The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [63]
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
The Woman Next Door
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.”
There have always been parents who kill their children, and there always will be psychotic and evil parents who do. The true story of child welfare—the more than half a million children in the care of the state, the twenty state child welfare agencies across the nation in such disarray that they are under court-ordered supervision, the seeming inability of the state to help the children it feels it must take from their homes—is about “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