UMD.ChildrenBeat.01-03.FA (Page 1)

Transcription

WINTER/SPRING 2001
CHILDREN’S
BEAT
the
A
JOURNAL
OF
MEDIA
COVERAGE
There Are No
Children There
Foreign journalists reporting
on children and families
•
•W
WHAT
HAT A
A NEW
NEW ADMINISTRATION
ADMINISTRATION AND
AND
C
CONGRESS
ONGRESS MEAN
MEAN FOR
FOR A
AMERICA
MERICA’’S
S FAMILIES
FAMILIES
•S
SCIENCE
CIENCE VS
VS.. S
SOUND
OUND BITES
BITES
•
•R
REPORTING
EPORTING THE
THE “GENDER
ENDER WARS
ARS”
”
•
OVERING THE
THE UNTHINKABLE
NTHINKABLE:: C
CHILD
HILD MURDER
MURDER AND
AND
•C
COVERING
CHILD
CHILD PROSTITUTION
PROSTITUTION
Vol. 8, No. 1
The Children’s Beat is published by the Casey
Journalism Center on Children and Families, a
national resource for professional journalists. The
center is a program of the Philip Merrill College of
Journalism at the University of Maryland. It is funded
by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and The David
and Lucile Packard Foundation.
CJC Staff
Beth Frerking, director
Patrice Pascual, deputy director and editor,
The Children’s Beat
Jennifer Moore, research director
CHIL
the
A
JOURNAL
OF
MED
Betty Pearce, administrative director
M U S U E H A D DA D
Cathy Trost, senior associate
Carrie Rowell, conference consultant
Terry Love, administrative assistant
Joan Hennessy, graduate fellow
Stephanie Haines, intern
CJC Advisory Board
Chairwoman: Laura Sessions Stepp
The Washington Post
Paul Duke, PBS
Jon Franklin, The (Raleigh) News & Observer
John Freeman, M.D., Johns Hopkins Hospital
Winifred Green, Southern Coalition for
Educational Equity
Albert R. Hunt, Wall Street Journal
Jeffrey Katz, National Public Radio
David Lawrence Jr., The Early Childhood
Initiative Foundation
Alfred Perez, MSW candidate, University of Michigan
Gene Roberts, Philip Merrill College of Journalism,
University of Maryland
Tonda F. Rush, American Press Works
Celeste Williams, The Indianapolis Star
Judy Woodruff, CNN
Magazine design: Christopher J. Paul and
Maria Sese Paul, Sese/Paul Design
Cover Photo: Musue Haddad
Casey Journalism Center on
Children and Families (CJC)
4321 Hartwick Road, Suite 320
College Park, MD 20740
Ph: 301-699-9336
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: www.casey.umd.edu
A project on teen mothers brought West African photojournalist Musue Haddad into the lives of Christine (above),
Ama (cover) and their children.
LDREN’S
BEAT
WINTER/SPRING 2001
IA
COVERAGE
5
Promise or Pablum?
What a new administration and
Congress may mean for America’s families
8
There Are No Children There
Foreign journalists reporting on children and families
14
Science vs. Sound bites:
Science and advocacy in public information
campaigns about children’s issues
16
Covering the Unthinkable
The Des Moines Register reports on child death
The Atlanta-Journal Constitution on child prostitution
23
What They’re Trying to Prove
A look inside the "gender wars"
and the perils of covering research
30
“This Much We Know”
An interview with parenting researcher
A. Rae Simpson
32
Research Watch
The National Survey of Child and
Adolescent Well-Being
33
Books: Where Teen Voices Ring True
34
This Just In
Expanding Enterprise
JASON MICCOLO JOHNSON
BY BETH FRERKING
W I N T E R / S P R I N G
2 0 0 1
T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
4
W
e were a bit smug in planning our
February conference for
Washington, D.C-based journalists who
cover the nation’s Capitol.
What could be simpler? The conference would be on home territory.We
were targeting journalists hungry for fresh,
reliable and responsive sources — something we pride ourselves on delivering.
Plus we had the luxury of choosing speakers in Washington,
with its surfeit of quotable policy wonks.
Even if these reporters didn’t exclusively cover social issues,
this would be a snap, we thought.
That was before several prospective fellows balked, worried
that even a one-day seminar was too long in a city where news
moves by the minute. Before the delayed presidential transition.
Before our keynoter canceled mere days before the conference.
(See story, page 7.)
In the end, the conference was a hit. Our fellows were 32
accomplished journalists. Panelists drew clear and detailed maps
on likely initiatives from President Bush and Congress regarding
child welfare, education and children’s health. And we scored a
national audience when C-SPAN broadcast much of the
conference live.
Still, we winced at our initial hubris.We are learning that
there are inevitable stumbles in broadening our reach.
