In the late 1970’s, a religious sect settled into the tiny town of Island Pond, Vermont, located in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. The group called itself the Church of Island Pond. Children from these families were occasionally beaten with rods and switches, in plain view, right out on the streets of town.
Residents reacted with alarm. Were church members a cult? After all, they were reclusive, schooled their children at home, used harsh forms of discipline and claimed Biblical authority for doing so. The children didn’t seem like normal kids; they always looked so very grave.
Rumors about rampant child abuse spread quickly in the little village. Townspeople became afraid of the religious community . They agonized over the beatings they witnessed and feared what might be going on, unseen. Eventually, they took their concerns to law enforcement.
One day in 1984, 50 state troopers – all armed, some wearing flak jackets – raided the 19 houses where 112 children lived with their families. It was dawn; most families were still sound asleep. The troopers told the children not to ask questions; just move and get on the bus waiting outside.
The children were frightened, crying, traumatized. Imagine the parents’ horror: waking to find their homes overrun with police officers who were taking their sobbing children away.
Teams of social workers, nurses, doctors, psychologists and others had been enlisted to examine the children for signs of physical and emotional trauma. The plan was to keep the children in a detention center for 3 days so that full examinations could be done on each one. The Governor had approved the action. The State Attorney General had approved the action.
But the public reaction was horrified. The Burlington Press penned an editorial comparing the raid to Nazi Germany. The ACLU deemed it a “massive deprivation of rights.”
A judge refused to approve the detention of the children from the commune because he had insufficient information. Since the church group did not routinely keep birth records, and treated many illnesses and injuries themselves, and lived communally, the state did not know how old particular children were, or which member of the church was the parent to which child, or if a particular child had suffered injuries multiple times.
The children were brought back home. And the people of Island Pond were left to wonder. Why had it all gone so wrong? How had their well-intentioned concern for the welfare of children become such a nightmare of militaristic action and trauma for the entire church community?
How DO we show our love and concern for our neighbors, especially for the children, when we suspect something might be dangerously wrong inside their families?
Last week, in Perris, California, population of roughly 70,000, a teen-aged child jumped out of the window of a suburban home, ran away, used a cell phone she had hidden and called the police in a desperate and heroic effort to save herself and her 12 siblings from torture, starvation and captivity.
When police arrived at the Turpin house, they found the siblings, ages 2 – 29, shackled, filthy and so malnourished they appeared to be years younger than their ages. They had endured torture and abuse so extreme over such a long period of time some of their minds and bodies had succumbed to impairment.
As the story unfolded, we learned that some of the older children had once been in public schools – dressed in the same clothes every day, so neglected and dirty they became easy targets for bullying. A couple of times the Turpin parents took all of the children to Las Vegas – all dressed alike – so that they could watch their parents renew their wedding vows. There were similar highly visible family outings over the years.
A small group of the Turpin siblings would sometimes accompany a parent to a community affair in Perris. They would all be dressed alike. They were so small for their ages people couldn’t tell if they were seeing elementary-aged children or high school children. Those who interacted with the Turpin children on these occasions described them as very, very pale and thin.
The fact that they were always dressed alike and equally emaciated made it hard to tell which child one was seeing. They were like interchangeable parts. The parents picked a couple of the older girls to send out to the mailbox – a way to interact with the neighbors. But the neighbors had no way to know for sure which child was which.
When the Turpin case broke in the news last week, I couldn’t help thinking of my own history as a child. My mother imposed an endless list of rules designed to break my spirit and demonstrate her hatred of me. The primary rule was to stay in my room. Whenever I was in the house, I was to be in my room. I was not to wander around, read on the porch, bring friends inside, watch TV after dinner, do my homework on the dining table, come into the kitchen for anything and so on. From my infancy until I left for college at 18, she berated and bullied me, kept me away from my siblings and excluded me from family activities and school activities. Comfort and love were commodities I was supposed to earn, and never did; not once in 18 years. My mother found something to punish me for every day, something that would send her into a rage and a tirade against my existence.
For 18 years, I wondered why no one rescued me from my own particular hell. The relatives came to the house for all the holidays and we visited them in between. They knew how I was treated. I went to school every day, and did poorly, despite aptitude tests saying I ought to do very well. My viola teacher must have noticed during 3 years of private lessons that my school picture was not there on top of the piano, with the pictures of my two siblings.
