Ancient wisdom finds statistical expression
Those baby names held such promise: Vanessa is Greek for butterfly; there was Summer for the season, and Nevaeh, a backwards version of paradise. None of these names hints at the darkness spiraling near the center of each little girl’s family life.
This month, during the Inland Northwest’s Our Kids: Our Business Project, residents have been asked to contemplate how children like these come to such violent ends and how this community can learn from their tragic tales.
It’s an ancient search. Since time began, storytellers, prophets and philosophers have struggled to define the human condition. The Greeks searched for divine order in the midst of life’s chaos. Christians still describe themselves as “children of a fallen humanity.”
William Woodsworth wrote, “The child is father of the man.” Authors ranging from Charles Dickens, abandoned to a London boot-blacking factory at 12, to Maya Angelou, who was raped at 8, transformed the profound pain of childhood into art.
The idea that humiliation, trauma and violence affect children for their entire lives is not new.
But until recently, this concept hadn’t been quantified terribly well by the cold statistics of science.
For contemporary leaders more likely swayed by hard data than the language of literature, those in social services found it difficult to explain how the lives of children like Vanessa Behan, Summer Phelps and Nevaeh Miller might have been saved.
That’s why local child welfare experts were thrilled to read of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. Conducted by researchers from Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this extensive study applies hard science to this ancient examination of the human condition.
The scientists’ conclusions sound much like those of William Faulkner. “The past,” he wrote, “isn’t over. It isn’t even past.”
Their discoveries came by accident. Researchers were studying obesity among employed middle-class Kaiser Permanente members. Running through a list of questions with a severely overweight woman, one of these researchers misspoke. Rather than “how old were you when you were first sexually active?” he asked, “How much did you weigh when you were first sexually active?”
Her answer: “Forty pounds.” Her father had raped her.
Researchers asked more questions. Before long, they realized that many of the subjects who lost weight only to quickly regain it had been sexually abused.
After that the research expanded to eight painful childhood experiences, such as having a father in prison or the mother treated violently. The study’s co-authors have come to realize these stories are far more common than most people would ever imagine.
They found that a traumatic childhood was related to higher rates of alcoholism and heart disease. A man with six of these experiences was 4,600 percent more likely to become an IV drug user than one with none.
ACE Study co-author Dr. Robert Anda will be speaking in Spokane later this month at a conference overflowing with educators, from preschool to high school. They deal daily with traumatized children.
Teachers know that dropout rates are linked to those early horrific memories.
Other professions have made similar observations. Nurses and doctors spot the symptoms in their offices. And now even police officers have begun to echo social service workers: The best way to prevent crime, they say, would be to support young parents.
WSU’s Roy Harrington says we don’t have to search far to understand the extent of human pain. All we have to do is look within.
Partners with Families and Children: Spokane found that 65 percent of the sexually abused children it serves had a parent who had experienced at least four adverse childhood experiences.
When we encounter these families, executive director Mary Ann Murphy says, our question should not be “What is wrong with you?” but “What has happened to you?”
So odd, that contemporary society requires a neat row of statistics to make the case our wisest minds began to observe so long ago.
It’s all rather backwards. Should we ever work our way to the answers that lie hidden in the past, I expect we’ll find a little girl waiting for us. Perhaps her name will be Eve. Or maybe Nede.