Our first responsibility is to the journalists who cover the
often lonely and under-respected social welfare beats.The best
go beyond the anecdote, using their considerable knowledge of
social policy to report the lives of children and families in rich
context. Since 1993, those journalists have provided our “best
practice” coverage models, they have won our annual Casey
Medals contest and have participated, over 400 strong, in our 15
national and regional conferences.They will always be our
primary audience.
Along the way, these reporters have sought our help in
convincing editors and producers that their stories deserve as
much space and time as those from traditional high-profile
beats.We are convinced that for coverage to expand, we have to
move beyond our proverbial choir.
So we’re looking as well at journalists who don’t specialize
in child welfare issues: the education, health, political and other
correspondents who may only dip into our territory.
That is why we asked the Regional Reporters Association in
Washington, D.C., to help us appeal to Capitol Hill journalists.
It is also why I have taken our message on the road, to national
conferences of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the
Associated Press Managing Editors association and others. It is
why we sought funding from The David and Lucile Packard
Foundation to augment our support from the Annie E. Casey
Foundation.The grants help fund additional newsroom seminars and regional conferences, thus allowing us to reach
newsrooms with ever-tighter training and travel budgets.
Our broader mission has prompted other changes, such as
the redesign of The Children’s Beat unveiled in this issue. Under
the guidance of deputy director Patrice Pascual, we are working
to make the magazine more timely and compelling. It will be
even more reflective of our craft’s most able practitioners —
reporters, editors and producers on the front lines of children
and family reporting. (Read Jane Hansen, Mark Siebert and our
trio of foreign reporters in this issue.)
To that end, we encourage you to let us know when you
have brought recent notable projects to fruition. Once you have
published or broadcast a major piece, think about sharing what
worked, what failed and what you might have done differently.
The center continues to shoulder what has always been its
stock in trade: source assistance to daily journalists. Research
director Jennifer Moore has aided many a reporter on deadline
with articulate and accessible experts.That, too, will continue.
Others initiatives — a truly interactive Web site and a
greater public presence through newspaper op-eds and radio
and television commentary — are long-term goals that will
emerge gradually.
Initially, touting our services made me a bit squeamish. After
20 years of reporting, I know too well that journalists are
generally skeptical and wise to a pitch.
But there’s an evangelist deep in my Texas heart, and I had
an advantage: I had used the center’s resources as a national
correspondent on family and children issues. I knew the value
of its services. Seven years after having attended the center’s first
national conference, I still carried the source notebook.
That first-hand experience helped. I remember three newspaper managing editors at the APME national conference
looking befuddled (and slightly embarrassed) when I marched
up to tell them how the center could help their reporters.They
had never heard of us. Fifteen minutes later, they were asking to
be put on our mailing list.
I have to remind myself that I’m promoting the powerful
work so many journalists have done to write and produce the
best stories on children and families.
Last fall we honored some of that work at our Casey Medals
ceremony. Winners spoke movingly about the challenges they
faced and the impact they hoped to have, whether they had
investigated New York’s lax child-care regulations, penetrated
California’s complex juvenile detention system or portrayed the
lives of teen-agers in Maine.
After the awards luncheon, former New York Times reporter
Nan Robertson exclaimed, “This is what journalism is
all about.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Promise or Pablum?
The new administration,
Congress and America’s families.
BY RACHEL JONES
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARSHALL H. COHEN
Feb. 11-12, 2001 — CJC’s conference included speakers Bill Galston, Catalina Camia, Ron Haskins, Margaret La Montagne,
Rev. Walter Fauntroy and conference fellow Mary Leonard of The Boston Globe.
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
opposition to the use of tax-supported vouchers for tuition at
private or parochial schools.
Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) agreed.While he believes the
administration is putting forth a “legitimate good-faith effort”
to improve education, he cautioned that vouchers are “the raw
nerve” of American politics, and that congressional Democrats
will fiercely oppose them. Former Rep. Bill Goodling, who
recently retired as longtime Republican chairman of the
Education and the Workforce committee, said he, too, resisted
vouchers. Unless children receive remedial help in public
schools, Goodling said, sending them to parochial schools would
only transfer the problems.
Another major administration proposal that will affect lowincome families and children is Bush’s so-called “faith-based
initiative.”The president created a Cabinet-level office to stimulate government support of church-sponsored social programs.
Haskins, a social scientist by training, contended that there is
scant research to prove that religious institutions do a better job
of helping the disadvantaged than secular social service agencies. Also, while the public seems intrigued with the concept,
many churches have not fully embraced the plan.
Nonetheless, the proposal may be “the greatest public relations
coup any administration could have,” said Sharon Daly, vice president for social policy for Catholic Charities USA. Catholic
Charities, and many other faith-based social service agencies,
already receive a large share of income through government
contracts, Daly explained, though her agencies lose about 30
cents on the dollar in government-funded services. She suggested
that reporters should “follow the money” and then ask:“Will
there be enough resources, and what will be decreased in order
to provide more services through faith-based programs?”
