The child comes first: when families can't be fixed.

Washington has been in a mild uproar since late September over a series of articles in the Washington Post. The result of four years of research by the highly regarded reporter Leon Dash, they chronicled the life of Rosa Lee Cunningham, a fifty-seven-year-old grandmother who has been convicted twelve times for shoplifting for which she has intermittently spent five years in jail. She has also been a prostitute and a drug pusher, is a drug addict, and is now HIV positive.

Rosa Lee, still a rather attractive woman if one can judge by news photos, has had eight children, five by different fathers. She never bothered with their schooling but she taught them and a number of her grandchildren, too, how to steal. All but two of her children followed her into drug dealing and drug addiction.

The purpose of the series, according to the Post and Dash himself, was to illuminate the life of the underclass that increasingly populates our cities but lives outside our main culture. Predictably, a storm of protest came from middle-class black citizens (Rosa Lee is African-American, as is Dash): Why portray the degradation of such a woman? Why not profile those hard-working and successful African-Americans who strengthen our communities? Others saw Rosa Lee as a victim, her life a result of racism and poverty. Still others, more thoughtful, saw the series as a call to action, to face up to the spreading infection of families like Rosa Lee's and to seek again to find solutions to the problem they present.

How can we deal with such an enormous and fast-growing problem? (In one lifetime Rosa Lee has brought into being three generations of petty criminals and social misfits.) There are ways.

Leon Dash in a subsequent article pointed out that two of Rosa Lee's children had turned out all right and were stable members of society. In both cases helpful adults had taken an interest in them and intervened in their lives--in one case, a teacher; in the other, a social worker. Apparently, too, the lack of such intervention in the lives of the other six was compounded by the fact that the educational system allowed them to become failures in the early and most crucial years of schooling.

As I write, Nelson Mandela and the Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams are visiting Washington, the former a triumphant example of the overcoming of a social pathology, the latter hoping to. This takes me back again to a column written by Barbara Reynolds of USA Today (May 13, 1994) at the time Mandela became official leader of what she called "Africa's rainbow nation." She contrasted the achievement of bringing democracy to South Africa--the result of a long struggle waged both within the country and abroad--to our national failure to cope with the desperate conditions in our own inner cities, especially in the District of Columbia, "the city the nation shares." Our leaders must refocus the struggle, she wrote, and suggested ways for that to be done.

We are years late in facing up to this problem. I agree with Reynolds. Let's start now. Government will be slow in doing so but churches and businesses can move more quickly. They can adopt the schools in which parents like Rosa Lee Cunningham have little interest or involvement and see that each and every pupil has the interest and help of a mentoring adult like her two successful children had. They can provide teachers' aides who will insure that no child is pushed on until he or she masters the basics of education and gains the self-confidence such mastery promotes. In fact, if we truly care, each of us could make ourselves part of that effort right now.

But the problem is not confined to the bringing up of asocial and neglected children by parents like Rosa Lee. The growing incidence of physical abuse by parents as well as the incidence of parents who provide no real care and love (a form of abuse) often produces emotionally stunted and murderous children.

According to Reynolds, a USA Today survey ranked our nation's capital as one of the deadliest places for children to live in the country. "In D.C. this year city officials estimate 2,500 kids will be abused," she writes. Reynolds proposes that orphanages should be built to protect children from abusive adults. As Commonweal readers know, this is a remedy that appeals to me. At the risk of being thought a Joanna-One-Note, I cite some of the arguments for orphanages of which I wrote some year ago ("The Least of These," December 1, 1989 and "Orphans Need Homes," January 26, 1990).

The welfare system in most cities

and states still addresses the prob-

lem of neglected and abandoned

children on the basis of an outworn 

and probably never realistic the-

sis--that the problem of each child

must be worked out according to a

permanent plan which will result ei-

ther in reunification with the bio-

logical family or adoption. The

reality is that most of these children

from the inner city are the offspring

of the second- and third-generation

of teen-aged mothers isolated from

any extended family and living in

extreme poverty. There are no real

biological families or homes to

which they may return ("The Least

of These").

And yet a misguided, supposedly family oriented system does return them to these nonhomes willy-nilly. "Tommy's 'mommy-sores' from an electric cord beating took months to heal," wrote Sister Josephine, administrator of Saint Ann's Infant Home recently. "He asked why we were sending him back home when we knew what was going to happen to him. Why indeed? All I could say is, 'It's a court order.' It's nothing but slavery" (Catholic Standard, September 29).

Sister Josephine describes this slavery vividly. "They are beaten, burned, battered, sold, used, and abused--just as were the slaves of years ago." She challenges the belief of the present child welfare system that every family can be "fixed" and that a biological family is always the best place to raise a child. If we put the child's needs and best interests first, we must seek alternatives, certainly for abused children (and perhaps for the children of neglect, too) until, and if, the parents can be rehabilitated. Among the alternatives she lists are long-term group homes, another term for Barbara Reynold's orphanages. It is time we considered this alternative seriously.