by mother » Fri Dec 23, 2005 5:17 pm
Our adoptive-parent friends speculated that there was much more to the story than simply psycho adults caging unfortunate children. It sounds as if they had Reactive Attachment Disorder and were in these large spaces in order to be safe. There were no locks and the kids were not unhappy. I know how crazy and hideous it looks at first glance, yet I have intimate awareness of living with RAD children. Say for example you've got a kid who was from an impoverished, scary part of the world born of parents who simply left tiny ones alone for the most part untended, unfed, unclean, etc. Say it's so scary, maybe mom is a coyote or drug mule, bad people and killings in front of the kids regular, nobody ever does anything to comfort the babies, in fact you get the shit knocked out of you if you make things worse by crying. Add hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, snakebites, a scary voodoo grandmother who does wierd rituals involving fire. Maybe the adults sneak into the US and DSS gets involved when a janitor finds the 4-year-old tyed up in the bath full of cold water nearly dead from hypothermia and tests reveal that nearly every single bone has been broken at one time, and of course ther are multiple open sores and so forth. So mom&dad get the kids taken and the kids get into the foster care system(which is often seriously corrupt on several levels) The kids are so, so angry and hurt and have never had normal bonding with any human being, and in order to survive have developed some bizzare strategies especially around control issues. (Being forced to eat vomit or feces requires a certain level of mental focus) Sooooo, when they get passed around from foster home to foster home because their behavior is so similar to the general idea of a serial killer, they're doing awful things to pets, each other and property, they can be a handful, especially at night. You've really got to have a sense of humor and be insanely creative to help RAD kids, because until they get safe, they have zero cause and effect thinking and their sole purpose in life is toCONTROL and hurt everyone and everything. Inside they are utterly terrified, as you can imagine: they're sick of being raped and sodomized and they'll tell you by eating weird stuff(they're in charge now) and smearing feces and urinating into the heating ducts(now nobody gets to control their private parts) Children we have parented simply could not handle what would be considered normal freedom to be a kid. They need such intense structure that you'd go nuts thinking about it. They love closed, tight spaces so they can feel safe from the hell they've experienced, and obviously serious attachment therapy. Our house is huge, and it frightened 3 very beautiful and seriously disturbed Guatemalan children we had, nothing we did could relieve their terror. There was some radical treatment which resulted in the death of a child a few years ago which has tarred the whole RAD community, now all methods of healing have become suspect. Heavy meds and jeuvenile treatment centers(which are prisons) have become more acceptable. My point is, since the parents said their therapist OK'd the cages, they could have been RAD kids feeling a lot safer where nobody could harm them when they slept. I hope this makes sense; if anybody here has dealt with a RAD child they'd immediatly understand what I described, otherwise it sounds like heinous child abuse. We had to have alarms on the doors for our safety at night after some scary episodes. Oh, and these ones liked clay, too. <p></p><i></i>