When political administrations change at the White House,
journalists covering social policy face big challenges.The election of President George W. Bush and a new Congress will
significantly affect federal policies on issues such as education,
health, taxes and welfare reform.While it may take years to
measure specific effects,Washington-based reporters attending
the recent Casey Journalism Center conference learned they
must prepare to aggressively track social policy impacting children and families under the Bush administration.
Most of the policy analysts, legislators and child advocates
participating in the conference agreed that in the first year of
the Bush administration, education will be the key child-related
issue.The centerpiece of the president’s education proposal is
contained in the “No Child Left Behind” treatise (see
www.whitehouse.gov).
Margaret La Montagne, assistant to the president for
domestic policy, described accountability as the “big idea” of the
Bush proposal. Educational achievement must be measured
annually so teachers and parents can evaluate children’s needs.
Bush insists that schools that fail to educate children must
improve or face the consequences, La Montagne said.
Literacy is the focus of Bush’s “Reading by 3rd Grade”
initiative, and the administration proposes targeted investments
for increasing child literacy. Journalists should also expect
debates over the provision of quality preschool programs; how
states respond to federal education mandates; and the evaluation
of strategies for helping at-risk children learn.
Brookings Institution fellow Ron Haskins, a former
Republican senior staffer on the House Ways and Means
Committee, said there is strong bipartisan support for most of
President Bush’s education proposals. But he predicted intense
5
But as the debate intensifies over separation of church and
state, Rev.Walter Fauntroy, a Washington, D.C. pastor who spent
20 years as the District’s delegate to Congress, said he didn’t
understand “what all the fuss is about.”
“The fact is that the government has a long history of
paying for services it has decided can be best delivered by the
private sector,” said Fauntroy, who also serves as president of the
National Black Leadership Roundtable.
Fauntroy has more than passing knowledge of how churches
and other religious institutions might respond. He is pastor of
administration. During the conference’s seminar on “Policy and
Politics,” reporters heard both ends of the spectrum.
For example, conservative legislators may be tempted to cut
funding earmarked in the 1996 welfare reform bill, because
welfare rolls have dropped nationwide.They also believe the
policy does not go far enough to address morality and family
formation. Conference speaker Robert Rector, a research fellow
at the Heritage Foundation, played a major role in crafting the
1996 legislation, and has conducted extensive research on the
economic and social costs of the system.
Also speaking were Rep. Robert Andrews, Mary Agnes Carey, Robert Rector, Sharon Daly and Shay Bilchik. Newsweek’s
Pat Wingert was among the fellows.
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
6
New Bethel Baptist Church, which provides numerous social
services to an impoverished neighborhood. “I can’t wait to see
black churches across the country deliver a service far better
than the bureaucracy ever could,” he said.
The delivery of social services will emerge in another
context early in the Bush administration, when Congress
debates reauthorization of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act next
year.The fact that some children are faring better on some
health and well-being indicators will undoubtedly affect
upcoming social policy debates.
Shay Bilchik, executive director of the Child Welfare League
of America, acknowledged that the vast majority of American
children are doing well, as shown by declining rates of child
poverty, teen pregnancy and other measures.
But he emphasized that much work is needed to help the
country’s most troubled families and children. Each year, 1,000
children die from abuse in the U.S., and there are as many juvenile suicides as homicides, said Bilchik, former director of the
Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency
Prevention.Two million children have parents in prison, and
most of those children believe their families could have been
saved with access to substance abuse treatment.The majority of
the country’s 8 million latchkey children don’t have access to
after-school care, he added, and of 122,000 children eligible for
adoption last year, only 36,000 found permanent homes.
Given that data, Bilchik believes that “a well-funded and
sustained commitment (from the new administration) would
enhance child welfare in this country.”
Welfare reform may offer reporters the best opportunity to
understand the major differences and underlying subtleties
involved in the shift from a Democratic to a Republican
Though welfare reform has been much heralded, Rector
says the marriage issue is one of the “great failures” of reform.
“The (welfare) system exists almost exclusively because of the
collapse of marriage,” he said, adding that nine of ten children
who receive housing aid, and eight of ten on food stamps, have
single parents. “As long as we have one of three children born
out of wedlock, the growth of the welfare state is absolutely
inevitable,” Rector said.
He contended that liberals have successfully silenced all
conservative efforts to include a statement of support for
marriage in federal policy. And Rector predicted that when the
welfare bill is reauthorized, Republicans will push for policy
that affirms the importance of marriage.
But while Rector discussed issues like marriage and the
failure to demand work from welfare recipients, his co-panelist,
William Galston, concentrated on broader cultural and
economic contexts.
“How the American people feel as a whole defines the
parameters of the issue,” said Galston, a professor of public
affairs at the University of Maryland and a domestic policy
adviser in former President Clinton’s first administration.
Galston suggested that most Americans do not separate
economic and policy issues affecting children and families from
cultural and moral positions. “They are unsympathetic to positions that are seen as hard-edged, ideological and narrow,”
Galston said.
