Child Abuse Statistics

In 1999, an estimated 3,244,000 children were reported to Child Protective Services (CPS) agencies as alleged victims of child maltreatment. Child abuse reports have maintained a steady growth for the past ten years, with the total number of reports nationwide increasing 45% since 1987 (Nation Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse (NCPCA) 2000 Annual Fifty State Survey).

Neglect represents the most common type of reported and substantiated form of maltreatment. In 1996, 25 states provided the following breakdown for reported cases: 62% involved neglect, 25% physical abuse, 7% sexual abuse, 3% emotional maltreatment and 4% other. For substantiated cases, 31 states gave the following breakdowns: 60% neglect, 23% physical, 9% sexual, 4% emotional maltreatment and 5% other (NCPCA's 1996 Annual Fifty State Survey).

In 1999, an estimated 1,401 child abuse and neglect related fatalities were confirmed by CPS agencies, nearly 4 every day. Since 1985, the rate of child abuse fatalities has increased by 39%. Based on these numbers, more than three children die each day as a result of child abuse or neglect (NCPCA's 1996 Annual Fifty State Survey).

According to information from at least 18 states that were able to report the type of maltreatment which caused the child's death for at least one of the past three years. Approximately 54% of the deaths were due to physical abuse while 43% resulted from neglect. Young children remain at high risk for loss of life. Based on data from all three years, this study found 82% of these children were under the age of five while an alarming 42% were under the age of one at the time of their death (NCPCA's 1996 Annual Fifty State Survey).

The U.S. Advisory Board reported that near fatal abuse and neglect each year leave "18,000 permanently disabled children, tens of thousands of victims overwhelmed by lifelong psychological trauma, thousands of traumatized siblings and family members, and thousands of near-death survivors who, as adults, continue to bear the physical and psychological scars. Some may turn to crime or domestic violence or become abusers themselves (U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, 1995 report, A National's Shame.)"

The Third National Incidence Study (NIS-3) of child maltreatment released by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN) in the fall of 1996. Note: NIS-4 is underway and is scheduled for completion Feb 2008.

The NIS is congressionally mandated under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). The NIS collects data on children who were investigated by child protective services (CPS) agencies and on children seen by community professionals who were not reported to CPS or who were screened out by CPS without investigation.

The NIS studies have been published on data collected in 1979 (NIS-1), in 1986 (NIS-2), and in 1993 (NIS-3).

The NIS uses two definitions of child maltreatment: the Harm Standard, under which children are counted as maltreated only if they have already experienced demonstrable harm; and the Endangerment Standard, under which children are counted if they have experienced maltreatment that puts them at risk of demonstrable harm.

The NIS-3 gathered data from a nationally representative sample of 5,612 community professionals in 842 agencies serving 42 counties.

Finding of the NIS-3:

• The estimated number of children seriously injured by all forms of maltreatment quadrupled between 1986 and 1993, from 141,700 to 565,000 (a 299% increase).
• Considering the Harm Standard:
• The estimated number of sexually abused children increased 83%;
• The number of physically neglected children rose 102%;
• There was a 333 % increase in the estimated number of emotionally neglected children; and
• The estimated number of physically abused children rose 42%.
  

CPS investigated only 28% of children whose maltreatment met the Harm Standard.
Although the percentage of children whose abuse or neglect was investigated declined, the actual number of children investigated remained constant.
CPS investigated only 26 percent of the seriously injured and 26 percent of the moderately injured children.

Girls are sexually abused three times more often than boys.

Boys are at a greater risk of serious injury and of emotional neglect than are girls.

The incidence of fatally injured girls declined slightly, while the incidence of fatally injured boys rose.

Found no race differences in maltreatment incidence.

Poverty is significantly related to incidence rates in nearly every category of maltreatment. Compared to children whose families earned $30,000 or more, children in families with annual incomes below $15,000 were:

• More than 22 times more likely to experience maltreatment under the Harm Standard and 25 times more likely under the Endangerment Standard.
• More than 44 times more likely to be neglected, by either definitional standard.
• Over 22 times more likely to be seriously injured using either definitional standard.
• 60 times more likely to die from maltreatment under the Harm Standard.

(Executive Summary of the Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect, September 1996 and Reid, T. (1996). News NIS-3 Data. APSAC Advisor, 9 (3).)
Children whose parents abuse drugs or alcohol are put at a greater risk for violent victimization (National Commission on Children, 1993).

With the exception of homicide, children and youths suffer more victimization than do adults in virtually every category, including physical abuse, sibling assault, bullying, sexual abuse, and rape (American Psychological Association Commission on Violence and Youth, 1993).

It is estimated that children with disabilities are 4 to 10 times more vulnerable to sexual abuse than their non-disabled peers (National Resource Center on Child Sexual Abuse, 1992).

In over 9000 divorces in 12 states, child sexual abuse allegations were made in less then 2% of contested divorces involving child custody (Association of Family Conciliation Courts, 1990).

Survivors:
It is estimated that there are 60 million survivors of childhood sexual abuse in America today (Forward, 1993)

Long term effects of child abuse include fear, anxiety, depression, anger, hostility, inappropriate sexual behavior, poor self esteem, tendency toward substance abuse and difficulty with close relationships (Browne & Finkelhor, 1986).

Clinical findings of adult victims of sexual abuse include problems in interpersonal relationships associated with an underlying mistrust. Generally, adult victims of incest have a severely strained relationship with their parents that is marked by feelings of mistrust, fear, ambivalence, hatred, and betrayal. These feelings may extend to all family members (Tsai and Wagner, 1978).

Guilt is experienced by almost all victims (Tsai and Wagner, 1978).

If a child victim does not resolve the trauma, sexuality may become an area of adult conflict (Courtois & Watts, 1982).

Adults who viewed domestic violence in the home as children have a greater difficulty holding jobs, maintaining relationships with their peers and have a higher risk of developing mental health disorders (Patterson, 1992).

Men appear to be prone to blame themselves for any sexual abuse they may have experienced as children (Mendel, 1993.)

Abusers:
The typical child sex offender molests an average of 117 children, most of who do not report the offence (National Institute of Mental Health, 1988).

It is estimated that approximately 71 % of child sex offenders are under 35 and knew the victim at least causally. About 80 % of these individuals fall within normal intelligence ranges; 59% gain sexual access to their victims through, seduction or enticement (Burgess & Groth, 1984).

S tress indicators such as unrealistic expectations of a child, unemployment and low self-esteem are important characteristics in perpetrators of child abuse (Health & Human Services, 1993).

Approximately 60 % of the male survivors samples report at least one of their perpetrators to be female (Mendel, 1993).

Three-year-old girl dies after alleged abuse by stepfather (Update)

SUBANG JAYA: A three-year-old girl, believed to have been abused over a month, by her stepfather has died.

The victim’s 27-year-old stepfather, 27, and 24-year-old mother were arrested by police soon after the child was taken to Poliklinik Komuniti Seri Kembangan by the man.

The stepfather brought the child, Jasmine Lee to the clinic after he found her unconscious at their home in Bukit Serdang at 7.45am on Wednesday.

A doctor who examined Jasmine found over 30 bruises on her body and head.

It is learnt that the injury marks found her resembled those suffered by someone who had been repeatedly assaulted over a period of time.

The doctor suspected something amiss when the stepfather could not explain how the child suffered such injuries and alerted the police.

Subang Jaya police chief Asst Comm Zainal Rashid said the stepfather was arrested soon after police arrived at the clinic and picked up the mother at their home at 12.45pm.

“The case has been classified as murder under Section 302 of the Penal Code. Jasmine’s body was taken to the Serdang Hospital for post mortem,” he said.

He added the couple are being detained at the Subang Jaya police headquarters to assist in investigations.

ACP Zainal said the stepfather, a mechanic, lost his job at a workshop last month adding that he married the woman about a year ago after she separated from her first husband.

“After he was jobless, he spent most of his time at the apartment unit,” he said.

He urged the public especially residents in the area to come forward and assist the police.

Credits to Oh Jo Vyn

When Is Spanking Child Abuse?

by Lisa Belkin

A hearing is underway in a Wisconsin courtroom, for Barry Barnett, a 43-year-old pastor. He and the state department of social services both agree that the father of nine and minister at the Lighthouse Family Ministries in Poynette, Wisc., used a wooden paddle to punish his 12-year-old son for lying last spring. But they differ on whether that paddling, which left bruises on the boy, was child abuse.

The son has testified — that his father hit him twice; that they both cried during the paddling; that the two “swats” hurt “a little”; that he loves his father and feels safe at home; and that he understands why he was hit. “You should not lie to you parents,” he said.

The ER where the boy was treated submitted a report to the court — showing that the there were faint bruises on his buttocks but no swelling and that he was in no pain.

The district attorney argued that Mr. Barnett “went beyond reasonable discipline and it’s a pattern.”

The boy’s 21-year-old sister stood outside the courthouse holding a sign that said “Thank you for spanking me Dad.”

Spanking, which has never really gone away in many parts, is back in the news. Sometimes it is still the schools doing the hitting. This summer, the Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union issued a joint report, estimating that more than 200,000 children were spanked at American schools during the previous school year. (Corporal punishment in school is still legal in 21 states.)

Sometimes it is the parents. Alan E, Kazdin, director the Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic at Yale, where he is a professor of child psychology, wrote in Slate late last month, that “Despite the rise of the timeout and other nonphysical forms of punishment, most American parents hit, pinch, shake, or otherwise lay violent hands on their youngsters: 63 percent of parents physically discipline their 1-to 2-year-olds, and 85 percent of adolescents have been physically punished by their parents.”

Is it legal? In the United States, yes. While the United Nations has set a target date of 2009 to end corporal punishment by parents, and while 23 countries have already banned hitting kids, the United States is not one of them. All states prohibit “abuse” of children, and some specifically prohibit the use of “unreasonable force,” against children, which is what Barnett is accused of doing.

Isn’t all hitting child abuse? That’s what the hearing in Wisconsin is trying to decide. But however it starts, warns Kazdin, who is also the author of “The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child, it usually escalates.

“More than one-third of all parents who start out with relatively mild punishments end up crossing the line drawn by the state to define child abuse: hitting with an object, harsh and cruel hitting, and so on,” he writes. “Children, endowed with wonderful flexibility and ability to learn, typically adapt to punishment faster than parents can escalate it, which helps encourage a little hitting to lead to a lot of hitting.”

The message that has not gotten through, say those who are trying to spread the word, is that spanking doesn’t work. Six years ago the psychologist Elizabeth Thompson Gershoff, then at Columbia University, published a review of 62 years of research, analyzing 82 separate studies. And while there was a lot of evidence that spanking makes children do what they are told in the very short term, it seems only to teach children not to get caught. What it doesn’t do is teach them to do better.

I can’t imagine using spanking as a deliberate and proscribed punishment. I have, however, hit my boys a small handful of times, in white-hot anger. They were already stronger than I was, and practically taller than I was, so I didn’t really have the power to physically hurt them. Yet I still cringe at the memory of my own loss of control, of the knowledge of what that could mean in a stronger parent with a smaller child.

We tell our children “do not hit.” Shouldn’t we all practice as we preach?

Adapted from :
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/when-is-spanking-child-abuse/

@Credits to : Erin Yap Peck Shing

When Big Brothers Bully

Highly critical parents and older siblings can have a negative effect on the self-esteem on the younger children in the family.

By Megan Olden, published on May 01, 2003 - last reviewed on April 10, 2007

Sibling animosity may be a universal truth, but that doesn't mean it is well understood. In a first attempt to link behavioral problems in early adulthood to the relationship with a brother or sister, researchers found that boys with older siblings who were critical of them were more likely to be arrested or to abuse drugs and alcohol.

In the study, 20-year-old boys with older siblings who had negative attitudes toward them were also more likely to associate with deviant peers and have sexual intercourse at a younger age than were boys with noncritical siblings. They exhibited the same antisocial behavior two years later.

