A 36-year-old Houston woman with
a history of depression is accused of drowning her five children in the
bathtub of her Clear Lake home. So, once again, a national news story
compels millions of Americans to wonder how or why such a heinous crime
could happen.
And who, if anyone, could have prevented it.
Shelly Sampson, the suspect's neighbor and herself the mother of
five children, said last week, "I just wish that I could have reached out
to her. I wish I had known something so I could have said, 'Let me watch
your kids for a while. Let me do something.' This is so awful. We just
didn't know."
But how much could Ms. Sampson or any other neighbor
be expected to know? And what could she or he do to prevent it? One of the
most tragic stories in recent memory has raised the question: What can the
larger community do to provide a support network and prevent such crimes?
In the view of many, a great deal more.
"This should have
been so preventable. There's blood on everybody's hands," says Michelle
Oberman, professor at DePaul University College of Law and a national
expert on infanticide. She's the co-author of Mothers Who Kill Their
Children: Inside the Minds of Moms from Susan Smith to the Prom Mom,
scheduled for release later this month by New York University Press.
"We need to try to figure out how we can break down the barriers
that divide neighbor from neighbor ... these artificial barriers that stop
us from knocking on our neighbors' doors," Ms. Oberman says. "You don't
have to sit and wait for these cases to happen. Because they will."
James Vollbracht, author of Stopping at Every Lemonade Stand: How
to Create a Culture that Cares for Kids (Penguin USA, $13), says today's
United States offers uneasy harbor to "a disconnected culture, and we're
scratching our heads about what to do about it."
Mr. Vollbracht
contends that "three things have happened" in the last half-century, the
first being "a breakdown of the circles of support for families. The first
is the extended family. In 1950, 50 percent of grandparents lived with or
near their grandchildren. Now it's 10 percent."
Mom and Dad are
increasingly pressured, he says, "and getting blamed for everything. If
parents in the past had a bad day, Grandma and Grandpa could step in. And
now that's not happening."
He sees the second troubled circle as
the neighborhood.
"Again, in successful child raising,
neighborhoods are very connected," he says, recalling an era such as the
1950s in which neighborhoods and families were as interwoven as the
threads on a sweater. "Now kids come home to unattended homes. Nobody is
there, they don't know the neighbors, and it's one of the highest risks
during the day for kids."
The third circle involves the school.
"We now have schools so large that the biggest risk is not
necessarily to kids defined as high-risk - it's to those in the middle who
get no attention whatsoever because of the size of the school," Mr.
Vollbracht says. "In the past, we've gotten by - by not paying attention.
Now they're shooting the schools up."
Richard Madsen, professor of
sociology at the University of California at San Diego, co-authored Habits
of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (University of
California Press, $17.95), which contends that individualism has
contributed to the breakdown of community in American life.
"We
live in an age of paid providers," Mr. Madsen says. "Paid child care, paid
therapists. In the old neighborhoods, kids who did something wrong got
bawled out by the neighbor, even before their parents got involved. So
kids developed an understanding of a larger community, one that cared
about them and helped steer them in the right direction.
"In
modern communities, a kid grows up and is never taken care of by anybody
who isn't paid to do it. The idea of being part of a community where
people care about you just because you're there doesn't exist anymore."
There's also the popular notion, in Mr. Madsen's view, that
Americans - by themselves, as individuals - can solve all of their
problems and take care of all of their needs, without the involvement of
the larger community or even their own extended family.
"There's
this feeling of 'You can't trust the schools, you've got to take care of
everything yourself,'" he says.
Though many Americans extol the
virtues of home-schooling, critics contend that keeping children away from
public or private schools does little to enhance a feeling of community
and can, in some cases, deepen a family's isolation. The Houston mother,
for instance, had chosen to home-school her children.
"American
culture," Mr. Madsen says, "is a culture that assumes society is composed
of individuals rather than something bigger."
Tow one's neighbors
that didn't exist 40 years ago. The Rev. John Fiedler, senior minister of
the First United Methodist Church of Dallas, says, "There are
right-to-privacy issues that can keep people from aggressively getting to
know each other. You may not know they're manic- depressive. We're very
good at showing people what they want to see. It's really hard to know
what's going on behind every door in the neighborhood."
But we may
need to make the effort.
Frederick Schmidt, director of spiritual
life and formation for Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist
University, says, "We leave our homes in the dark and very often return to
them in the dark. We do not know our neighbors or we do not know them
well.
"Culturally, we're tempted to believe we can recapture what
American communities once took for granted with little or no effort. But I
don't think community can be attained that easily or that cheaply. We have
to find a way to really invest in one another's lives."
Staff
writers David Tarrant and Karen M. Thomas contributed to this report.
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