However, he and Rector agreed that the Bush administration
may have its strongest influence on families through tax policy.
Galston urged reporters to monitor the Bush tax cut proposal.
“A number of discretionary programs affecting children and
families will be caught up in this crush to make the numbers
add up,” he said. Items to be considered include expanding both
the child care tax credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, and
reducing or eliminating the marriage penalty in the tax code.
Legislators may also grapple with the issue of welfare benefits for legal immigrants.They are currently eligible on an
emergency basis, but Democrats may try to mandate Medicaid
coverage for children of legal immigrants, Haskins said.
He predicts the Title 4B Block Grant, which provides funding
for states to offer family preservation services, will be reauthorized without major controversy. However, he thinks Congress
will try to provide more flexibility in how states use the money
to keep families together. Currently, the bulk of the money can
only be spent once a child is removed from the home.
Additionally, Haskins predicted that Congress would reauthorize funds for child support enforcement and distribution.
This legislation could eventually put $4 billion in the hands of
poor families and children through child support collected from
absent fathers.
The issue of child health and access to health care underlies
all others for most American families. Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore and co-founder
of the Children’s Health Fund in New York, said journalists
need to understand the full scope of the problem.While official
statistics show that nearly 10 million American children are
uninsured, Redlener estimated that an additional 5 to 10
million are only partially covered, or have no preventive, dental
or well-child care.
These poor and at-risk children suffer disproportionately
from the consequences of inadequate health care. Asthma rates
have skyrocketed, and immunization rates are still dangerously
low in some areas, Redlener said. He also cited lack of access to
T H E
B E A T
contributed to passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act
of 1997 and the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999.
Yet Perez was quick to warn reporters that he is an
exception, and that most children who “age out” of foster
care do so ill-prepared to support themselves and lead
productive lives.
“I survived a system that can be cruel to children,” Perez
said. Some 530,000 children are in foster care nationwide,
and more than 200,000 remain in foster care for two years
or longer.Twenty thousand children age out of foster care
annually.
Perez believes his success was no accident. Rather, he
said, six “life jackets” contributed to his resiliency and
allowed him to emerge intact out of foster care: education,
employment, independent living skills, mentoring, outside
family support and aftercare services.
He urged reporters who cover foster care to examine
whether local programs include those components.Without
them, he said, foster youths will face an extremely difficult
transition into adulthood.
CJC Director Beth Frerking said that Perez was an excellent replacement for HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson,
who canceled at the last minute, because Perez deeply
understands the intersection of social policy and practice.
2 0 0 1
When Alfred G. Perez began an
internship at the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services in
Washington last year, he brought
with him a rare and hard-earned
perspective on child welfare
policy.
Perez, 24, had spent 11 years as
a foster child in California. His childhood and adolescence
were ruled by the very policies he now helps administer.
As the keynote speaker at CJC’s conference on what a
new administration means for children and families, Perez
acknowledged that he is one of the lucky ones.
He proudly listed his accomplishments: He earned his
bachelor’s degree from San Jose State University, is working
on his master’s degree in social work from the University
of Michigan, and advocated while in college on behalf of
children in California’s child protection system.
He also was one of several foster care veterans who
participated in a 1997 White House meeting on adoption
and foster care, where he shared his experiences with former
first Lady Hillary Clinton.The meeting ultimately
Rachel Jones is a freelance writer
and part-time reporter for National
Public Radio.
one of the lucky ones
medical care as a major problem, particularly for children in
rural areas. Redlener urged reporters to carefully analyze the
federal State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which
has been an important tool for creative governors to improve
child health.
Howard Cohen agreed.The former chief health counsel for
the House Committee on Commerce said it would be a
mistake to mischaracterize the nuances of policy affecting children and families.
“Incremental changes are the most effective way to have an
impact (through policy,)” said Cohen, who is now a partner
with the Greenberg Traurig law firm in Washington.
For example, though SCHIP enrollment was slow in some
states, including Bush’s home state of Texas, the numbers have
started to increase. Also, Cohen said legislators have developed
creative strategies like adding special provisos to major bills that
are designed to benefit children’s health and well-being. For
example, the Food and Drug Cosmetics Modernization Act of
1997 included an incentive for drug companies to thoroughly
research appropriate dosages for children.
“Be critical, but don’t jump to conclusions about who’s got
the white hats on and who’s got the black hats on,” Cohen said.
“Many of these provisos originated in the
Republican House. Republican Congress
members care as much about children as
their counterparts do.”
7
Generally, the articles in The Children’s
Beat are decidedly domestic. No
surprise there: the Casey Journalism
Center was founded to help U.S.based journalists improve coverage of
children and families. But after
meeting three accomplished reporters
from foreign countries, each with
Ama’s baby, Eunice, died before her
significant experience in covering
second birthday.
children and families in their homelands, we discovered common
concerns: in ethics, in access and in
efforts to elevate the beat.