The study, published in the Journal of Family Psychology (2003), required 73 men and women to describe their relationship with a younger brother. These findings do not imply that criticism causes deviance: Indeed, the siblings could have been highly critical because their brothers' behavior was problematic. But they do illustrate the potentially harmful impact of sibling interaction, says Bernadette Bullock, Ph.D., a research scientist at the University of Oregon's Child and Family Center and co-author of the study."Sibling influence is part of an ongoing multidirectional dynamic," says Bullock. The relationship is in turn influenced by parental attitudes and each child's temperament.

Jeanne Safer, Ph.D., a psychoanalyst and author of The Normal One: Life With a Difficult or Damaged Sibling, agrees: "How siblings relate to one another very often has to do with how the parents see the siblings and create the relationship between them."

Researchers including Bullock are now exploring the associations between parental and sibling attitudes, including the possibility of a contagion effect, in which the opinions of one family member affect the perceptions of others in the home.

Adapted from :

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200303/when-big-brothers-bully

Big Bad Bully

Note : long articles ahead. don't read if you're sleepy :P btw.. this is the "continous" article of the previous post that i've posted entitled "Top Strategies for Handling Bully"

How kids - and parents - can wrestle with a bully. Eventually, the one most hurt by bullying is the bully himself.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on September 01, 1995

No, it's not just boys being boys. It takes a special breed of person to cause pain to others. But the one most hurt by bullying is the bully himself—though that's not at first obvious and the effects worsen over the life cycle. Yes, females can be bullies too. They just favor a different means of mean.

On the first day of spring in 1993, honor student Curtis Taylor took his seat in the eighth-grade classroom he had grown to hate in the Oak Street Middle School in Burlington, Iowa. For three years other boys had been tripping him in the hallways, knocking things out of his hands. They'd even taken his head in their hands and banged it into a locker. Things were now intensifying. The name-calling was harsher. Some beloved books were taken. His bicycle was vandalized twice. Kids even kicked the cast that covered his broken ankle. And in front of his classmates, some guys poured chocolate milk down the front of his sweatshirt. Curtis was so upset he went to see a school counselor. He blamed himself for the other kids not liking him.

That night, Curtis went into a family bedroom, took out a gun, and shot himself to death. The community was stunned. The television cameras rolled, at least for a few days. Chicago journalist Bob Greene lingered over the events in his column, and then he printed letters from folks for whom the episode served largely as a reminder of their own childhood humiliations at the hands of bullies.

Months later, in Cherokee County, Georgia, 15-year-old Brian Head grew tired of the same teasing and deeds. The denouement was only slightly more remarkable. He shot himself to death—in front of his classmates. He walked to the front of the classroom and pulled the trigger. The Georgia death came on the heels of five bullying-related suicides in a small town in New Hampshire. Within days, the story got lost in the cacophony of breaking events.

Just over a decade earlier, in late 1982, a nearly identical series of events unfolded in the northern reaches of Norway. Three boys between the ages of 10 and 14 killed themselves, one newspaper reported, to avoid continued severe bullying from schoolmates. But the story would not die. Nor would it shrivel into self-pity. An entire nation erupted. The following fall, scarcely nine months later, a campaign against bullying was in full swing in all of Norway's primary and junior high schools, launched by the minister of education. And its architect, Dan Olweus, Ph.D., a psychologist who, in 1970, had pioneered the systematic study of bullying, became something of a national hero.

The difference between the American and the Scandinavian experience could arguably be summed up in four words: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. A nation whose toys are given to slashing robots in half seems to have more tolerance for violence as a solution to problems. Most Americans do not take bullying very seriously—not even school personnel, a surprising finding given that most bullying takes place in schools. If Americans think at all about it, they tend to think that bullying is a given of childhood, at most a passing stage, one inhabited largely by boys who will, simply, inevitably, be boys.

"They even encourage it in boys," observes Gary W. Ladd, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois and one of a growing cadre of Americans studying the phenomenon. "That's what parents always ask me," says psychologist David Schwartz, Ph.D., of Vanderbilt University, "isn't it just a case of boys being boys?" The same parents harbor the belief that kids should somehow always be able to defend themselves—to "stand up for themselves," "fight back," "not be pushed around by anyone"—and those who don't or can't almost deserve what they get. Bullying is just good old boyhood in a land of aggressive individualists.

Nothing could be further from the truth.
First in Scandinavia, then in England, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada, and finally, the United States, researchers have begun scrutinizing the phenomenon of bullying. What they are finding is as sad as it is alarming:

• Bullies are a special breed of children. The vast majority of children (60 to 70 percent) are never involved in bullying, either as perpetrators or victims. Early in development, most children acquire internal restraints against such behavior. But those who bully do it consistently.
• Their aggression starts at an early age.
• It takes a very specific set of conditions to produce a child who can start fights, threaten or intimidate a peer ("Give me the jump rope or I'll kill you"), and actively inflict pain upon others.
• Bullying causes a great deal of misery to others, and its effects on victims last for decades, perhaps even a lifetime.
• The person hurt most by bullying is the bully himself, though that's not at first obvious, and the negative effects increase over time.
• Most bullies have a downwardly spiraling course through life, their behavior interfering with learning, friendships, work, intimate relationships, income, and mental health.
• Bullies turn into antisocial adults, and are far more likely than non aggressive kids to commit crimes, batter their wives, abuse their children—and produce another generation of bullies.
• Oh yes, girls can be bullies too. The aggression of girls has been vastly underestimated because it takes a different form. It is a far more subtle and complex means of meanness than the overt physical aggression boys engage in.

To understand the behavior of bullies is to see how aggression is learned and how well the lesson is taken to heart. The existence of bullies tells us that the social needs of human beings are vastly undervalued, at least in Western culture. For the social life of kids, often thought as an accessory to childhood, turns out to be crucial to healthy development. In the long run, bullying can be a way—a desperate and damaging way—for some people to maintain a circle of human contacts.

And bullying always has a very long run. Bullying may begin in childhood, but it continues into adulthood; it is among the most stable of human behavior styles.

What's a Bully and Who Is It.
There is no standard definition of a bully, but Dan Olweus has honed the definition to three core elements—bullying involves a pattern of repeated aggressive behavior with negative intent directed from one child to another where there is a power difference. There's either a larger child or several children picking on one, or a child who is clearly more dominant (as opposed to garden-variety aggression, where there may be similar acts but between two people of equal status). By definition, the bully's target has difficulty defending him- or herself, and the bully's aggressive behavior is intended to cause distress, observes Olweus, professor of psychology at the University of Bergen.

The chronicity of bullying is one of its more intriguing features. It is the most obvious clue that there comes to be some kind of a social relationship between a bully and his victims—and most bullies are boys, while victims are equally girls and boys. And it suggests that, contrary to parents' beliefs, bullying is not a problem that sorts itself out naturally.

The aggression can be physical—pushes and shoves and hitting, kicking, and punching. Or it can be verbal—name-calling, taunts, threats, ridicule, and insults. Bullies not only say mean things to you, they say mean things about you to others. Often enough, the intimidation that starts with a fist is later accomplished with no more than a nasty glance. The older bullies get, the more their aggression takes the form of verbal threats and abuse.

Figures differ from study to study, from country to country, and especially from school to school, but from 15 to 20 percent of children are involved in bullying more than once or twice a term, either as bullies or victims. In one Canadian study, 15 percent of students reported that they bullied others more than once or twice during the term. According to large-scale studies Olweus conducted in Norway in 1983, 7 percent of students bullied others "with some regularity" But since then, bully problems have increased. By 1991, they had gone up a whopping 30 percent.

Bullies, for the most part, are different from you and me. Studies reliably show that they have a distinctive cognitive make-up—a hostile attributional bias, a kind of paranoia. They perpetually attribute hostile intentions to others. The trouble is, they perceive provocation where it does not exist. That comes to justify their aggressive behavior. Say someone bumps them and they drop a book. Bullies don't see it as an accident; they see it as a call to arms. These children act aggressively because they process social information inaccurately. They endorse revenge.

That allows them a favorable attitude toward violence and the use of violence to solve problems. Whether they start out there or get there along the way, bullies come to believe that aggression is the best solution to conflicts. They also have a strong need to dominate, and derive satisfaction from injuring others. Bullies lack what psychologists call prosocial behavior—they do not know how to relate to others. No prosocial attitudes hold them in check; they do not understand the feelings of others and thus come to deny others' suffering.

Bullies are also untroubled by anxiety, an emotion disabling in its extreme form but in milder form the root of human restraint. What may be most surprising is that bullies see themselves quite positively—which may be because they are so little aware of what others truly think of them. Indeed, a blindness to the feelings of others permeates their behavioral style and outlook.

Every attempt to trace aggression to its roots indicates that it starts in the preschool years and thrives in elementary and middle school. Up to grade six, Olweus reports, bullies are of average popularity. They tend to have two or three friends—largely other aggressive kids. And it's their physical strength other kids admire. As they get older, though, their popularity with classmates wanes; by high school they are hanging out only with other toughs. They may get what they want through aggression, and be looked up to for being tough, but they are not liked.

If their self-confidence survives increasing rejection by peers, it may be because bullies are unable to perceive themselves correctly in social situations, a part of their social blindness. Reports child psychologist Melissa DeRosier, Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina: "Bullies are clueless as to how little they are liked. They are out of touch with what kids think." As something of a threat to others, they are not likely to learn just exactly how other kids feel about them. And with their deficits in social cognition, they certainly don't see the impact of their own behavior on others.

It's possible that bullying is not the same in all the world's cultures and that American children suffer more severely at the hands of bullies—a suggestion borne out by the fact that bullies register less popular with peers here, especially as they get older, than they do in Scandinavia. There may be an intensity to bullying here that does not exist elsewhere. Dominance may be more valued; competition more accepted. Victimization may be more extreme. This intensity has many observers worried because violence is worsening in the U.S. and other countries. While that doesn't necessarily mean bullying is getting worse, there are disturbing signals. "Clinically, I see an increment in the aggressive fantasies kids now bring to therapy," confides Schwartz. "They talk about their dolls tearing the skin off each other."

Bullying exists, to greater or lesser degrees, in virtually every Westernized culture. It is a serious problem in Japan. It happens in China. No one knows for sure, because the same methodology has not been applied in every country, but there may be more bullies per capita in the U.S., England, Canada, and Ireland than in other countries. And bullyings not partial to cities; if anything, its more common in the one-room schoolhouse than in urban settings.

But no matter where they live, bullies find one place especially congenial to their nefarious activities: school. Most bullying occurs on the school playground, especially its unsupervised corners, and in the long and crowded corridors of most schools. Above all else, says Dan Olweus, bullying is a school problem.

It's not that bullying worsens at adolescence; in fact, it tends to lessen. But that's when sensitivity to rejection by peers takes a painful leap forward. Curtis Taylor probably could have told you that.

They Don't Pick on Just Anyone
Up until about age seven, studies suggest, bullies pick on anyone. After that, they single out specific kids to prey on. And those bullied at one age tend to be bullied later on. Olweus calls them "whipping boys." Even the term is searing. Between ages eight and 16, about 8 or 9 percent of kids are the consistent targets of bullies.

And, says Illinois's Gary Ladd, bullies engage in a "shopping process" to find them. At the beginning of the school year, when children do not know each other well, about 22 percent of children report having a victimization experience on more than a moderate level, Ladd finds. But by the end of the school year, only 8 percent of kids wind up being regularly singled out by bullies. About half of all kids are victimized at least once a year.

Moreover, the younger a child, the more likely he or she is to experience aggression at the hands of peers. For if there's one thing bullies do, it's pick on children who are younger and smaller than they are. And weaker. Most bullies are physically strong and they specifically seek out kids who are ill-equipped to fight back.

