The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [62]
How can we be so certain? Reporters spelled out for us precisely how Lopez differed from us. “Drugs, drugs, drugs—that’s all she was interested in,” Time quoted a neighbor saying of Lopez, and not just any drugs, not the sort that subscribers to Time might use. Lopez was “dominated by crack,” a drug that, according to the New York Times, “can overwhelm one of the strongest forces in nature, the parental instinct.” Crack “chemically impairs” mothers, the Times quoted one psychologist as saying, to the point where they “can’t take responsibility for paying the rent or seeing that there is food on the table for their children.”36
Infanticidal mothers are routinely depicted by the media as depraved beyond what any of us can imagine about ourselves or our friends and relatives. The year before Awilda Lopez, the media-anointed monster mother was a South Carolinian named Susan Smith, who drowned her two little boys in a lake. She too was portrayed as severely degenerate. She had been having an affair with her boss’s son and planned to dump her husband and marry the boyfriend. After her lover wrote her a note saying he wasn’t ready for the responsibilities of fatherhood, the story went, she decided to kill her kids. As if all of this weren’t perverse enough, she had been having consensual sex with her stepfather, reporters revealed.
It took some doing, though, for the news media to portray Smith as the personification of depravity. They had to invalidate everything they themselves had been saying about her. Throughout the first week after the death of her children the press depicted her as a loving, heroic, small-town mom. They even bought in to Smith’s weepy tale about a black man carjacking her kids, a story that should have made reporters wary, considering their embarrassment five years earlier after Charles Stewart, a Boston man, hoodwinked them with exactly the same racist ruse following the murder of his pregnant wife in an insurance scam.37
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.39
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