Our three contributors — Liberia’s
there are
no children there
TEXT
AND
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
M U S U E N O H A H A D DA D
Musue Haddad, Mojca Lorencic of
Slovenia and El Salvador’s Margarita
For eight terrifying years, civil war ruined Liberia’s economy and infrastrucW I N T E R / S P R I N G
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
8
Funes — are spending the year as
ture, leaving most citizens destitute. Before the war ended in 1997, more
Hubert H. Humphrey fellows at the
than 250,000 people had died. Three years later, nearly a half-million people
University of Maryland College of
were still refugees in neighboring countries. The United Nation’s High
Journalism. Through a combination of
Commissioner for Refugees has tried to close some refugee camps and no
coursework, visits to professional
longer provides food, health clinics or reliable water supplies. Still, refugees
media organizations and research,
stay. They are too afraid to go home. They fear political oppression, the
these reporters are forming relationdeliberate abuse of individual and civil rights by government and criminals
ships with U.S. journalists and
who have no fear of the law.
enriching their professional skills.
Through their reflections, they’ve
enriched us as well.
As her condition deteriorated, my visits
became more regular, not so much for my
reporting, but out of concern for the child
and mother. Sick as she was, Eunice would
stretch out her thin arms toward me and
struggle to smile as I arrived, carrying a
small bag of groceries.
In Sierra Leone, a country neighboring Liberia, boys grew
T H E
B E A T
So I am cautious in what I publish. It is not good to embarrass someone who probably feels haunted by what he’s done.
Even though I am hopeful that the executors of these crimes
will face justice, you don’t know what your story will push
them to do.
For girls, perhaps, there is less possibility for redemption.
Eunice was just a year old. Her ribs could be counted above
her protruding stomach.The little girl’s hair was thin and
slightly orange, a sign of malnourishment.
Her mother, Ama, had given birth at age 14. She and Eunice
lived in an unfurnished room in a village in Ghana. Ama’s
unmarried pregnancy was seen as a disgrace, so the Liberian
2 0 0 1
into adulthood as rebel soldiers.
In name, Liberia has been a democratic nation for 150 years.
But an elected government is not necessarily a democratic one.
As with any underdeveloped country, Liberia’s progress can best
be measured by the status of its women and children.That has
been my focus during my nine years as a reporter and photographer.
My experiences have challenged my ideas of journalistic
objectivity.When you document intense suffering, you are
given a terrible responsibility. Maybe I have made some decisions that you would not make. But I must always ask myself,
where does my reporting end and my compassion and human
responsibility begin?
Consider Sumo. At age eight, he made a decision that may
haunt him for the rest of his life: he joined the militia which
would later rule Liberia. “I became a fighter after my mother
and father were killed in my presence,” he told me. “The CO
(commanding officer) told me to either join them or follow my
parents.”
Sumo was trained to handle assault weapons. He said that
the commanding officer then ordered him to kill someone as
his initiation. “I killed the woman because I was afraid they
would kill me,” Sumo told me.
Some countries are now trying to punish child soldiers for
atrocities they committed. Militias have claimed that they
provided the children with protection and that many willingly
became fighters. But Sumo and many others told me that they
had no option.They were almost always drugged to commit
barbaric human rights violations.These boys fought alongside
adult militias and carried out reconnaissance, acting as spies,
carrying ammunition and serving as bodyguards.
After nearly eight years of being programmed to kill and
take orders from their commanders, these militias, now with
many in their teens, campaigned for their faction’s political
party.They intimidated civilians to vote for their candidates.
They were promised jobs and annulment of their crimes so
long as their candidate won.
Now that his leaders are in power, Sumo, 18, has quit military life. He sells imported used clothes. However, he still fears
his wartime superiors, who now wear the uniforms of the military, police or other security institutions.These men have not
been trained or rehabilitated. Sumo still runs errands for them.
Prior to the war, Sumo, like most children in Liberia, would
play. Now, he bears scars of guilt for atrocities, including rapes
he and his peers were ordered to commit as a way of humiliating civilians during the war.
I don’t usually report the full extent of the crimes
committed by people such as Sumo. Nor do I illustrate the full
maltreatment experienced by their victims.That may be hard
for foreign journalists to understand.While such information
needs to be published, the consequences of such reportage is
equally important to me. In a country such as Liberia, the
publication of complete details can result in a reprisal against all
involved: the interviewer, the interviewee, their family members
and associates. It is also possible that the perpetrators will be
brutally punished by superiors for not silencing their victims.
These realities are often lost on foreign journalists.
9
teen was sent to live with her aunt, a nearly destitute farm
worker. Ama and Eunice slept on a tattered mattress. Rainwater
regularly flooded the room.
Christine lived about two miles away, but did not know
Ama. At 14, Christine had fled alone on a ship to seek refuge at
a Ghanan refugee camp.While living in the camp, she became a
mother as well.