Those who become targets also bear a particular set of psychological characteristics. They are more sensitive, cautious, and quiet than other kids, Olweus finds, and more anxious. They also have a negative view of violence. It's not just that they're non aggressive, for lots of kids are non aggressive. But these kids withdraw from confrontations of any kind and cry when attacked. They radiate what one researcher calls "an anxious vulnerability." Faced with conflict, they are gripped with fear. Their fearfulness and physical weakness probably set them up.

"The big question," says Ladd, "is where does victimization start. Do kids emit signals for others to test them? Or is it that bullies pick out those they see they can dominate?" He finds clues in the fact that some kids are victimized later in the school year but not early on. "Something increases their likelihood of being picked on—probably, vulnerabilities revealed in a class environment. Maybe they don't do well in gym, or fumble a reading task."

And they easily acquiesce to the demands of bullies: They cry and assume defensive postures. Not only do they not fight back, they hand over their possessions—handsomely rewarding their attackers psychologically and materially—powerfully reinforcing them. The reinforcement is double: Bullies are unlikely to be punished by retaliation.

t's one thing to be submissive when challenged, but researchers now know that the children who become bully victims are submissive even before they're picked on. At Vanderbilt University, where he is a research associate, child psychologist David Schwartz conducted a novel study of children, none of whom knew each other at the outset. He silently monitored and videotaped them in a series of play sessions. "Even in the first two sessions, before bully-victim situations develop, these kids behaved submissively," Schwartz reports.

In nonconfrontational situations they showed themselves to be "pervasively nonassertive." Schwartz catalogues the ways. They didn't make overtures to others, didn't initiate conversation. They made no attempts to verbally persuade their peers—no demands, requests, or even suggestions. They were thoroughly socially incompetent, spending time in passive play, playing parallel to their peers, rather than with them.

Being submissive in non aggressive contexts kicks off a dizzying downward spiral of events. It sets them up as easy targets. "It seems to mark these kids for later victimization," says Schwartz. "And that only made them more submissive." Here's the catch—being victimized leads to feeling bad, feeling anxious, which then increases vulnerability to further victimization. This is the spiral Curtis Taylor couldn't—and shouldn't have been expected to—untangle by himself.

To say that victims are socially incompetent is not to say that they are to blame for the aggressive behavior of bullies. It is simply to recognize that certain patterns of social behavior make some children vulnerable, say investigators. After all, even the most passive child isn't victimized unless there's a bully in the room.

Just as certain as there will always be a bully around, victimization can lead to a host of social-psychological difficulties. No one likes a bully, but no one likes a victim either. The failure—or inability—of victims to stick up for themselves seems to make other kids highly uncomfortable. After all, says Ladd, "part of growing up is learning how to stick up for yourself." Gradually, whipping boys become more and more isolated from their peers. While bullying is painful, it is the social isolation that probably is most damaging to victims. An emerging body of research shows that social isolation, to say nothing of active rejection, is a severe form of stress for humans to endure. And rejection deprives these kids of the very opportunities they need to acquire and practice social competence.

Victims are rejected not only by the bullies but typically by other peers as well. Few children like them; many dislike them. In answering questionnaires they confide they are very lonely. They typically develop a negative view of school and hate going. They suffer headaches, stomachaches, and other somatic complaints. "We ask them how they feel in school," Ladd reports. "It's clear they're pretty unhappy. They want to get away from that environment." Eventually, achievement suffers. Regardless of their grades, a disproportionate number of rejected kids drop out of school. These children internalize the very negative views of themselves others hold of them, Olweus finds.

"There are lots of kids in schools who are being victimized and, as a result, are not living up to their potential, not getting as much out of the school experience as they could," says Ladd. "They get very negative views of themselves and their abilities. That's a waste of human beings, and a threat to the health and wealth of the country."

Olweus, who has followed thousands of Norwegian children into adulthood, finds that by age 23, some "normalization" takes place. By then, those who once were victims are free to choose or create their own social and physical environments. However, they are still susceptible to depression and to negative feelings about themselves.

Victimization, everyone agrees, is bad for kids. But it sometimes has effects that are not entirely negative. It can prod children into finding a way to salvage a sense of self-respect. There are those whom victimization by bullies drives deeper into the world of books and to excel in schoolwork—both activities with long-term payoffs—although it's scarcely a predictable outcome and a terribly aversive route to excellence.

In Olweus's studies, victims have close relationships with their parents and tend to come from overprotective families. As a result, they get no practice in handling conflict, one of the basic facts of social life, and no confidence in their ability to negotiate the world on their own. Overprotection prevents them from learning the skills necessary to avoid exploitation by others.

Dance Macabre
Increasingly, researchers are coming to see bullying and victimization less as the products of individual characteristics and more as an outgrowth of unique interactive chemistry. Over time, bullies and their victims become a twosome—a dyad, in the lingo of social science. Like husbands and wives, mothers and infants, and other lovers, they come to have an ongoing relationship, they interact frequently, and there is a special dynamic operating.

What makes normal dyadic relationships so enthralling for both parties—and for infants is the medium in which growth takes place—is the intricate pattern of mutual responsiveness, of action and response, the synchrony of give and take that gets established. It sets up its own gravitational field; it draws the two together and validates each as a special person. If that's not quite how it goes with bullies and their victims, still these children develop a history with each other, and the behavior of each reinforces the other. Call it the bully-victim dance.

That's how Toronto psychologist Debra Pepler, Ph.D., sees it. "There is a relationship. There is a repeatedness over time. Then a glance or comment can work, setting up a whole terrifying sequence of emotions, such as anxiety," where once there was the verbal threat of aggression, or even the real thing. Then the submissiveness signals to the bully that his aggression is working. Once selected for aggression, victims seem to reward their attackers with submission.

Other researchers describe victims who actually pester the bully. There is, for example, the kid who runs after the bully: "Aren't you going to tease me today? I won't get mad." Both bullies and victims are disliked by their peers. They may be seeking each other for social contact—just because no one else will.

An Underground Activity
Bullying inhabits a covert kids-only world—right under the noses of adults. "Teachers tell us it doesn't happen in their school or classroom," reports Ladd, "when in fact it does,"—a point he teases out by giving separate questionnaires to students and teachers. "To some degree the teachers simply don't want to admit it. But there is also evidence that kids know just how antisocial their behavior is and often choose corners out of the ken of their teachers."Nor do most parents know about it when their kids are victimized. Like Curtis Taylor, kids often think it is their own fault. So there is deep shame and humiliation. Moreover, the fear of reprisals keeps kids from saying a word. And tragically, says Ladd, the pace of parenting today doesn't leave a whole lot of room for parents to sit down every evening with their children and find out how their day went, to talk about how they are being treated by their peers.

He wishes they would, because when he asks, he hears. "We ask kids to tell us something fun that happened at school. Then we ask, 'Tell us about something that happened that was nasty.' Out pour stories about harassment, exclusion, rejection, victimization. A lot of the parents look like they're hearing about it for the first time."

When Toronto's Debra Pepler wanted to get a detailed glimpse into the world of bullies, she planted a video camera in schools and trained it on the playground, where the kids were monitored by remote microphones. In 52 hours of tape, Pepler, of York University, documented over 400 episodes of bullying, from brushes of mild teasing to 37 solid minutes of kicking and punching. The average episode, however, lasted 37 seconds. Teachers noticed and intervened in only one out of 25 episodes. The child in the 37-minute incident, says Pepler, is repeatedly kicked and thrown around by two kids (although in the vast majority of instances, bullying is one-on-one). "What's so strange to me is that he stays in it. There are lots of opportunities for him to get away. At one point a teacher even tries to break it up, and all three of them say, 'Oh no, we're just having fun.' "

"In showing other kids the tapes, I confirmed what I felt—it's so important for children to be members of a social group that to receive negative attention is better than to receive no attention at all. It's actually self-confirming. There's a sense of who I am; I am at least somebody with a role in the group. I have no way of identifying myself if nobody pays attention to me."

Or as one seventh-grade boy said to her about the victim, "It's just like he's getting paid for it to stay a part of that group. It's like being a prostitute. You do something you don't want to do and you get paid a lot of money for it." Some victims "really do silly things that feed into their victimization," she agrees. Olweus sharply disagrees. He contends that the way kids were selected for the study renders the findings "atypical." "In my experience," he insists, "the overwhelming majority of victims derive no satisfaction from victimization."

Nevertheless, Pepler's studies suggest bullying is far more common among kids than most adults either observe or admit. In a mid-sized school it happens once every seven minutes. And 4 percent of bullies are armed, at least in Toronto, an ethnically balanced city. Probably because bullying is such a covert activity, schools seem to have a hard time figuring out what to do about it. There are only scattered efforts in U.S. schools to institute any anti-bully programs, and, unlike in Scandinavia, rarely have they been tested for effectiveness.

Bullying may thrive underground, but it is a psychologically distinctive experience. It's painful. It's scary. Victims feel a great loss of control. Ask anyone who's ever been victimized even once—the memory tends to survive well into adulthood.

Not All Bullies Are Alike
Until recently, a bully was just a bully. But researchers are turning up differences among them that provide strong clues as to how the behavior takes shape. There seem to be two distinct types of bully, distinguished by how often they themselves are bullied.

To make matters slightly more complex, different researchers have different names for them and draw slightly different boundary lines. There are those bullies who are out-and-out aggressive and don't need situations of conflict to set them off, called "proactive aggressors" in some studies, "effectual aggressors" in others. Classic playground bullies fall into this camp. Their behavior is motivated by future reward—like "get me something." It's goal oriented, instrumental. Or perhaps these bullies have high thresholds of arousal and need some increase in arousal level. Hard as it is to believe, these bullies have friends—primarily other bullies. What they don't have at all is empathy; cooperation is a foreign word. They are missing prosocial feelings.

Then there are those bullies who are sometimes aggressors, sometimes victims: "reactive bullies" ,"ineffectual aggressors" or, in Olweus's lexicon, "provocative" victims. Regardless of who starts a fight, these kids prolong the battle, says David Perry, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. They get angry easily and escalate conflict into aggression, but end up losing. Their behavior is motivated by perceived provocation.

Perry claims that half of all bullies are hotheads. Any way the bully pie is sliced, these highly reactive aggressors are the worst off. They engage in the highest levels of conflict—they give it and they get it. And they place great value on controlling their adversaries. But their emotional make-up is distinct: They are easily emotionally aroused and can't handle conflict. "Peers are good at describing their characteristics," Perry reports. "They get emotionally upset, they show distress easily, they are quick to become oppositional and defiant. They are quick to cry. And they are named most likely to lose fights amid exaggerated cries of frustration and distress."And they are the least liked. Of all children, they are the most rejected in the peer group—which puts them at risk of developing the kinds of externalizing, antisocial problems bullies develop, as well as the internalizing problems, like anxiety and depression, that are common to victims. Whether these bullies have the most trouble in life isn't clear, but they do have the fewest friends.

Why do they keep at it, when they always lose? Most of all, says Perry, they have problems of emotional regulation; they have low thresholds of arousal in the first place, and they can't calm themselves down once conflict starts. They get invested in their fights. Their high level of arousal keeps them from recognizing it's time to get up and walk away when they are clearly losing." Their emotions may be preempting their cognitions, or arousal may be distorting their cognition," Perry says.

Most of all, they are targets because they're fun for other bullies to pick on; they provide lots of theatrical value. They get provoked because they react in ways that are rewarding to bullies—they get a response. Getting a response is the bully's ultimate reward.

These hotheads, says Perry, seem to have a low threshold of irritability. "They seem to exist in a mood state of readiness." They frequently take an oppositional stance in situations.

The ineffectual bullies bear an uncanny resemblance to psychobiologist Gary W. Kraemer's monkeys. Kraemer, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, and a researcher at the famed Harlow Primate Laboratory, is working with two of the lab's populations of rhesus monkeys. One group is reared from birth by their monkey mothers. The other is nurtured by lab workers for the first month after birth, then reared with their monkey peers.