Children who are being abused cannot sound the alarm. The consequences of the abuser finding out that the child has revealed the family situation are too monstrous to contemplate. Their lives would become even more of a living hell. They have been rendered powerless and voiceless by their circumstances. The ability to speak up for themselves and fight back has been beaten out and shamed into submission. I remember having nightmares as a child in which I was desperate to talk, to scream for help, but I was being strangled and no sound came out.
After a lifetime of studying and thinking about this issue, I’ve realized that a great deal of our power to help victims of abuse lies in how we love our neighbors.
Think about how we come to know the people who are our neighbors. We hang out on the porch, we chat by the mailbox, we shovel driveways and mow lawns. Along the way we share ideas and apple pies. We come to know the neighbor’s kin and dear ones. We share tricks for fixing a muffler and getting a plumber.
Through a thousand acts of daily living, we try to be a good neighbor to our neighbors. We treat one another as equals and love our neighbors as if they were siblings in our large extended family.
In the village of Island Pond, the townspeople backed off from knowing the neighbors who came to town to start a church commune. When they saw church members publicly punishing their children, they became afraid of engaging them in conversation. They saw how grave and quiet the children were, and talked about it amongst themselves. They stopped seeing them as neighbors, equals, siblings in an extended family – all of that. Instead, they saw them as “the other,” different.
That is one clue that we have stopped the process of loving our neighbor. In cases where fear of the other takes over our neighborly instincts, we have lost opportunities to get to know a family. Neighborly behaviors help us to see beyond what the abusers want us to see – the normal, happy family they carefully portray in public from time to time.
The best way to play a role in a potentially awful situation is to approach the neighbors as a neighbor. Seek conversations regularly, and with the smile of a kind-hearted neighbor on your face. Don’t use your neighborly chats as excuses to go poking about inside or to ask prying questions. Keep your eyes and ears open and keep on stopping by. Care about them as if they were your siblings.
Knock on the door, bring over “cupcakes for the children” or your own niece who needs someone to play with. Ask about the children during school vacation weeks. Offer to water plants when the family goes away. Find out if they know the name of a good handyman or mechanic. Behaving as mature, loving neighbors is the clearest power that is in our hands.
Don’t be put off by the ogres that may be inside a neighbor’s house. Even if one or more of the adults has a fierce demeanor and facial expression, even if you encounter a brick wall of resistance to your neighborly charm, assume that continuing to be a good neighbor is necessary and important.
In Perris, California, the neighbors saw what the parents of those 13 children would allow others to see: a family of quiet, well-mannered children; normal and happy family outings. But the neighbors also saw significant details that they dismissed – things they couldn’t believe, didn’t want to believe, would be related to abuse: children marching in circles at night, an emaciated child who couldn’t stop eating at a pot luck, children far too small for their ages, children who went unseen for two whole years, children who only emerged from the house at night.
We tend to lower our vigilance if some things seem to be okay. Abusers count on this fact and give us, from time to time, a picture of normalcy to contemplate – the way the Turpin parents took all the kids to Disneyland. That’s a trick abusers use to muddy the water so neighbors can’t think straight, can’t be sure there’s anything wrong over there.
My mother used to have the ladies of the neighborhood over for tea once in a great while. I was reminded to stay in my room on these occasions. “Don’t you make sound. Do you hear me? Not a sound. If I hear any sounds coming out of your room up there you’ll get a spanking so hard you won’t sit down for a week.” And then she’d tell the neighborhood ladies all about the sweater she was knitting for me.
Abusers work hard to keep us from seeing the whole. They know we might notice some of the nasty details, but it won’t matter as long as we don’t fit the nasty details into a coherent picture of what’s going on.
People say now that life in the village of Island Pond shifted a little after the raid. Members of the commune revisited their teachings on punishment. Residents began their own slow process of getting to know and respect members of the church. Church members began to get involved in the community, volunteer for the fire department, start businesses in town. These days they say they all get along.
The tragedy is that such neighborliness would have saved everyone from the trauma of that raid. Mature, responsible, kindhearted and continual neighborliness also might have pried the Turpin children loose from their incarceration much sooner.
There is always a chance that abusers will pick up and move somewhere else when neighbors get too close, when it seems like people might be onto them. But we can make sure that wherever they go, we the neighbors will be there, doing this thing called loving our neighbors.