I met the girls in 1994 while doing a project on teen-age
mothers. For at least a year, I visited each girl twice or thrice
weekly. Little did I imagine the intense impact of this project
on my personal and professional life.
Ama and Eunice’s situation worsened with every visit.They
shared the same diet, a fist-sized portion of corn dough with
mashed tomatoes.They ate once a day from the same bowl.
Ama had no idea how to take care of her child, and Eunice was
almost always naked and exposed to the weather.
Not only were they starving, but Eunice was becoming
severely sick with diarrhea. As her condition deteriorated, my
visits became more regular out of concern for the child and
mother. Sick as she was, Eunice would stretch out her thin arms
toward me and struggle to smile as I arrived, carrying a small
bag of groceries. As Eunice got weaker, I sent her to the
hospital at my expense. She was released few days later, but by
then, I had become sick. For nearly two weeks, I laid in bed
thinking of Ama and Eunice.When I next visited, Eunice was
dead. I felt I had betrayed her.Would things be different if I had
been present?
Ama’s story as a teen-age mother didn’t end with Eunice’s
death. A few weeks later, I learned that she was more than six
months pregnant. As with her previous pregnancy, Ama had no
prenatal care. I convinced her to visit the hospital after taking
care of the expenses.
Haunted by the death of Ama’s daughter, I decided to ensure
that 16-year-old Christine and her baby son, Chris, would
survive. It was evident that my reporting duties and my
emotions overlapped. I questioned myself on many occasions. I
knew that these girls’ lives had changed because of my interfer-
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
10
While Haddad helped Christine to survive, she knew that
she couldn’t help the girl and her son escape a life of
extreme poverty.
In addition to soldiering, Haddad saw children used to
campaign and intimidate voters in Liberian elections.
ence. Still, their deprivation was so great that I knew my efforts
wouldn’t change the path of their lives.Their poverty was too
intense.
Chris did not have everything a child needed but, within the
refugee camp in which he was born, he was at least fortunate.
The camp’s elderly women began to watch over Chris after
noticing my visits. I watched Chris grow to almost two years.
By then Christine gave birth to another boy. In 1996, she and
her two boys returned to her parents in Liberia. Ama and her
young daughter have remained in the village where we met.
Christine hopes to resume her education while Ama wishes to
acquire skills in sewing so she can support herself and her child.
In my project, I tried to show that Ama and Christine’s lives
cannot be isolated from other teen mothers who are unmarried, lack family support and have no access to education or
adequate medical care.These girls had no access to contraceptives, nor does Ama understand family planning. Many African
infants and mothers die or live miserable lives because of these
conditions.There is no way to fully measure the cost of these
losses to our societies.
I may have gone beyond what many reporters would do.
But I realized that in sharing their stories, these young mothers
were giving me what I wanted. Didn’t they deserve something
in return — if not material things then responsiveness and
acceptance?
Musue Noha Haddad is a staff writer
and photo editor for The News, an
independent daily newspaper in
Monrovia, Liberia. A former refugee,
Haddad is a founding member of the
Female Journalists Association of
Liberia. In 1999, she won the
Journalist of the Year Award from the
Press Union of Liberia.
Before 1990, child sexual abuse was rarely reported in
Slovenia, a former Yugoslav republic with a population of
two million people. Perhaps surprisingly, the main reason
that changed was because of the police.
When the Experts Don’t Know:
Covering Sexual Abuse in Slovenia
BY MOJCA LORENCIC
T H E
Mojca Lorencic is a reporter for
Dnevnik, of Slovenia’s four daily
newspapers. She was judged the
Best Young Journalist of 1998 by
the Slovenia Journalists
Association.
2 0 0 1
young, he is only questioned once.The effort is made to
substantiate the child’s story without having him testify in court.
Children have been educated as well, in a way that seems less
likely in the U.S. A popular magazine for preschool children
dedicated an issue to helping children avoid abuse.That material
was then taught to Slovenian children aged 3 to 7, most of
whom attend full-day, community-run child care.
That training has helped child-care workers as well. In one
case, caretakers suspected that a 5-year-old boy might be a
victim of abuse because of his sexually oriented behavior.They
reported those fears to the police, whose investigation revealed
that the boy had been sexually abused by his father. Later, the
father was found guilty and sentenced to prison. As is often the
case, the boy’s mother has continued to deny her husband’s guilt.
Children also receive training in elementary schools, and for
this, some credit goes to U.S. non-governmental organizations.
For instance, the Slovenian office of the Open Society Institute
adopted a child assault prevention project, developed by the
International Center for Assault Prevention in New Jersey.This
program informs children about abuse and helps them to
develop protective skills.
The shocking nature of child sexual abuse stories makes
them easy to place in the newspaper.The greater challenge for
me is to report them in a way that will educate my readers and
will include underlying causes of such abuse. In this case, the
police have made my job easier.