Human "mothers", Kraemer finds, do a swell job of raising physically robust monkeys. But only the monkey moms raise socially competent ones. The human-reared monkeys are either impulsively aggressive or inordinately reclusive—their behavior varies unpredictably. They have a collage of changes in the way they see the world, deficits in cognitive problem-solving that endure no matter how much social interaction with their peers the monkeys later get.

"Peer-reared monkeys can't anticipate what is going to happen next in social interactions," says Kraemer. "They look like a wild cannon. Something will set them off. And they have no 'off' button. Once in agonistic encounters, they have a hard time stopping." These monkeys not only display unregulated aggression and antisocial behavior, they contribute to the instability of the whole group. They just don't "get" the rhythms of relationships.

In addition to behaving like reactive bullies, they have an array of enduring neurochemical changes in the brain. There is chaos in specific neurotransmitter systems—the serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine pathways. "The norepinephrine system is not developed at all," says Kraemer. "The serotonin system is strange" To Kraemer, these monkeys are proof that social relations—specifically the early care-giver-infant attachment process, the dance of mother and child—actually structures the developing nervous system. It gets incorporated within, becoming the prototype for all social behavior. In the connection between mother and infant lies the pattern and desire for connecting with others.

"To the degree that caregivers are unpredictable, random, and asynchronous, then social behavior is not likely to be internally regulated," Kraemer says. "Social activity is not an accessory in life; it's reproduced in your brain." That's one reason, he believes, that aggression begins early and winds up such a durable approach to life.

Of the human-reared monkeys, he says, "You can give them all the Prozac in the world but you can never get them back on the usual trajectory. It will reduce the duration and frequency of repetitive behaviors, but it doesn't increase the proportion of social behavior. The entire system is dysregulated. You can make a symptom go away, but that doesn't restore normalcy."

In the normal course of events, says Kraemer, human children develop dominance hierarchies, although they are not very rigid. But in bullies, the process becomes supervening. Even when failure is evident, they continue. "There is certainly a dysregulation of something. Bullies and victims are breaking the normal harmony. Theirs is a different dance."

If his studies suggest that aggression begins in the early caregiver-child interaction, there's an arsenal of human research making the very same case.

Aw, C'mon—Isn't It Just Boys Being Boys?
Sure lots of boys engage in all kinds of competition and rough-and-tumble play; those are non-threatening physical ways of establishing dominance hierarchies, a goal that actually promotes social stability.

But the line between fun and fisticuffs gets erased only when there's a bully in the pack; the bully may misconstrue some borderline gesture or movement as intentionally hostile. When push turns to shove, when meanness intrudes on play—when someone selects a target and inflicts pain and the payoff is someone else's humiliation—then it's outright bullying.

And that's not a healthy way of interacting, not for the victims, but especially not for the bullies. There are huge costs to them. It is the first and perhaps most identifiable stop on a trajectory that leads almost directly to criminal behavior. Bullying is just another word for antisocial behavior, and it's part of a more general rule-breaking stance. According to long-term studies conducted by Olweus, 60 percent of boys who were named as bullies in grades six to nine have at least one court conviction by age 24.

Kids who are aggressive in childhood tend to be aggressive in adolescence and later. In a decades-long look at boys in London, those who were bullies at age 14 were largely bullies at age 18—and at 32. In a classic long-term study that is still ongoing, University of Michigan psychologist Leonard Eron, Ph.D., and colleagues have been following 518 children in upstate New York from the age of eight. All are now in their 40s. The most astonishing finding is that the kids who were named by their peers—at age eight—as most aggressive commit more crimes, and more serious crimes, as adults. They have more driving offenses. More court convictions. More alcoholism. More antisocial personality disorder. More use of mental health services.

When young, says Eron, these kids have intelligence levels equal to those of their normal peers. But by age 19, aggressive behavior gets in the way of developing intellectual skills. At age 30, they and their spouses were interviewed. "There is significantly more abusive behavior," says Eron, who's girding for another round of assessment. "They don't achieve socially, economically, or professionally. They never learned prosocial behavior, and that interferes with every activity." Their work histories are erratic, at best—the behaviors that make them troublesome among peers make them disruptive among co-workers. The longer the haul, the more the bully suffers.

"Parents should be concerned about bullying," Eton adds. "These kids are not just harming others; they're harming themselves."

"Over time, aggression is a marker of every negative outcome that there is," adds Vanderbilt's Schwartz. Bullies get locked into patterns of aggressive and hostile response that are very rewarding to them—but that sharply circumscribe who they get to hang out with. As they go through high school, increasingly their behavior is acceptable only to others like themselves; fortified with their hostile cognitive style and growing contempt for the values of others, they spin their way to outcast lifestyle.

There's sex, drugs, and booze to keep them busy—and they take up with all of them earlier than most other kids, studies show. They drop out of school, hang out with aggressive peers, and that drives further deviance; the link with others like them may be what turns a bully into a criminal. However criminals are made, the point can not be clearer—bullies' social style drives their downward drift through life.

If bullying is bad for those who give it as well as those who get it, then just exactly why do kids do it? "It's a great strategy for getting what you want," says Illinois's Gary Ladd. You push the little girl off the tricycle, you get the tricycle. "A lot of aggressive kids think aggression works. They think about one outcome, but not about the others."

People do have a need to control their environment, and perhaps some enter life with differences in that need, as occurs with other traits. The great psychological benefit to bullying, says Ladd, is that bullies feel powerful, in control. "They've picked a little microcosm in which to exert control." But it's a helluva way to get your own way.

"These kids are experts at using short-term payoffs," says psychologist Gerald R. Patterson, Ph.D., a founder of the Oregon Social Learning Center in Eugene, and a pioneer in family studies of aggression. "They're not very good at long-range things that are in their best interest."

For all those boys who engage in bullying as a way of gaining status, the last laugh is on them. Their trophy is a sham. What looks like power and status turns out not to be that at all. The proof is in their testosterone levels.

Richard E. Tremblay, Ph.D., is a psychologist at the University of Montreal who has been conducting long-term studies of over a thousand bullies and other aggressive kids. Among one group of 178 kids that has passed the threshold of adolescence, Tremblay checked out hormone-behavior links by measuring the boys's levels of testosterone. What he found set him on his ear. The boys who were rated (by peers and teachers) most physically aggressive at ages six to 12 had lower testosterone levels at age 13 than ordinary peers. The "multiproblem fighters," or hothead bullies, proved to have the lowest testosterone levels of all.How could these consistently aggressive boys register so low on testosterone? Tremblay admits to having been puzzled. The mistake, he realized, is all those direct extrapolations from animal studies of dominance in which testosterone equals aggression. He has come to believe that testosterone does not reflect brute force but is a barometer of social success. "Physical aggression that is not accompanied by social well-being and social success—being designated a leader by peers—is not associated with high testicular activity."

Among humans, he says, physical aggression leads increasingly to rejection by peers, parents, even the school system. By the end of elementary school, half of bullies are not in their age-appropriate grade.

"They are losers," he states emphatically. "Their testosterone status at puberty reflects the fact that they are not dominating their environment. The human behaviors of dominance are not the same as animal ones," he insists. In humans, even in beefy boys, social dominance has less and less to do with physical aggression—and more and more with language. "While aggression is important for attaining high social status," says Tremblay, "it is not the only strategy. And when sustained, it is not decisive at all." And that is precisely where bullies are weak. Their general intelligence starts out about on a par with that of other kids, but their verbal intelligence is low.Tremblay pauses to register his bemusement. "I started out studying aggression in adult criminals. Then I found I had to look at adolescents. Now I'm looking at young children. If you had told me I was going to be studying two-year-olds, I would have said that you were crazy."

But he has come to believe that the lifestyle of aggression is pretty much a done deal by age two. And with that, the Terrible Twos just got a lot worse. "Physical aggression is normal at that age. It builds up from nine months and reaches its highest frequency at age two. And then you learn that it hurts when aggressed. Adults intervene and indicate that it is the wrong behavior. Language skills increase, and physical aggression decreases. If you don't get it by age two, then you become aggressive. There's something about language." It may be that language skills are socially acquired in the caregiver-child interaction. And some kids get more of that than others.

Hey — What About the Girls?
Bullying has been studied largely in boys because they are so much more overtly aggressive. The problem, contends psychologist Nicki R. Crick, Ph.D., is that aggression has always been defined strictly in terms of what boys do that's mean. And that's just one more instance of male bias distorting the way things really are. She and her colleagues now know that "girls are just as capable of being mean as boys are."

"The research shows that boys engage in physical aggression such as kicking, hitting, pushing, shoving, and verbal aggression like name-calling and making fun of kids more than girls do," notes Crick. "The interpretation is that boys are just a lot more aggressive than girls are. But if you go back to the textbook definition of aggression, it's 'the intent to hurt or harm.' "

"For the past three years we've been looking at the ways girls try to harm others. We've identified a form of aggression unique to females, what we call relational aggression, hurting others through damaging or manipulating their relationships in aversive ways." Like:

• Spreading vicious rumors in the peer group to get even with someone so that other people will reject that person.
• Telling others to stop liking someone in order to get even with him or her.
• Trying to control or dominate a person by using social exclusion as a form of retaliation: "You can't come to my birthday party if you don't do x, y, and z."
• Threatening to withdraw friendship in order to get one's way, control another's behavior, or hurt someone: "I won't be your friend if... "
• Giving someone the silent treatment and making sure that they know they're being excluded as a form of retaliation.

It makes intuitive sense to Crick. "If you want to hurt someone and you want it to be effective, shouldn't it be something they really value? Numerous studies have shown that women and girls really value relationships, establishing intimacy and dyadic relations with other girls. That led us to looking at the use of relationships as the vehicle for harm, because if you take that away from a girl, you're really getting at her." Similarly, boys' aggression, plays into goals shown to be important to boys in the face of their peers—physical dominance and having things, or instrumentality.

In studies of children ranging from three years of age to 12, she has determined that parents, teachers, and kids themselves see these behaviors as problematic. They regard them as mean and manipulative. "This behavior cuts across all socioeconomic and all age groups. Adults do these things too." In fact, Crick's studies show that relational aggression becomes a more normative angry behavior for girls the older they get. Particularly as girls move into adolescence, themes of social exclusion increase in frequency in girls's conflicts with their peers.

While Crick's studies show that 27 percent of aggressive kids, mostly boys, engage in both overt and relational aggression, the majority of aggressive kids—73 percent—engage in one or the other, not both. Relational aggression is far more characteristic of girls, at least throughout the school years. Taking relational aggression into account leads to a startling conclusion: Girls (22 percent) and boys (27 percent) are aggressive in almost equal numbers.

Just as in the case with physical aggression, neither relational bullies nor their victims do well in the short or long haul. They're unhappy with their relationships. They feel emotionally upset and are at risk for social and emotional problems. Being the target of such aggression leaves victims subject to anxiety when meeting people and set on a path to avoiding others.

Being the social bully puts girls at risk of being increasingly rejected over time. Others grow tired of their behavior, weary of being manipulated. While most relationally aggressive kids are rejected by most others, a few are "controversial"—that is, they are well-liked by some kids and actively disliked by others. Either way, their own behavior brings them problems because it strictly limits the pool of potential friends.

Being the friend of a relationally aggressive girl and 75 percent of them have at least one friend—is no picnic. Their friendships are hotbeds of conflict and betrayal. While there's more intimacy in their friendships—more self-disclosure, telling secrets, talking about their feelings—there's also more negativity and aggression. Such girls don't buffer their friends from their aggressiveness; they do it to them, too.They also construct coalitions and demand exclusivity, getting jealous when a friend pays attention to anyone else. "We think that intimacy is for them a medium of control," says Crick. "They want to be intimate because that is how they get information to use to control others."

