The New York Times of July 19th reported a brutal attack on a Haitian woman and her son in a housing project in West Palm Beach.  It involved repeated rape of the woman by ten young men and a forced performance of oral sex by the woman on her 12 year old son.  The two victims were stripped, burned with cleaning fluid, beaten and photographed.  No one in the building responded to the woman’s screams or called the police;  she and her son walked to the nearest hospital after the attack.  Three of the young men have been apprehended;  they are 14, 15 and 16.  The news article offered no comment about the age of the perpetrators but focused on congressional cutbacks that have resulted in diminished police protection at the project.  The quote by the director of the local Housing Authority is:  “It (cutback) didn’t affect the people’s lives on Palm Beach but it sure affected the people who live in Dunbar Village.”

     Can any amount of money directed at law enforcement get to the real problem in Dunbar Village and other places like it?  This is a story about violent teenage deviants with cell phones, guns and enough sexual experience to perform rape and orchestrate sadistic pornography.  Clockwork Orange comes to mind.  Crimes like this have been committed by men through the centuries but not usually by children.  We aren’t told whether these boys lived in the community but we are told that the project is filled mainly by single women and their children, the most destitute class in our society.  Statistically, children raised by poor single women have little hope of finishing school, escaping behavior problems, finding jobs or avoiding a life of dependency or criminality.  Warehousing them together would seem the ideal way to re-enforce the rudderless nature of their lives.

     It would seem more logical and critical to put the money into preventive measures rather than expect the police to instill control after the fact.  I’ll assume that many, if not most of these women are receiving financial assistance from the government.  In return for this, are they asked to attend parenting or adult education classes?  Are their children getting helped by the myriad volunteer organizations that exist all over - Big Brothers and Sisters, PAL, Reading is Fundamental - to name a few?  Is there a program in the housing project to put these women in mandatory contact with social service agencies that are already funded and in place?  Does anyone monitor who lives with these women and their children?  Is there a curfew and is there any check for whether children are being left alone at night?

     Our society is reeling from the promiscuity of unlimited freedom and almost no self-restraint on the part of purveyors of video games, music and violent movies and t.v.  Do we really believe that vulnerable children, raised with little structure or supervision, can escape damage or withstand the imprecations of gangs, drug dealers and criminals?  In the same issue of the Times, there is an account of a plea bargain for a 28 year old mother who failed to get medical help for her 4 year old child, the youngest of six.  He was beaten to death by her 19 year old live-in boyfriend because he accidentally knocked a plasma t.v. off the wall.  The ambulance was called hours after the body had turned cold.  The other five children were reported to be inveterate roamers through the apartment building, begging for food.  The mother’s sentence was 2 and 1/2 to 7 years.  “I’m sorry,”  she said.

     The Jamjaweed, who have slaughtered roughly 30,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands in Darfur, have perfected the tactic of indoctrinating children as torturers and murderers.  They kidnap them, drug them, then force them to witness and commit acts of violence while they are very young.  Once this behavior modification has taken place, they are a reliable source of unbridled violence and can be counted on to rape, slash, burn and kill as directed.  In Dunbar Village in West Palm Beach, no one has been accused of kidnap.

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