They simply have trouble providing for them in a consistent and competent manner. Critical of journalists’ infatuation with infanticidal parents, Shapiro observes, “When the death of a child becomes the context in which all subsequent child
welfare stories get reported and written, then all the failing parents become the homicidal parent and all their children are in grave peril.”
⁴²

Local newspapers and TV news programs pick up where the national media leave off in creating the false impression that a large proportion of failing parents are homicidal. Local media run story upon story about deadly mothers who never make it to national infamy. Around the time of the Smith and Lopez chronicles, for example, the New York City media ran hundreds of news stories about a woman named Sherain Bryant, who tortured and beat her four-year-old daughter to death in 1994. A focus of media attention for the following two years, Bryant was finally sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison.

Following her conviction in 1996 the
New York Daily News
ran an editorial that concluded with a leading question: “She has now been removed. But how many more Bryants are out there?” As if to answer the question, around this same time the
Daily News—
along with most of the rest of the New York City media—relayed hideous particulars about several other local moms as well. Two notable examples are the Brooklyn woman who scratched and burned her seven-year-old daughter while smoking crack cocaine in front of her, and the Queens mother who, despondent after an argument with her husband, shot her two-year-old and six-year-old in the head, killing them both.
⁴³

The
New York Times
article about the Queens woman includes another common journalistic gambit: implying that behind any door may reside a would-be murderous mom. A neighbor is quoted, saying what neighbors are so often quoted as saying after a woman has killed her child. “She seemed like such a nice lady. She was a friendly person, and she had nice little kids. I’m shocked,” the manager of a nearby laundromat says, suggesting ipso facto that other nice, friendly moms might someday slaughter their children too.
⁴⁴

Stories that blithely pass along frightening statistics on child abuse likewise promote the mythic impression of a nation teeming with potentially lethal women. Donna Shalala announced in 1996 that the number of children abused and neglected by their parents had doubled during a recent seven-year period, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million, and the number of seriously abused children had quadrupled from about 143,000 to
nearly 570,000. She did not specify how much of the abuse was committed by mothers, but since the vast majority of single parents are women (and Shalala emphasized that children of single parents are almost twice as likely to be harmed), she implicitly singled out mothers.
⁴⁵

By and large reporters took the numbers at face value and labeled them “alarming,” and crusaders for various causes used them to argue for everything from greater spending on welfare programs to a ban on abortion—the latter from the author of an op-ed piece in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune,
who argued that “abortion on demand has had a polluting effect, which is at least partially responsible for the dramatic rise in child abuse and neglect.”
⁴⁶

Absent from almost all of the coverage was readily available evidence suggesting that rates of child abuse had not increased as drastically as Shalala indicated. For instance, statistics from the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse showed that the annual number of fatalities resulting from child abuse had increased by only about 200 during the period in question, from 1,014 in 1986 to 1,216 in 1993. If the number of kids seriously abused and neglected quadrupled, as Shalala avows, should not then the number of deaths have increased by a large number as well?
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A closer look at Shalala’s study reveals that much of what is described as a “skyrocketing” increase in child abuse is really a growth in
expectations
of abuse. According to Douglas Besharov, a former director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect who helped design the study and lately has been on the staff of the American Enterprise Institute, more than half of the additional 1.4 million children were not actually said to be abused or neglected but rather “endangered.” That is to say, these children were deemed by social services professionals to be at risk of future harm.
⁴⁸

Another ill-reported set of statistics further buttresses the illusion of an epidemic of savage mothers. Their interest sparked initially by Lorena Bobbitt, who severed her husband’s penis in 1993, and by O. J. Simpson,
who claimed in 1994 that his murdered wife had battered him, journalists set out to inform the public about the prevalence of “husband abuse.”