Only rarely do relational bullies form a friendship with one of their own kind; they typically choose a very non aggressive peer. Normally, friendship is a highly positive experience and buffers people from a host of ills. But friendship with a relational bully can be a passage to psychopathology.

If other researchers have missed such behaviors, it's because they are subtle and sophisticated, and far less visible than the black-eyed bullying of boys. They also create fewer problems for society; these behaviors may be harmful, but relational bullies don't wind up in the criminal justice system.

Of Peers and Cheers
So you or your kid is not a bully or a victim. There's still no room for smugness. Even observing aggression from the sidelines is not a neutral activity.

The nature of bullying is such that even kids who aren't antisocial get drawn into it. "I no longer think of bullying as something that happens just between two people," says Toronto's Debra Pepler, even though over 90 percent of episodes involve a single bully and victim. "Peers are so often present when we observe it on the playground. It's really in some sense an interaction that unfolds in a context rather than in isolation. I hesitate to say this, but there's the entertainment and the theater value of it. The other kids may feel a part of that. They may feel anxious, excited, afraid but that feeds into the interaction."

In 85 percent of the episodes of bullying, says Pepler, other children are involved in some capacity or as audience. "If you're going to establish dominance, the only way to do it is with other children around. In the longer episodes, there's a tremendous building of excitement and arousal."

Sometimes the roles peers play in promoting bullying is less marginal. Two bullies kick a kid to the ground and bystander peers, through a process of social contagion, join in, particularly if it's a kid they dislike. The group is empowered by the numbers, their individual responsibility diluted to the vanishing point.

Take the "slam book" that circulated in one Toronto classroom. Each page bore a heading: who's the stupidest, who's the ugliest, who's the most unpopular, and so on. "Almost all the girls in the class nominated someone," says Pepler. "It had a huge negative impact on the kids being named. Most of the girls in this class were really nice kids. Eight of the 10 involved would never have done it on their own. But because of the importance of being part of a group, they engaged in antisocial behavior that just wasn't a part of their person."

Antonius Cillessen, Ph.D., calls group dynamics "the hidden purpose" of much bullying. A psychologist at the University of Connecticut, he finds that peer groups fan the flames of bullying by conferring reputations that keep bullies and victims frozen in their roles. They especially reinforce victimization. "When children have negative expectations of another child, they act more negatively to that child. This negative behavior then seems to trigger a reciprocally negative reaction from the target child," thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

No matter what victims do, even if they change their behavior, their peers filter observations of them through their negative expectations—and still give a negative interpretation to those kids's actions. As peers see them, they can't do anything right.

Cillessen is concerned. The power of reputational factors among peers is so strong that what look like obvious remedies will not solve bullying problems. For example, teaching victims social skills—more assertive and socially competent ways of interacting—is necessary but not sufficient. Their peers' perceptions still remain the same, and they act accordingly. His studies furnish proof that bullying can be tackled only with a school-wide program.

How They Get That Way
Most kids try aggression in the course of growing up. And most give it up. But some, says David Perry, "are encouraged by parental behaviors or by neglect." In other words, bullies are made, not born.

There is no big bang, no one crisis of development. It's largely in the nuances of parent-child interaction. And so unexceptional, so mundane is the process that it's taken Gerald Patterson over 20 years of observing parents and children together to nail it down. But he distills it into four words: the coercion parenting model. It gets played out in relatively trivial—but frequent bouts of disobedience.

Marginally skilled parents—many parents are, he says, and their numbers are increasing—come up against an active, willful, "difficult" child. The mother says something reasonable to the child: "Would you close the door, please." The child doesn't do it; he is noncompliant. "The core of aggressive behavior in children and adults is noncompliance," Patterson says.

The child goes over to the TV set and turns it on. Five minutes later, the mother asks again: Please close the door. The kid ignores her again. Then the parent shouts and threatens, "If you don't close the door, I'm going to spank you." At some point, the kid may get up and close the door, says Patterson, but he has the mother reduced to four or five minutes of yelling. "The child is controlling the mother by his noncompliance. Then the mother gets so upset at the back talk and noncompliance that she strikes out and hits the child. These are not crazy parents. They get caught in a process that is controlling their behavior."The basic problem with their parenting is that it's noncontingent. The noncompliance (say, a two-year-old hits his sister) goes unpunished until the parent is so full of hostility she lashes out unpredictably. "Instead of being contingent, these parents natter and scold. They threaten but don't follow through and say, 'Okay, that misbehavior will cost you... ' and name some chore. And if the child still doesn't do it, 'I'm going to lock up your bicycle'—and really do it. And start the process all over again the next day. They don't do that" The inconsistent use of ineffective punishment winds up intermittently rewarding defiance.

Given the lack of a consistent adult response, a child cannot develop trust in a caregiver, sowing the seeds for a hostile view of the world. Noncontingent parenting breeds in kids the expectation that others will treat them unfairly and unpredictably.

The use of physical punishment as a solution to aggression only teaches the child the same solution—and fosters resentment. Their experiences may leave them overwhelmed with intense retaliatory feelings.

But it isn't just the discipline. In between the inconsistent parenting there's a lack of parental monitoring of children's behavior. And that comes across as uncaring. Children of parents who use such a discipline style may become more worried about how to get their own way, meet their own needs. They don't—can't—think about other people very much.

Here's the kicker: Bullies are more aggressive as kids, so they often receive harsh punishment from parents, which teaches them how to be even more aggressive.

"Noncontingent parenting is unable to stop, deviant or aggressive behavior," Patterson emphasizes. "What goes along with it that makes it a Greek tragedy is that the families that get swept up in it not only inadvertently reinforce antisocial behavior, they fail to reinforce prosocial behavior. They don't sit down with their kid, give him a nod, a hug—the kinds of things good parents normally do hundreds of times a day." They don't engage in the dance.

That dance is "extremely important to foster growth" Patterson says. "These kids get slowed in language development. The child doesn't learn to ask for things; he takes things," living on the edge of his impulses.

To cite parenting practices as "the primary proximal cause" for the earliest form of antagonistic behavior, as Patterson does, is not to rerun blame-more views of what's wrong with people. It's a meticulous analysis of the ways that children learn to join the society of others, to curb their impulses. All that's needed, says Patterson, are nonhostile, nonthreatening, nonphysical sanctions for rule-breaking applied consistently.

Patterson admits that the reams of data he and others have collected show that the coercion-parenting model doesn't fit for girls unless they are overtly aggressive. Relational aggression begins differently.

Starting this fall, Nicki Crick is looking into the family relationships of relationally aggressive children. "We think that these behaviors may get modeled for kids. Say mom doesn't speak to dad when she's mad at him. She punishes him by giving him the silent treatment, or she may withdraw love. There are family variables that might increase a kid's need to control, or need to have affection, such as discipline."

She also thinks parents may be directly teaching kids to make hostile attributions. Kids learn a worldview from their parents: Is the world a nice or a mean place?

No matter how bullies get that way, there is ultimately only one way to stop bullying: to establish a climate in which aggressive behavior is not tolerated—and enforce it. As a nation, Sweden is leading the way. As of July 1994, it outlawed bullying, following a suggestion of Olweus, himself a Swede. Norway may soon do it, too.

Big Bullies
What do bullies do when they grow up? In one sense, they never grow up; they are locked in an infantile pattern of non-compliance, frozen into one way of handling problems. Lacking social skills, and especially the ability to handle conflict, their relationships are likely to be unstable and short-lived. But when they do take partners, they often become spouse abusers.

Bullying is virtually a sine qua non of domestic violence. Battered wives commonly describe what their husbands do as bullying, reports University of Washington psychologist Neil Jacobson, Ph.D. Bullying and battering share a dark mission. "Battering is using violence or the threat of violence to control another's behavior," says Jacobson. "That is the essence of bullying—it's just directed to one's significant other"

While no one has directly observed bullying transforming itself into battering, the evidence points to a direct convergence of bullying and battering behavior across the life cycle. The life histories of adult batterers parallel the course bullies' lives take as development unfolds. Batterers are likely to have been delinquent as adolescents.

There is an even more remarkable suggestion that bullying and spouse abuse are two stops along the same dead-end street. Batterers and bullies both sort themselves into distinct types that share certain peculiarities of behavior and biology. Jacobson observes two batterer types among adult men: calculating cobras and reactive hot-heads. In a kind of disharmonic convergence, they resemble proactive and reactive bullies, and Kraemer's motherless monkeys.Like batterers, bullies tend to minimize their own aggressive actions. They make identical cognitive distortions, and attribute hostility to others where it doesn't exist. This misinterpretation gives bullies and batterers alike a way to justify violence. It is the greasy gear with which they typically shift onto others the blame for their own misdeeds.

But as if bullies aren't bad enough, they tend to have children who are bullies. Not only do they model aggression as a solution to conflict, but they are likely to lash out at their children, use physical means—and so hand-feed to the next generation a belief that the world is an uncaring place, an excuse for another go at hostility.

Power, Yes. Persecution, No.
Bullying is a conflict in which aggression is used to demonstrate power. But aggression and power are not synonyms. "I don't think we want our children to learn lessons about aggression and violence when they have power," says Pepler. "Aggression is the wrong way to use power. There are wonderful ways to be leaders without being aggressive."

Tremblay points to what he defines as "tough leaders." These are boys who are aggressive but have prosocial skills. They don't get their way by physical aggression or verbal abuse. In new situations they quickly take over and establish dominance by verbal fluency. In his studies, they are the most socially successful, the best-liked—and have the highest testosterone levels of all.

Bullies wind up being very costly to society, says Gerald Patterson: "We're talking about the production of marginally skilled adults who will be at the margins of society even if they don't commit crimes. They cost the rest of us a lot." They have more accidents; more illness; shorter, less productive lives; pay less in taxes; and use more welfare services. In school they tended to get lots of services, things that were not very effective.

But the most profound case against bullying is made by Dan Olweus. He sees it as a blow to the very soul of freedom. "Bullying violates fundamental democratic principles," he argues. If two kids were merely to challenge each other, they'd fight fair, one would win and the other lose, they'd shake hands, and that would be the end of that. Like our Presidential elections. "But the problem is that bullies seek out the victims and persecute them. They follow them up, wait for them in order to harass them. It is a basic democratic right for a child to feel safe in school and to be spared the oppression and repeated, intentional humiliation implied in bullying."

HOW TO HANDLE A BULLY
What Children Can Do:

1. A wise line of defense is avoidance. Know when to walk away. It is thoroughly adaptive behavior to avoid a bully. Being picked on is not character-building.
2. Use humor to defuse a bully who may be about to attack. Make a joke: "Look, Johnny, lay off. I don't want you to be late for school."
3. Or tell the bully assertively, "Get a life. Leave me alone." And walk away. This may be the best defense for girls.
4. Recruit a friend. Observers find that having a friend on the playground is one of the most powerful protectives, especially for boys.
5. In general, seek out the friendly children and build friendships with them.

