We All Need To Help Our Other ‘Rachels’

On Tuesday, most young children of the Inland Northwest will safely be seated in school.

Rachel Carver will not be there.

The dark-haired girl who would have been entering fourth grade at Spokane’s Ridgeview Elementary was assaulted and killed June 15 - the last day of school.

Her uncle, Jason Wickenhagen, is charged with her murder.

At a forum sponsored by this newspaper a few nights ago to discuss what can be done to reduce the risk of other child-abuse deaths, a chilling comment echoed through the auditorium at Shadle Park High School as the discussion began.

“There are many Rachel Carvers in Spokane,” said Cheryl Steele, director of the city’s community-oriented policing program. “We just don’t know where they all are.”

For too many kids, personal safety is a subject that must be learned at school because it isn’t practiced at home.

The defining difference between a safe school and an unsafe home is that a school, regardless of its politics, educational philosophy or location, is a community.

Adults and children spend time together, watching one another, talking, walking and interacting every day.

And it is community that seems to make all the difference when it comes to the safety of a child.

In a recent Time magazine story, anthropologist Phillip Walker notes that in his study of bones from 5,000 children in pre-industrial cultures dating back 6,000 years, he has never found bruises that provide the skeletal hallmark of battered children.

In today’s society, if tests were run on the bones of children in America’s classrooms, one of 20 would show signs of child battering.

The reason?

Walker believes it goes back to community. Primitive children were raised under the watchful eyes of aunts, grandparents and friends in communities where little went unnoticed behind the mammoth-hide doors.

At the newspaper forum on preventing child abuse, Spokane Child Protective Services director Dee Wilson offered a similar perspective.

Wilson noted that half the children who die from abuse and neglect in our region were children who were unsupervised much of the time.

There was no aunt, no uncle, no caring, responsible adult from the community watching over them.

And when asked the best hope for preventing or reducing child abuse deaths, Wilson said this: “Home visiting is the best thing we know to do.”

To visit a home requires someone to consider the neighborhood as belonging to them.

But we know that few neighbors today bother to pay attention or even dare to intrude next door.

Instead, the state has taken over that visitation - with limited success.

Given this assessment, could it be our politicians are baling too much political hay on the issue of needing tougher laws to fight and prevent crime?

Surely legal loopholes need to be closed that allowed Jason Wickenhagen to be free even though he had tried to rape a 16-year-old only weeks before Rachel Carver’s death.

To his credit, Rep. Mark Sterk of Spokane has made closing this loophole a campaign issue.

But changing laws cannot create a community.

In fact, much of our anxiety over crime actually has led to more locked doors, high walls and threatening signs that all visitors should keep out.

In truth, we can’t keep out of each other’s lives.

The problems that lead to child abuse and neglect are community problems that affect us and cost us all.

Our prisons already are overflowing with men and women who themselves were abused and neglected and who, in turn, abused.

Our schools already are disrupted by children whose rage at abuse spills onto others in the classroom.

Our neighborhoods already are home to children at risk and parents who desperately need guidance.

We have to pay attention, and be responsible for ourselves and our neighbors.

No single best way exists for paying attention to neighbors and their children.

Something as small as inviting yourself up to a troubled door with a plate of cookies might be a start.

Organizing a single mothers support group at church could work.

Giving time and money to organized crisis centers in the region would be a step.

Reporting suspicious activities to the police is something we all should do.

What doesn’t work is simply to pull the shades, turn on the TV.

All that will do is lead us once again to shake our heads in shame when the story of the next Rachel Carver flickers on the screen.

, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the Editor of The Spokesman-Review. His column appears each Sunday on the Perspective page.