B E A T
There was one police officer, a woman, who was responsible
for the state’s department investigating child sexual abuse. Even
in a small country, the workload was heavy. At her urging, the
investigators initiated a new approach: cross-agency teams.Team
members were drawn from child welfare agencies, schools,
child-care centers, physicians’ offices and children’s counseling
centers. Few of these child experts knew anything about
detecting child sexual abuse.
Our police sought the cooperation of colleagues in Great
Britain, who were more experienced in such investigations. Guest
lecturers were brought in to share their knowledge, and journalists were invited to the sessions.They discussed how to identify
children who are abused and how investigations should be
handled.We learned that too often, insensitive institutions further
victimize children through clumsy and inefficient casework.
Although our country’s privacy laws are very strict, the police
give reporters basic information so we can educate the public
about child sexual abuse cases.They describe the charges in
general and tell us what region the child is from.They never
disclose full names or addresses of victims or even the suspects, as
is the practice in the U.S. Slovenian journalists generally agree
that protecting the child’s privacy is greater than the public’s
right to know his identity.The same goes for the offenders: we’re
concerned that if we identify the offender, it would be very easy
for the readers to identify the child.We don’t even disclose the
suspect’s name if he is found guilty in court. Court cases dealing
with sexual crimes are closed to the public and journalists may
be present only when a verdict is read.
Due to efforts to increase sensitivity in recognizing abused
children, the number of reported cases has increased greatly,
from 93 cases reported in 1993, to 161 in 1999.The police
believe that the increased number of reported cases doesn’t
mean that the problem of child sexual abuse grew, but that they
have been able to detect more abused children.
Now, when a child abuse case is detected, a team is formed
from agencies and institutions that are familiar with the child
and his family.They outline a case strategy and if the child is
11
covering children
in a post-war society
BY MARGARITA FUNES
I became a reporter in El Salvador in the aftermath of the
disastrous 12-year war between the government and
guerillas. When peace was negotiated in 1992, people felt
optimism — even those who had lost their entire families or
who had fearfully come to the city after spending their
youth ghting in the mountains.
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
12
But the restoration of democracy was complicated.The country
had lived under social chaos, and our capital city was devastated
in a 1986 earthquake. Journalists who had risked their lives
covering the war were now caught up in big topics: whether
peace would hold, how our economy could recover and
whether the elements of a civil society would be restored.
In September 1997, when I had just graduated as a journalist, I was hired by La Prensa Gráfica (one of the country’s
two main newspapers) to cover international news.Two weeks
later, the editor in chief assigned me to a department that
didn’t actually exist, “social issues.” I would begin serious
reporting on health, education and environmental issues, all
under one guideline: give a human face to all the stories. Until
then, there had been very few articles reporting these issues in
the national media.
My senior editor was convinced that there were many
untold stories, especially those related to children and the environment. He strongly believed that readers would be interested
in social topics if given the chance. He also thought these
stories would help “sensitize the country.” But since the
Salvadoran media had never covered such topics, we needed to
convince readers to read the articles, even if some appeared to
be quite long. One of our best junior editors was assigned to
work with me, and we decided to use a “friendly” writing style
to engage readers.
Visiting at least one hospital each day gave me a new
perspective of what our society was facing behind the political
curtains.The war had impacted not only those who did battle
up in the mountains, but also those in the cities. I started to
report on children being beaten by their own relatives and
abuse and negligence by mothers and fathers, whose behavior
may have been the consequence of war traumas. Parents who
never overcame their own bad experiences seemed to recreate
them for their children.
I reported on a brother and sister (4 and 7 years old) who
police found at home, chained to the legs of a table.Their
mother chained them there whenever she left the house for
work. After she was arrested, she said that when she was a child,
government soldiers had confined her father in that same way
after they accused him of helping the guerillas.
When the national media reported this and similar cases, the
public started to contact the newsroom with other cases and to
alert the authorities to the plight of neglected or abused children in our country.The authorities became more active in
enforcing the laws that protected children. More attention was
paid to providing and updating the statistics about the suffering
experienced by many of El Salvador’s children, which gave us
more stories to report.
Of course inside the newsroom, every day was a challenge.
News of politics, crime and violence seemed to always take
precedence, but we finally started to win the cover of the paper.
One of our first covers detailed how children younger than 12
worked on the streets of San Salvador instead of attending
school, and worse than that, the kinds of work they were doing.
When the national media reported this and
similar cases, the public started to contact
the newsroom with other
cases and to alert the authorities to the
plight of neglected or abused children in
our country.The authorities became
more active in enforcing the laws that
protected children.
2 0 0 1
T H E
Margarita I. Funes is an investigative
reporter for Vértice magazine in
El Salvador, which is published by
El Diario de Hoy, one of the country’s
main daily newspapers. Previously,
she wrote for La Prensa Gráfica’s
magazine, Enfoques.