What Parents Can Do:

• See that your child has a grounding in assertive behavior. The real first line of defense against a bully is self-confidence.
• Spread the word that bullying is bad for bullies.
• Ask your children how peers treat them. Children often are ashamed to bring up the subject. Parents must.
• Enroll your child in a social-skills group where children learn and practice skills in different situations.
• Model good relationships at home. Help siblings get along.
• Increase the social opportunities of all kids, but especially victimized ones. Invite other children, and groups of children, over to the house. Encourage sleepovers. This is your job; parents are social engineers.
• Enroll your child in classes or groups that develop competencies in activities that are valued by peers. Even kids who don't love sports may like karate, tae kwon do, and similar activities.
• Shut off the TV: much programming reinforces the idea that aggression is the only way to deal with conflicts.
• Empathy helps. Instill in all kids a sense of the distress that a victim experiences.
• Help your child come up with a set of clever verbal comebacks to be used in the event of victimization by verbally abusive peers.
• See that kids in groups have plenty of things to do. Provide play materials. Buy a soccer ball. Paint a hopscotch pattern on the sidewalk. Bullying flourishes when kids are together and have nothing else to do.
• Do not tell or teach a kid to fight back. Fighting back is the worst defense. In most instances, victimized children really are weaker and smaller than the bully—thus their fears of losing there fights may be quite real. Besides, not all bullying takes the form of physical aggression. Counter-aggression to any form of bullying actually increases the likelihood of continued victimization.
• Do not expect kids to work it out on their own. Bullying is not a simply a problem of individuals. Given the influence of the peer groups and reputational factors in maintaining the behavior of bullies and victims, it is extremely unrealistic to expect kids to alter the dynamics of bullying by themselves.
• Always intervene. Adults have a crucial role to play in the socialization of children. And consistency counts. Any time adults do not intervene they are essentially training others to solve problems through aggression.
• Intervene at the level of the group. Let all kids know bullying is not OK. Declare emphatically: "This is not acceptable behavior. You can't do this here."
• Talk to your child's teachers to find out what is normal behavior for children of that age group and to find out what the class atmosphere is like.
• Talk to other parents; where there's one victimized child there are likely to be others.
• Get the school involved. At the very least, ask that the school declare bullying off-limits. A change in the atmosphere of the school is not only possible, but helpful in reducing bullying.
• Go to the school administration and demand that bullies be transferred to other classes or schools. Every child has the right to a safe school environment.
• If all else fails, see that your child is transferred to another school. The same child may thrive in a different school with a group of children having different values.

Adapted from :

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200910/big-bad-bully

German Priest in Church Abuse Case Is Suspended

MUNICH — The priest at the center of a German sexual-abuse scandal that has embroiled Pope Benedict XVI continued working with children for more than 30 years, even though a German court convicted him of molesting boys.

The priest, Peter Hullermann, who had previously been identified only by the first letter of his last name, was suspended from his duties only on Monday. That was three days after the church acknowledged that the pope, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, had responded to early accusations of molestation by allowing the priest to move to Munich for therapy in 1980.

Hundreds of victims have come forward in recent months in Germany with accounts of sexual abuse from decades past. But no case has captured the attention of the nation like that of Father Hullermann, not only because of the involvement of the future pope, but also because of the impunity that allowed a child molester to continue to work with altar boys and girls for decades after his conviction.

Benedict not only served as the archbishop of the diocese where the priest worked, but also later as the cardinal in charge of reviewing sexual abuse cases for the Vatican. Yet until the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising announced that Father Hullermann had been suspended on Monday, he continued to serve in a series of Bavarian parishes.

In 1980, the future pope reviewed the case of Father Hullermann, who was accused of sexually abusing boys in the Diocese of Essen, including forcing an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex. The future pope approved his transfer to Munich. On Friday, a deputy took responsibility for allowing the priest to return to full pastoral duties shortly afterward. Six years later, Father Hullermann was convicted of sexually abusing children in the Bavarian town of Grafing. Father Hullermann’s identity was revealed Sunday, when a man whose marriage he was scheduled to perform in the spa town of Bad Tölz stood up in the pews and began shouting as the head of the congregation was speaking in vague terms about the scandal.

But even after the revelations of last week, parishioners there, where Father Hullermann had been working, described him glowingly, calling him friendly, down to earth and popular with churchgoers, especially children and teenagers.

Father Hullermann’s story is one of a beloved priest with a damaging secret church officials helped him hide.

School records in the town of Grafing show that he taught religion six hours a week at a public high school starting Sept. 18, 1984 — less than five years after he was moved from Essen for abusing boys. The only mention of the case in the church records there said that lay elders were informed of “criminal proceedings,” though locals said there were rumors that it had something to do with children.

Rupert Frania, the priest in charge of the congregation in Bad Tölz, where Father Hullermann spent the last year and a half, said in an interview on Sunday that his superiors did not tell them about the priest’s history of sexual abuse.

“They should have told me before,” said Father Frania, who said he first heard about Father Hullermann’s conviction last week as the story was about to become public.
The statement by the archdiocese said that there was “no evidence of recent sexual abuses, similar to those for which he was convicted in 1986.”

In June 1986, the priest was convicted of sexually abusing minors and given an 18-month suspended sentence with five years of probation, fined 4,000 marks and ordered to undergo therapy.

Repeated attempts to contact Father Hullermann at his home in Bad Tölz were unsuccessful.
“He is not here at the moment,” Father Frania said.

Significant questions remain unanswered, especially about the pope’s involvement during his time as archbishop and how closely he supervised decisions about the priest. Nor have any of the victims in Grafing as yet come forward publicly.

Even before this latest case, the European sexual-abuse scandal had deeply damaged the church’s reputation in the pope’s home country, Germany. The congregations in Bad Tölz and in Garching an der Alz, where Father Hullermann worked for 21 years, responded with shock and anger, but also with a strong defense for a priest lauded for his approachability, good humor and ability to connect with parishioners on everyday issues.

In Bad Tölz on Sunday, after the groom’s outburst, there was consternation. Churchgoers, like Eva Wankerl, who said they had come to the service on Sunday because they were expecting Father Hullermann to give the sermon, left in tears. “He was somehow so close to the people, compared to some of the others who could seem superior,” said Ms. Wankerl, 61, a pensioner.

But she also said it was time that the church stopped hiding abuse cases and questioned why priests seemed to be held to a less strict standard of morality than ordinary parishioners. “If you get divorced and remarry you can’t take communion, but someone convicted of molesting children can celebrate Mass for the rest of his life,” she said.

Indeed his year and a half in Bad Tölz seemed more plum than punishment. He lived just off the historic pedestrian thoroughfare in one of Germany’s most beautiful spa towns.

His sudden departure in 2008 from Garching, where for years he worked as the parish administrator, was an emotional affair complete with a brass band and the firing of salutes, according to a local newspaper article posted to the church Web site.

But the story of his departure takes on strange overtones in light of the revelations, describing “Hulli,” as the children nicknamed him, as “a priest to touch,” who succeeded in creating “a young church and to pass on his love of liturgy in enduring fashion to the young generation.”
When he moved to Bad Tölz, it was under the condition that he was not supposed to have dealings with children. Though he was supposed to tend to tourists, he worked with few restrictions, including celebrating Mass with altar boys.

Michael Leitenstorfer, who said his children had worked in services with Father Hullermann, strongly defended the priest. “I’ve personally experienced how Father Hullermann treated our children absolutely appropriately, but also lovingly,” he said.

Father Frania added that he had heard no accusations against Father Hullermann during his time in the parish and said that people should practice forgiveness toward him. “If we can no longer believe in forgiving sins, we might as well close the whole store,” he said.

Victor Homola contributed reporting from Berlin.
Fromhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/world/europe/16church.html?pagewanted=2

Credits to Ng Boon Yong, T3

Child Abuse Awareness - Do You Care?

Credits to Chong Woan Rong, T3

The girl in the window

PLANT CITY — The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child's face in the window.

A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.

Everyone knew a woman lived in the house with her boyfriend and two adult sons. But they had never seen a child there, had never noticed anyone playing in the overgrown yard.

The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.

The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.

Months went by. The face never reappeared.

Just before noon on July 13, 2005, a Plant City police car pulled up outside that shattered window. Two officers went into the house — and one stumbled back out.

Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds.

Plant City Detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police.

They found a car parked outside. The driver's door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I've ever seen."

The police officers walked through the front door, into a cramped living room.

"I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "There's just no way to describe it. Urine and feces — dog, cat and human excrement — smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."

Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.

The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.

"It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!"

While Holste looked around, a stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter . . .

The detective strode past her, down a narrow hall. He turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark.

At his feet, something stirred.

First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.

She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked — except for a swollen diaper.

"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "The glass in the window had been broken, and that child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."

When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."

The girl didn't struggle. Holste asked, What's your name, honey? The girl didn't seem to hear.

He searched for clothes to dress her, but found only balled-up laundry, flecked with feces. He looked for a toy, a doll, a stuffed animal. "But the only ones I found were covered in maggots and roaches."

Choking back rage, he approached the mother. How could you let this happen?

"The mother's statement was: 'I'm doing the best I can,' " the detective said. "I told her, 'The best you can sucks!' "

He wanted to arrest the woman right then, but when he called his boss he was told to let DCF do its own investigation.

So the detective carried the girl down the dim hall, past her brothers, past her mother in the doorway, who was shrieking, "Don't take my baby!" He buckled the child into the state investigator's car. The investigator agreed: They had to get the girl out of there.

"Radio ahead to Tampa General," the detective remembers telling his partner. "If this child doesn't get to a hospital, she's not going to make it."

• • •

Her name, her mother had said, was Danielle. She was almost 7 years old.

She weighed 46 pounds. She was malnourished and anemic. In the pediatric intensive care unit they tried to feed the girl, but she couldn't chew or swallow solid food. So they put her on an IV and let her drink from a bottle.

Aides bathed her, scrubbed the sores on her face, trimmed her torn fingernails. They had to cut her tangled hair before they could comb out the lice.

Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, never seen a doctor. She didn't know how to hold a doll, didn't understand peek-a-boo. "Due to the severe neglect," a doctor would write, "the child will be disabled for the rest of her life."

Hunched in an oversized crib, Danielle curled in on herself like a potato bug, then writhed angrily, kicking and thrashing. To calm herself, she batted at her toes and sucked her fists. "Like an infant," one doctor wrote.

She wouldn't make eye contact. She didn't react to heat or cold — or pain. The insertion of an IV needle elicited no reaction. She never cried. With a nurse holding her hands, she could stand and walk sideways on her toes, like a crab. She couldn't talk, didn't know how to nod yes or no. Once in a while she grunted.

She couldn't tell anyone what had happened, what was wrong, what hurt.

Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, director of pediatric psychology at the University of South Florida medical school, was the first psychologist to examine Danielle. She said medical tests, brain scans, and vision, hearing and genetics checks found nothing wrong with the child. She wasn't deaf, wasn't autistic, had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.

The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But the scene at the house, along with Danielle's almost comatose condition, led them to believe she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. Hard as it was to imagine, they doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun, sung to sleep, even hugged or held. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.

Armstrong called the girl's condition "environmental autism." Danielle had been deprived of interaction for so long, the doctor believed, that she had withdrawn into herself.

The most extraordinary thing about Danielle, Armstrong said, was her lack of engagement with people, with anything. "There was no light in her eye, no response or recognition. . . . We saw a little girl who didn't even respond to hugs or affection. Even a child with the most severe autism responds to those."

Danielle's was "the most outrageous case of neglect I've ever seen."

The authorities had discovered the rarest and most pitiable of creatures: a feral child.

The term is not a diagnosis. It comes from historic accounts — some fictional, some true — of children raised by animals and therefore not exposed to human nurturing. Wolf boys and bird girls, Tarzan, Mowgli from The Jungle Book.

It's said that during the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II gave a group of infants to some nuns. He told them to take care of the children but never to speak to them. He believed the babies would eventually reveal the true language of God. Instead, they died from the lack of interaction.

Then there was the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who wandered out of the woods near Paris in 1800, naked and grunting. He was about 12. A teacher took him in and named him Victor. He tried to socialize the child, teach him to talk. But after several years, he gave up on the teen and asked the housekeeper to care for him.

"In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed," said Armstrong, the psychologist who examined Danielle. "Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world."

The importance of nurturing has been shown again and again. In the 1960s, psychologist Harry Harlow put groups of infant rhesus monkeys in a room with two artificial mothers. One, made of wire, dispensed food. The other, of terrycloth, extended cradled arms. Though they were starving, the baby monkeys all climbed into the warm cloth arms.

"Primates need comfort even more than they need food," Armstrong said.

