When boyfriends hurt children
The baby was “irking me.” That’s what Keishawn Gordon told law enforcement when he was arrested for allegedly murdering 1-yearold Legacy Beauford, the little boy who was found unresponsive Thursday at the Webster Houses in Morrisania. Gordon was tired of listening to the child cry and has been accused of punching the infant, breaking his ribs and lacerating his liver. He says he wasn’t squeezing the child’s stomach “that hard.”
It looks as though 4-year-old Jaycee Eubanks suffered a similar fate last week. Allegedly beaten and thrown on the floor by his stepfather, Jaycee was found dead by police in Gowanus. His 6-yearold brother saw it all happen.
Earlier this year, 10-year-old Ayden Wolfe was found dead, allegedly at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend.
It does not take much detective work to see patterns in these kinds of horror stories. From Nixzmary Brown, the 7-year-old who was tortured and killed by her stepfather in 2006 to Zymere Perkins, the 6-year-old who was beaten to death by his mother’s boyfriend in 2016, the story is too often the same: What sociologists call “nonrelative males” in the home present serious risk to the children. While many boyfriends and stepfathers are terrific, loving, steadying influences on the young people in their orbit, there’s evidence that children living in homes with men who are not their fathers are much likelier — according to federal government statistics 11 times more likely — to suffer from abuse as those living with their married biological parents.
In all of these cases, there’s another layer of chilling warnings missed, in this case by New York’s Administration for Children’s Services. Legacy’s family was the subject of multiple 911 calls and reports to the city’s child abuse hotline. Jaycee and his brother were both reported by their daycare in August for bruises.
Such prior reports of abuse should obviously set off alarms. But once a report has been made, caseworkers should also pay special attention to the danger that the presence of a mother’s boyfriend in the home may pose.
Again, this is not to cast aspersions on all the men out there who are playing an important fatherly role in the lives of children who are not biologically related to them. A viral video going around shows a father who, at the end of his wedding ceremony, drops to one knee and “proposes” adopting his new wife’s two daughters. The entire wedding party is in tears by the end. And viewers of the video will be too.
Single parenting can be extremely hard, and the presence of a second responsible authority figure can mean the world.
But there is something about the relationship between men and the children of other men in their home that can be quite volatile. Whether it is the constant reminder of another man’s previous relationship with the girlfriend or jealousy over the time those children take from a relationship or already present violent tendencies that are not stopped by the tender feelings one usually has toward one’s own children, something goes wrong.
Unfortunately, some of the women in situations like these seem more concerned with making their partners happy than with consistently protecting their children; perhaps they rationalize volatility and violence. Some women are afraid of their partners as well; domestic abuse and child abuse are closely correlated. Others are likely dependent on their partners for money or access to drugs. Though it has become common for observers to downplay the seriousness of a charge of child neglect (as opposed to physical or sexual abuse), they should understand that some of the mothers charged with neglect are in trouble for failing to protect their children from an abusive partner.
Which brings us back to the folks investigating the reports coming to families. They often have insufficient appreciation of what the actual risks are to children. As the late Richard Gelles, former dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, told me: “Even the state-of-the-art assessment tools being used in New York are no better at predicting risk for a child than if you flipped a coin.”
New York City should consider adopting predictive analytics as a tool to better understand which kids are at highest risk when a call is made to the child abuse hotline. (Pittsburgh already has done this.) The algorithms used in such tools not only take account of previous reports of abuse, but also reports of chronic absenteeism in schools, records from family assistance programs and, perhaps most importantly, who the people are living in the home and whether they have a prior criminal history. Maybe caseworkers don’t understand the mother’s boyfriend problem, but the numbers don’t lie.