“It’s Far More Widespread Than People Think” read a headline in the
Washington Post
in 1993 in a lengthy story revealing the existence of battered husbands, about whom the mental health community and general public “have been in deep denial,” according to the reporter. How common is husband battering? According to a headline in
USA Today
in 1994, “Husbands Are Battered as Often as Wives.” In an article the following year a writer for the
National Review
cited a study showing that “54 per cent of all severe domestic violence is committed by women.” In 1996, in one of several columns he has published on this issue, John Leo of
U.S. News & World Report
revealed that “children are now more likely to see mommy hit daddy” than the other way around. Not only that, the whole thing has been covered up by “feminist scholars,” according to Dennis Byrne of the
Chicago Sun-Times.
“Researchers have known for years that women are as, if not more, likely to report violently abusing their husbands or partners,” Byrne revealed in 1998.
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A major source of statistical information behind these stories is research conducted by a colleague of mine, the sociologist Richard Gelles, director of the Family Violence Research Program at the University of Rhode Island. The writers accurately identified Gelles’s research as the best available studies, but they wrongly reported the findings. Gelles does not hold that millions of men get beaten by their wives, as a casual reader of newspapers and magazines might be led to believe. On the contrary, he maintains that 100,000 to 200,000 men are battered in the United States—a number that pales in comparison to the 2 million battered women. Supporting Gelles’s findings, FBI data show that one in four female murder victims is killed by a husband or boyfriend, compared to just 3 percent of murdered men slain by wives or girlfriends.
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By overlooking or downplaying what Gelles considers vital, writers make his assertions seem like evidence of an epidemic of moms beating up dads. “The statement that men and women hit one another in
roughly equal numbers is true,” Gelles admits. “But it cannot be made in a vacuum without the qualifiers I always include in my writing: number one, women are seriously injured at seven times the rate of men; and number two, women are killed by partners at more than two times the rate of men.” When women do kill their husbands, he adds, they are often reacting to years of brutal assaults or to a current attack. In reality, when mommies hit daddies most of the time they don’t hurt them very much, but unfortunately the same cannot be said the other way around. As Gelles puts it, “The most brutal, terrorizing, and continuing pattern of harmful intimate violence is carried out primarily by men.”
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Husband abuse never became a predominant scare on a par with, say, teenage motherhood. Yet the fact that several respectable publications helped to promote it evinces how intense the moral panic over motherhood became in the 1990s. That conservative columnists and talk show hosts continue to promote the scare in the late 1990s—half a decade after Gelles began publicly condemning it as misogynistic—also demonstrates something. Fear mongers do not have to stop performing their hocus-pocus just because their secrets have been revealed.
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How to Perpetuate Prejudice Without Really Trying

J
ournalists, politicians, and other opinion leaders foster fears about particular groups of people both by what they play up and what they play down. Consider Americans’ fears of black men. These are perpetuated by the excessive attention paid to dangers that a small percentage of African-American men create for other people, and by a relative
lack
of attention to dangers that a majority of black men face themselves.

The dangers to black men recede from public view whenever people paint color-blind pictures of hazards that particularly threaten African-American men: discussions of disease trends that fail to mention that black men are four times more likely to be infected with the AIDS virus and twice as likely to suffer from prostate cancer and heart disease than are white men; reports about upturns in teen suicide rates that neglect to note evidence that the rate for white males crept up only 22 percent between 1980 and 1995 while the rate for black males jumped 146 percent; or explorations of the gap between what middle-class Americans earn and the expenses of maintaining a middle-class lifestyle that fail to point out that the problem is more acute for black men. (College-educated black men earn only as much as white men with high school diplomas.)
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The most egregious omissions occur in the coverage of crime. Many more black men are casualties of crime than are perpetrators, but their victimization does not attract the media spotlight the way their crimes do. Thanks to profuse coverage of violent crime on local TV news programs, “night after night, black men rob, rape, loot, and pillage in the living room,” Caryl Rivers, a journalism instructor at Boston University, has remarked. Scores of studies document that when it comes to
victims
of crime, however, the media pay disproportionately more attention to whites and women.
²