The most recent case of a feral child was in 1970, in California. A girl whom therapists came to call Genie had been strapped to a potty chair until she was 13. Like the Wild Boy, Genie was studied in hospitals and laboratories. She was in her 20s when doctors realized she'd never talk, never be able to take care of herself. She ended up in foster care, closed off from the world, utterly dependent.

Danielle's case — which unfolded out of the public spotlight, without a word in the media — raised disturbing questions for everyone trying to help her. How could this have happened? What kind of mother would sit by year after year while her daughter languished in her own filth, starving and crawling with bugs?

And why hadn't someone intervened? The neighbors, the authorities — where had they been?

"It's mind-boggling that in the 21st century we can still have a child who's just left in a room like a gerbil," said Tracy Sheehan, Danielle's guardian in the legal system and now a circuit court judge. "No food. No one talking to her or reading her a story. She can't even use her hands. How could this child be so invisible?"

But the most pressing questions were about her future.

When Danielle was discovered, she was younger by six years than the Wild Boy or Genie, giving hope that she might yet be teachable. Many of her caregivers had high hopes they could make her whole.

Danielle had probably missed the chance to learn speech, but maybe she could come to understand language, to communicate in other ways.

Still, doctors had only the most modest ambitions for her.

"My hope was that she would be able to sleep through the night, to be out of diapers and to feed herself," Armstrong said. If things went really well, she said, Danielle would end up "in a nice nursing home."

Danielle spent six weeks at Tampa General before she was well enough to leave. But where could she go? Not home; Judge Martha Cook, who oversaw her dependency hearing, ordered that Danielle be placed in foster care and that her mother not be allowed to call or visit her. The mother was being investigated on criminal child abuse charges.

"That child, she broke my heart," Cook said later. "We were so distraught over her condition, we agonized over what to do."

Eventually, Danielle was placed in a group home in Land O'Lakes. She had a bed with sheets and a pillow, clothes and food, and someone at least to change her diapers.

In October 2005, a couple of weeks after she turned 7, Danielle started school for the first time. She was placed in a special ed class at Sanders Elementary.

"Her behavior was different than any child I'd ever seen," said Kevin O'Keefe, Danielle's first teacher. "If you put food anywhere near her, she'd grab it" and mouth it like a baby, he said. "She had a lot of episodes of great agitation, yelling, flailing her arms, rolling into a fetal position. She'd curl up in a closet, just to be away from everyone. She didn't know how to climb a slide or swing on a swing. She didn't want to be touched."

It took her a year just to become consolable, he said.

By Thanksgiving 2006 — a year and a half after Danielle had gone into foster care — her caseworker was thinking about finding her a permanent home.

A nursing home, group home or medical foster care facility could take care of Danielle. But she needed more.

"In my entire career with the child welfare system, I don't ever remember a child like Danielle," said Luanne Panacek, executive director of the Children's Board of Hillsborough County. "It makes you think about what does quality of life mean? What's the best we can hope for her? After all she's been through, is it just being safe?"

That fall, Panacek decided to include Danielle in the Heart Gallery — a set of portraits depicting children available for adoption. The Children's Board displays the pictures in malls and on the Internet in hopes that people will fall in love with the children and take them home.

In Hillsborough alone, 600 kids are available for adoption. Who, Panacek wondered, would choose an 8-year-old who was still in diapers, who didn't know her own name and might not ever speak or let you hug her?

The day Danielle was supposed to have her picture taken for the Heart Gallery, she showed up with red Kool-Aid dribbled down her new blouse. She hadn't yet mastered a sippy cup.

Garet White, Danielle's care manager, scrubbed the girl's shirt and washed her face. She brushed Danielle's bangs from her forehead and begged the photographer to please be patient.

White stepped behind the photographer and waved at Danielle. She put her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her hands, stuck out her tongue and rolled her eyes. Danielle didn't even blink.

White was about to give up when she heard a sound she'd never heard from Danielle. The child's eyes were still dull, apparently unseeing. But her mouth was open. She looked like she was trying to laugh.

Teenagers tore through the arcade, firing fake rifles. Sweaty boys hunched over air hockey tables. Girls squealed as they stomped on blinking squares.

Bernie and Diane Lierow remember standing silently inside GameWorks in Tampa, overwhelmed. They had driven three hours from their home in Fort Myers Beach, hoping to meet a child at this foster care event.

But all these kids seemed too wild, too big and, well, too worldly.

Bernie, 48, remodels houses. Diane, 45, cleans homes. They have four grown sons from previous marriages and one together. Diane couldn't have any more children, and Bernie had always wanted a daughter. So last year, when William was 9, they decided to adopt.

Their new daughter would have to be younger than William, they told foster workers. But she would have to be potty-trained and able to feed herself. They didn't want a child who might hurt their son, or who was profoundly disabled and unable to take care of herself.

On the Internet they had found a girl in Texas, another in Georgia. Each time they were told, "That one is dangerous. She can't be with other children."

That's why they were at this Heart Gallery gathering, scanning the crowd.

Bernie's head ached from all the jangling games; Diane's stomach hurt, seeing all the abandoned kids; and William was tired of shooting aliens.

Diane stepped out of the chaos, into an alcove beneath the stairs. That was when she saw it. A little girl's face on a flier, pale with sunken cheeks and dark hair chopped too short. Her brown eyes seemed to be searching for something.

Diane called Bernie over. He saw the same thing she did. "She just looked like she needed us."

Bernie and Diane are humble, unpretentious people who would rather picnic on their deck than eat out. They go to work, go to church, visit with their neighbors, walk their dogs. They don't travel or pursue exotic interests; a vacation for them is hanging out at home with the family. Shy and soft-spoken, they're both slow to anger and, they say, seldom argue.

They had everything they ever wanted, they said. Except for a daughter.

But the more they asked about Danielle, the more they didn't want to know.

She was 8, but functioned as a 2-year-old. She had been left alone in a dank room, ignored for most of her life.

No, she wasn't there at the video arcade; she was in a group home. She wore diapers, couldn't feed herself, couldn't talk. After more than a year in school, she still wouldn't make eye contact or play with other kids.

No one knew, really, what was wrong with her, or what she might be capable of.

"She was everything we didn't want," Bernie said.

But they couldn't forget those aching eyes.

When they met Danielle at her school, she was drooling. Her tongue hung from her mouth. Her head, which seemed too big for her thin neck, lolled side to side.

She looked at them for an instant, then loped away across the special ed classroom. She rolled onto her back, rocked for a while, then batted at her toes.

Diane walked over and spoke to her softly. Danielle didn't seem to notice. But when Bernie bent down, Danielle turned toward him and her eyes seemed to focus.

He held out his hand. She let him pull her to her feet. Danielle's teacher, Kevin O'Keefe, was amazed; he hadn't seen her warm up to anyone so quickly.

Bernie led Danielle to the playground, she pulling sideways and prancing on her tiptoes. She squinted in the sunlight but let him push her gently on the swing. When it was time for them to part, Bernie swore he saw Danielle wave.

That night, he had a dream. Two giant hands slid through his bedroom ceiling, the fingers laced together. Danielle was swinging on those hands, her dark eyes wide, thin arms reaching for him.

Everyone told them not to do it, neighbors, co-workers, friends. Everyone said they didn't know what they were getting into.

So what if Danielle is not everything we hoped for? Bernie and Diane answered. You can't pre-order your own kids. You take what God gives you.

They brought her home on Easter weekend 2007. It was supposed to be a rebirth, of sorts — a baptism into their family.

"It was a disaster," Bernie said.

They gave her a doll; she bit off its hands. They took her to the beach; she screamed and wouldn't put her feet in the sand. Back at her new home, she tore from room to room, her swim diaper spewing streams across the carpet.

She couldn't peel the wrapper from a chocolate egg, so she ate the shiny paper too. She couldn't sit still to watch TV or look at a book. She couldn't hold a crayon. When they tried to brush her teeth or comb her hair, she kicked and thrashed. She wouldn't lie in a bed, wouldn't go to sleep, just rolled on her back, side to side, for hours.

All night she kept popping up, creeping sideways on her toes into the kitchen. She would pull out the frozen food drawer and stand on the bags of vegetables so she could see into the refrigerator.

"She wouldn't take anything," Bernie said. "I guess she wanted to make sure the food was still there."

When Bernie tried to guide her back to bed, Danielle railed against him and bit her own hands.

In time, Danielle's new family learned what worked and what didn't. Her foster family had been giving her anti-psychotic drugs to mitigate her temper tantrums and help her sleep. When Bernie and Diane weaned her off the medication, she stopped drooling and started holding up her head. She let Bernie brush her teeth.

Bernie and Diane already thought of Danielle as their daughter, but legally she wasn't. Danielle's birth mother did not want to give her up even though she had been charged with child abuse and faced 20 years in prison. So prosecutors offered a deal: If she waived her parental rights, they wouldn't send her to jail.

She took the plea. She was given two years of house arrest, plus probation. And 100 hours of community service.

In October 2007, Bernie and Diane officially adopted Danielle. They call her Dani.

"Okay, let's put your shoes on. Do you need to go potty again?" Diane asks.

It's an overcast Monday morning in spring 2008 and Dani is late for school. Again. She keeps flitting around the living room, ducking behind chairs and sofas, pulling at her shorts.

After a year with her new family, Dani scarcely resembles the girl in the Heart Gallery photo. She has grown a foot and her weight has doubled.

All those years she was kept inside, her hair was as dark as the dirty room she lived in. But since she started going to the beach and swimming in their backyard pool, Dani's shoulder-length hair has turned a golden blond. She still shrieks when anyone tries to brush it.

The changes in her behavior are subtle, but Bernie and Diane see progress. They give an example: When Dani feels overwhelmed she retreats to her room, rolls onto her back, pulls one sock toward the end of her toes and bats it. For hours. Bernie and Diane tell her to stop.

Now, when Dani hears them coming, she peels off her sock and throws it into the closet to hide it.

She's learning right from wrong, they say. And she seems upset when she knows she has disappointed them. As if she cares how they feel.

Bernie and Diane were told to put Dani in school with profoundly disabled children, but they insisted on different classes because they believe she can do more. They take her to occupational and physical therapy, to church and the mall and the grocery store. They have her in speech classes and horseback riding lessons.

Once, when Dani was trying to climb onto her horse, the mother of a boy in the therapeutic class turned to Diane.

"You're so lucky," Diane remembers the woman saying.

"Lucky?" Diane asked.

The woman nodded. "I know my son will never stand on his own, will never be able to climb onto a horse. You have no idea what your daughter might be able to do."

Diane finds hope in that idea. She counts small steps to convince herself things are slowly improving. So what if Dani steals food off other people's trays at McDonald's? At least she can feed herself chicken nuggets now. So what if she already has been to the bathroom four times this morning? She's finally out of diapers.

It took months, but they taught her to hold a stuffed teddy on the toilet so she wouldn't be scared to be alone in the bathroom. They bribed her with M&M's.

"Dani, sit down and try to use the potty," Diane coaxes. "Pull down your shorts. That's a good girl."

Every weekday, for half an hour, speech therapist Leslie Goldenberg tries to teach Dani to talk. She sits her in front of a mirror at a Bonita Springs elementary school and shows her how to purse her lips to make puffing sounds.

"Puh-puh-puh," says the teacher. "Here, feel my mouth." She brings Dani's fingers to her lips, so she can feel the air.

Dani nods. She knows how to nod now. Goldenberg puffs again.

Leaning close to the mirror, Dani purses her lips, opens and closes them. No sound comes out. She can imitate the movement, but doesn't know she has to blow out air to make the noise.

She bends closer, scowls at her reflection. Her lips open and close again, then she leaps up and runs across the room. She grabs a Koosh ball and bounces it rapidly.

She's lost inside herself. Again.

