Via DrCase @ Flickr
Yesterday Michigan authorities found the body of a nine-year-old quadriplegic in a garbage bag stuffed in a garbage bin, covered with mothballs and locked away in a storage space. Until she died, Shylea Thomas lived with a guardian who was possibly also her aunt in a run-down house in Flint, along with seven other children ranging in age from three months to fifteen years. No one seems to know what happened to her mother. She had been taken out of school in January; police began to look into her whereabouts this week when relatives alerted them to her disappearance.
Yeah. I know.
Not very much will be known about this case, I guess, for some time, if we ever hear about it again. There isn’t much reason to expect we will. Shylea isn’t blonde or from an affluent community, there is no prurient sexual element to her death that can keep us titillated as in the Sandra Cantu murder in California,. Moreover, Shylea seems to have had very little by way of advocates and allies in her small universe. Apparently one can stop appearing in public in the middle of January and no one will raise an eyebrow before April. No one wants to meddle in the affairs of others, no one wants to invade privacy, and beyond shaking their heads at the television when “these things happen,” no one does much of anything. And so it goes, when you are a Shylea.
She isn’t the first and she won’t be the last of these stories of actual human beings just falling through the cracks, of course, and there’s a hypocrisy that goes along with my writing this at all, which is to say: what have I done for the marginalized and poor children of colour (the bottom of the pyramid, as far as patriarchy goes) lately? I got PhDork’s point a few weeks ago that small acts can nonetheless be called activism, and I do agree with that for the most part, but on days where I check my Harpy feeds and find stories like Shylea’s, I am reminded of how very small my acts are.
There is an element here of what I might call sheer exhaustion, of course, among the kind of people who might have been able to help Shylea out. I have known social workers, and from them I know that very few people ever deliberately ignore cases like Shylea’s. But there is little time to spare for a speculative social worker visit and even less energy to keep track of people who seemed fine, last you saw them, and who you just plumb forgot to ask about again.
And as for me, well, I don’t do well with children, or, really, people frankly. I prefer books and cats. And so I have not really spent as much time in the trenches actually helping the marginalized as I probably should have. My being bothered by this fact comes and goes – hell, I think, looking around my peers at my place of employment, I’m not doing too shabby – but I have been feeling it heavily lately.
What I do best is write, and advocate for people, but as with the Angie Zapata case, there’s always a sense of being too late to the party, of being able to talk about horrifying things only after they happen. And today, just today, because of Shylea, I’m not sure it’s enough.
As someone who has worked with children with all sorts of mental and physical disabilities for about 12 years now, these kids can be the easiest to lose track of. So many of them are bounced around between educational programs and even housing situations with family members or foster parents that adult teachers and therapists are often unable to figure out where a child should be. Particularly if it’s a stressed school district, a teacher might not find out that the child has been switched to another class, school or a live-in program until after it happens.
Precisely the children who shouldn’t fall through the cracks do.
My fantasy is for self-identifying “pro life” people and movements to shift gears to protection of born children and access to welfare and social services for stressed families including pregnant women.
One wonderful thing someone can do is become a CASA (Court appointed special advocate) volunteer advocate in your community. The court assigns you to advocate for an individual child who is at risk of falling through the cracks. You end up spending more time with the child than their social workers, visit their school, assess guardianship, and then write up a report and make recommendations to the court as to the welfare of the child. There is extensive training but it only comes out to like 10-15 hours a month, and the difference you can make in a child’s life is incredible.
One thing I also wonder about is the fact that it’s Flint, MI. I just read this week about how they’re bulldozing entire sections of town and basically returning them to nature, because the town is decimated and dying. I would wonder about the resources even available to help such a child in Flint, MI. I’d also wonder about whether or not a family might be drowning in the expenses of caring for a special needs child, and whether that might contribute to some sort of desperate act. Not that I am in anyway justifying what has happened to Shylea, but maybe attempting to tie this sad sad story into the sad state of affairs in general right now.
such good points funnyface. deprivation definitely piles upon deprivation.
Yeah I thought that too, funnyface, I sort of ran out of time while writing this post but I had meant to address it, thanks for mentioning it.
I’m still following the news feeds on this one and it appears that the aunt was living off of welfare, too, of course, and it isn’t clear how many of the seven other children were hers. And you know, I hate that these things happen, but there’s a part of me that thinks, “yeesh, stick me in a broken down house with eight kids I can barely feed and I’m not sure what I’d do.” I’m just not.
Activism/volunteer work is something I think about a lot. I want to help but being both shy and introverted, I really struggle to find a good way to do much other than donate since most volunteer positions involve a lot of hands on work with people. And I wonder how much my relative pennies help anyone out.
Such an awful story and one I think I’ll be thinking about for awhile.
This story absolutely broke my heart. I have been saying for a very long time that we only give lip service to caring about children. There is so much we could do if we really believed in the potential of a child and yet each day we turn our backs. I am reminded of the two young boys who recently committed suicide after the school system failed to help them. Why is it so hard to decide that even our smallest citizens matter?
who knows Renee.
Maybe in an ultra-competitive world that doesn’t value service, ppl who aren’t able bodied/minded DO fall through the cracks. And kids take ALOT of investment before it starts to really pay off. Though I’m a *P_________D* ( your fave word ) college student, I’ve seen enough of that in my own world.
Humm…she was 9 eh? I wonder if it was suicide. I hope I can follow this through.
j.d. regent, there are many people who are right-to-life who do exactly that and work to lessen the burden of stressed families and those on welfare. it’s just that doing that sort of thing, which is decidedly a ‘behind the scenes’ act, isn’t nearly as titillating to the media as the crazed abortion-clinic bombers or prayer blockades.
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