Hugo Chavez, Child Abuse, and Me

Beaver Cleaver is a television show.

If you look at my profile you'll see that I am a veteran (ex) child abuse investigator here in New York City. I'm becoming something of a crusader against the child abuse/foster care industry and I have an anecdote about Hugo Chavez that he might or might not enjoy were he ever to read it but it makes a point that needs to be made.

It is widely said that Hugo Chavez was an abused child and it seems that that is true in the sense that we understand it - and that understanding ought to change. They say that as a boy Hugo Chavez was frequently beaten with a belt by his parents and that he would sometimes run to his grandmother's house for some relief.

Fortunately for him he did not live in an enlightened place like New York City @ 1980-today. Had he lived in such a place he most likely would have been subject of a child abuse or child maltreatment investigation (likely several). He could then have ended up in foster care.

Had he gone into foster care he very likely would have been eventually a career prisoner and not an army officer and later president of his country.

I once had a girlfriend who was raised in NYC public housing like I was. She once told me (I was still working as a baby snatcher) that she had often wished that someone like me had come to her home to rescue her and her siblings from her angry violent father. Lucky for her this never happened. She was spared the trauma of seeing her parents turn her in, give her up, surrender her, hand her over to an unspeakably cruel odysey of neglect and abuse called foster care. Better her angry father's belt than this crippling betrayal.

This woman went on to become a high ranking New York State official, a holder of a Doctorate and a university professor. She harbors angry memories and feelings about her childhood, but as imperfect as it was, and her childhood was no fairly tale, she was not mortally crippled by it as millions like her were not (all of her siblings made it into the middle class by the way). Lots of Venezuelans, even Chavistas, look to the US as some sort of golden world that needs to be emulated. In a perfect world no child would grow up angry at her parents. No child would be hit by a belt. We don't live in a perfect world. Foster care is not the answer.

I hope they never emulate our "Child Protective Services" in Venezuela.

I don't want to make light of child abuse. I would like it to be properly defined, though. The Bible itself advocates corporal punishment of children. I don't agree with it, but most people raised in the Judeo/Christian/Islamic world have experienced it, some more than others. When all is said and done it is parents and no one else held responsible for what their children do and what they grow up to be.