But in many ways, Dani already has surpassed the teacher's expectations, and not just in terms of speech. She seems to be learning to listen, and she understands simple commands. She pulls at her pants to show she needs to go to the bathroom, taps a juice box when she wants more. She can sit at a table for five-minute stretches, and she's starting to scoop applesauce with a spoon. She's down to just a few temper tantrums a month. She is learning to push buttons on a speaking board, to use symbols to show when she wants a book or when she's angry. She's learning it's okay to be angry: You can deal with those feelings without biting your own hands.

"I'd like her to at least be able to master a sound board, so she can communicate her choices even if she never finds her voice," Goldenberg says. "I think she understands most of what we say. It's just that she doesn't always know how to — or want to — react."

Dani's teacher and family have heard her say only a few words, and all of them seemed accidental. Once she blurted "baaa," startling Goldenberg to tears. It was the first letter sound she had ever made.

She seems to talk most often when William is tickling her, as if something from her subconscious seeps out when she's too distracted to shut it off. Her brother has heard her say, "Stop!" and "No!" He thought he even heard her say his name.

Having a brother just one year older is invaluable for Dani's development, her teacher says. She has someone to practice language with, someone who will listen. "Even deaf infants will coo," Goldenberg said. "But if no one responds, they stop."

William says Dani frightened him at first. "She did weird things." But he always wanted someone to play with. He doesn't care that she can't ride bikes with him or play Monopoly. "I drive her around in my Jeep and she honks the horn," he says. "She's learning to match up cards and stuff."

He couldn't believe she had never walked a dog or licked an ice cream cone. He taught her how to play peek-a-boo, helped her squish Play-Doh through her fingers. He showed her it was safe to walk on sand and fun to blow bubbles and okay to cry; when you hurt, someone comes. He taught her how to open a present. How to pick up tater tots and dunk them into a mountain of ketchup.

William was used to living like an only child, but since Dani has moved in, she gets most of their parents' attention. "She needs them more than me," he says simply.

He gave her his old toys, his "kid movies," his board books. He even moved out of his bedroom so she could sleep upstairs. His parents painted his old walls pink and filled the closet with cotton-candy dresses.

They moved a daybed into the laundry room for William, squeezed it between the washing machine and Dani's rocking horse. Each night, the 10-year-old boy cuddles up with a walkie-talkie because "it's scary down here, all alone."

After a few minutes, while his parents are trying to get Dani to bed, William always sneaks into the living room and folds himself into the love seat.

He trades his walkie-talkie for a small stuffed Dalmatian and calls down the hall, "Good night, Mom and Dad. Good night, Dani."

Some day, he's sure, she will answer.

Even now, Dani won't sleep in a bed.

Bernie bought her a new trundle so she can slide out the bottom bunk and be at floor level. Diane found pink Hello Kitty sheets and a stuffed glow worm so Dani will never again be alone in the dark.

"You got your wormie? You ready to go to sleep?" Bernie asks, bending to pick up his daughter. She's turning slow circles beneath the window, holding her worm by his tail. Bernie lifts her to the glass and shows her the sun, slipping behind the neighbor's house.

He hopes, one day, she might be able to call him "Daddy," to get married or at least live on her own. But if that doesn't happen, he says, "That's okay too. For me, it's all about getting the kisses and the hugs."

For now, Bernie and Diane are content to give Dani what she never had before: comfort and stability, attention and affection. A trundle, a glow worm.

Now Bernie tips Dani into bed, smooths her golden hair across the pillow. "Night-night," he says, kissing her forehead.

"Good night, honey," Diane calls from the doorway.

Bernie lowers the shade. As he walks past Dani, she reaches out and grabs his ankles.

She's out there somewhere, looming over Danielle's story like a ghost. To Bernie and Diane, Danielle's birth mother is a cipher, almost never spoken of. The less said, the better. As far as they are concerned Danielle was born the day they found her. And yet this unimaginable woman is out there somewhere, most likely still on probation, permanently unburdened of her daughter, and thinking — what? What can she possibly say? Nothing. Not a thing. But none of this makes any sense without her.

Michelle Crockett lives in a mobile home in Plant City with her two 20-something sons, three cats and a closet full of kittens. The trailer is just down the road from the little house where she lived with Danielle.

On a steamy afternoon a few weeks ago, Michelle opens the door wearing a long T-shirt. When she sees two strangers, she ducks inside and pulls on a housecoat. She's tall and stout, with broad shoulders and the sallow skin of a smoker. She looks tired, older than her 51 years.

"My daughter?" she asks. "You want to talk about my daughter?" Her voice catches. Tears pool in her glasses.

The inside of the trailer is modest but clean: dishes drying on the counter, silk flowers on the table. Sitting in her kitchen, chain-smoking 305s, she starts at the end: the day the detective took Danielle.

"Part of me died that day," she says.

Michelle says she was a student at the University of Tampa when she met a man named Bernie at a bar. It was 1976. He was a Vietnam vet, 10 years her senior. They got married and moved to Las Vegas, where he drove a taxi.

Right away they had two sons, Bernard and Grant. The younger boy wasn't potty-trained until he was 4, didn't talk until he was 5. "He was sort of slow," Michelle says. In school, they put him in special ed.

Her sons were teenagers when her husband got sick. Agent Orange, the doctors said. When he died in August 1997, Michelle filed for bankruptcy.

Six months later, she met a man in a casino. He was in Vegas on business. She went back to his hotel room with him.

"His name was Ron," she says. She shakes her head. "No, it was Bob. I think it was Bob."

For hours Michelle Crockett spins out her story, tapping ashes into a plastic ashtray. Everything she says sounds like a plea, but for what? Understanding? Sympathy? She doesn't apologize. Far from it. She feels wronged.

Danielle, she says, was born in a hospital in Las Vegas, a healthy baby who weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Her Apgar score measuring her health was a 9, nearly perfect.

"She screamed a lot," Michelle says. "I just thought she was spoiled."

When Danielle was 18 months old, Michelle's mobile home burned down, so she loaded her two sons and baby daughter onto a Greyhound bus and headed to Florida, to bunk with a cousin.

They lost their suitcases along the way, she says. The cousin couldn't take the kids. After a week, Michelle moved into a Brandon apartment with no furniture, no clothes, no dishes. She got hired as a cashier at Publix. But it was okay: "The boys were with her," she says. She says she has the paperwork to prove it.

She goes to the boys' bathroom, returns with a box full of documents and hands it over.

The earliest documents are from Feb. 11, 2002. That was when someone called the child abuse hotline on her. The caller reported that a child, about 3, was "left unattended for days with a retarded older brother, never seen wearing anything but a diaper."

This is Michelle's proof that her sons were watching Danielle.

The caller continued:

"The home is filthy. There are clothes everywhere. There are feces on the child's seat and the counter is covered with trash."

It's not clear what investigators found at the house, but they left Danielle with her mother that day.

Nine months later, another call to authorities. A person who knew Michelle from the Moose Lodge said she was always there playing bingo with her new boyfriend, leaving her children alone overnight.

"Not fit to be a mother," the caller said.

The hotline operator took these notes: The 4-year-old girl "is still wearing a diaper and drinking from a baby bottle. On-going situation, worse since last August. Mom leaves Grant and Danielle at home for several days in a row while she goes to work and spends the night with a new paramour. Danielle . . . is never seen outside the home."

Again the child abuse investigators went out. They offered Michelle free day care for Danielle. She refused. And they left Danielle there.

Why? Didn't they worry about two separate calls to the hotline, months apart, citing the same concerns?

"It's not automatic that because the home is dirty we'd remove the child," said Nick Cox, regional director of the Florida Department of Children and Families. "And what they found in 2002 was not like the scene they walked into in 2005."

The aim, he said, is to keep the child with the parent, and try to help the parent get whatever services he or she might need. But Michelle refused help. And investigators might have felt they didn't have enough evidence to take Danielle, Cox said.

"I'm concerned, though, that no effort was made to interview the child," he said.

"If you have a 4-year-old who is unable to speak, that would raise a red flag to me. "I'm not going to tell you this was okay. I don't know how it could have happened."

Michelle insists Danielle was fine.

"I tried to potty-train her, she wouldn't train. I tried to get her into schools, no one would take her," she says in the kitchen of her trailer. The only thing she ever noticed was wrong, she says, "was that she didn't speak much. She talked in a soft tone. She'd say, ‘Let's go eat.' But no one could hear her except me."

She says she took Danielle to the library and the park. "I took her out for pizza. Once." But she can't remember which library, which park or where they went for pizza.

"She liked this song I'd sing her," Michelle says. "Miss Polly had a dolly, she was sick, sick, sick . . ."

Michelle's older son, Bernard, told a judge that he once asked his mom why she never took Danielle to the doctor. Something's wrong with her, he remembered telling her. He said she answered, "If they see her, they might take her away."

A few months after the second abuse call, Michelle and her kids moved in with her boyfriend in the rundown rental house in Plant City. The day the cops came, Michelle says, she didn't know what was wrong.

The detective found Danielle in the back, sleeping. The only window in the small space was broken. Michelle had tacked a blanket across the shattered glass, but flies and beetles and roaches had crept in anyway.

"My house was a mess," she says. "I'd been sick and it got away from me. But I never knew a dirty house was against the law."

The cop walked past her, carrying Danielle.

"He said she was starving. I told him me and my sisters were all skinny till we were 13.

"I begged him, ‘Please, don't take my baby! Please!' "

She says she put socks on her daughter before he took her to the car, but couldn't find any shoes.

A judge ordered Michelle to have a psychological evaluation. That's among the documents, too.

Danielle's IQ, the report says, is below 50, indicating "severe mental retardation." Michelle's is 77, "borderline range of intellectual ability."

"She tended to blame her difficulties on circumstances while rationalizing her own actions," wrote psychologist Richard Enrico Spana. She "is more concerned with herself than most other adults, and this could lead her to neglect paying adequate attention to people around her."

She wanted to fight for her daughter, she says, but didn't want to go to jail and didn't have enough money for a lawyer.

"I tried to get people to help me," Michelle says. "They say I made her autistic. But how do you make a kid autistic? They say I didn't put clothes on her — but she just tore them off."

After Danielle was taken away, Michelle says, she tripped over a box at Wal-Mart and got in a car accident and couldn't work anymore. In February, she went back to court and a judge waived her community service hours.

She's on probation until 2012.

She spends her days with her sons, doing crossword puzzles and watching movies. Sometimes they talk about Danielle.

When Danielle was in the hospital, Michelle says, she and her sons sneaked in to see her. Michelle took a picture from the file: Danielle, drowning in a hospital gown, slumped in a bed that folded into a wheelchair.

"That's the last picture I have of her," Michelle says. In her kitchen, she snubs out her cigarette. She crosses to the living room, where Danielle's image looks down from the wall.

She reaches up and, with her finger, traces her daughter's face. "When I moved here," she says, "that was the first thing I hung."

She says she misses Danielle.

"Have you seen her?" Michelle asks. "Is she okay?"

Is she okay?

Danielle is better than anyone dared hope. She has learned to look at people and let herself be held. She can chew ham. She can swim. She's tall and blond and has a little belly. She knows her name is Dani.

In her new room, she has a window she can look out of. When she wants to see outside, all she has to do is raise her arms and her dad is right behind her, waiting to pick her up.

About this story

St. Petersburg Times reporter Lane DeGregory and Times photographer Melissa Lyttle met Danielle and her new family at their home in February. All of the scenes at their house and in speech therapy were witnessed by the journalists.

The opening scene and others were reconstructed from interviews with neighbors, the detective, Danielle's care manager, psychologist, teacher, legal guardian and the judge on her case. Additional information came from hundreds of pages of police reports, medical records and court documents.

Michelle Crockett was interviewed at home in Plant City.

In June, Danielle's new parents sold their Florida home and moved out of state. Bernie built Dani a treehouse. Last week, she began summer school.

Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.