B E A T
Children were very reluctant to talk to us, even though their
full names were never published.We found that more than 60
percent of the children we had interviewed were not going to
school because their parents or closest relatives forced them to
bring money home every day.They had to sell flowers on the
streets or “entertain” drivers who were waiting at traffic lights
by eating fire — a trick that involves dipping a stick in gasoline,
lighting it and putting it in your mouth. Others rode the buses,
“earning” money by picking passengers’ pockets.
Investigations such as this generated reader response and
gained editors’ respect.Within a year, the social issues department had become very strong and had moved from inside news
pages to the front. Some reporters still complained that the
issues we covered weren’t important enough to compete with
politics and the economy. But other reporters approached the
team with stories that they had witnessed or heard in their
neighborhoods or in their own families.
By this time, the other media were also fully reporting on
children and families, and even the TV news made a short space
for such stories.
By the end of 1998, Vértice, the investigative magazine of El
Diario de Hoy (the other main newspaper), devoted an entire
issue to Salvadoran children.The stories provided an in-depth
study and psychological analysis of the new generation of
Salvadorans, who manifested many signs of trauma even though
their parents experienced the war directly, but they had not.The
stories won UNICEF’s Iberoamerican prize for that year.
To produce that issue, the chief editor assigned two professional and energetic journalists (one of them my former junior
editor, and the other, an ex-classmate).While both journalists
were working on this complex report, they were still assigned to
other stories, because the paper wouldn’t commit extra
resources to relieve them.The editor argued that there were
other “important issues” that needed to be reported and the
children’s investigation could always wait.
But positive reader response to those stories must have made
an impression. In September 1999, that same editor hired me to
write more investigative pieces on children and families for
Vértice. Still, I sometimes faced a barrier because it was a bit hard
for my editor to accept a topic on children every week. Most of
the time he would say that he liked the style and the topic and
that I could go ahead with the investigation, but when it was
ready, he gave primacy to other “more timely” articles.
My ex-classmate and I made a good team.Together we
began to convince him that the stories should be published as
soon as we had them.We almost always succeeded.
Nowadays, since both main newspapers have their own
social section with at least three journalists, it is easier for
readers to find good stories than it was two or three years ago.
And almost no one inside the newsroom doubts that children’s
stories are worthy of daily coverage, not only because the
readers like them but also because since they appeared, we have
gained a new perspective of children in our violent society.
13
Science vs. Sound bites
science and advocacy in public information campaigns about children
B Y RO S S T H O M P S O N
An uneasy partnership exists between research scientists and reporters who focus on children. Scientists are naturally
cautious, preoccupied with creating cumulative knowledge that will stand the test of time and professional critique. This makes
us equivocal and hesitant to give you what you need — information with immediate, practical relevance to readers’ lives.
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
14
Further, an increasingly sophisticated public relations strategy by
child advocates complicates communication between reporters
and researchers: agenda-guided public information campaigns
on children’s issues.
These campaigns begin with a series of orchestrated media
events, organized around a theme that promotes a particular
view or action plan to the public.The message addresses a
critical social interest — how divorce affects children, the risks
of teen-age childbearing, the need to stimulate developing
young brains — and enlists recent scientific discoveries to
support its proposals.
But the science may be incomplete or misinterpreted in the
advocates’ campaign.
This is a critical concern for those of us who study children’s
development. In contrast to more esoteric fields, the public
views our research in light of what they know first-hand about
children and their growth. New discoveries may be interpreted
to support enduring beliefs about human development, such as
the importance of early speech, reading or counting. So the
results of a study of an early intervention program may be inappropriately used to support or challenge public funding of other
programs for young children. An investigation of the
preschooler’s conscience may be extrapolated to predict teen-age
delinquency or adult criminality — even though the research
was never designed to specifically address these problems.
This misinterpretation of research undermines public confidence in developmental science and can lead to ineffective
public policy. Consider the sensational and highly publicized
reports of the “Mozart effect,” which argues that exposure to
classical music promotes early intellectual development.That
theory led to a Florida law requiring that children in state-run
child-care programs listen to classical music daily, and in
Georgia a classical music CD is given to every new mother.
There is no scientific evidence that long-term intellectual
gains result from early exposure to classical music. But from that
one campaign, the idea of promoting early learning — upon
which much good science has been established — was reduced
to a fad.
A larger case study of how science is used, selectively, to
support a specific agenda was the 1997 “I Am Your Child”
campaign. It mobilized Hollywood star and Washington political
power to emphasize the importance of nurturing the brains of
children from birth to age 3. But it told only part of the story
of brain development.
A group organized by actor and director Rob Reiner
planned the campaign for more than two years. Reiner said he
initiated the effort because of his concerns that the public and
policy-makers were ignoring the importance of the first three
years of life, which had been outlined in reports such as the
Carnegie Corporation’s, Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of our
Youngest Children (1994). Reiner’s fellow organizers included
representatives of the Clinton White House, media celebrities
and major foundation officials, as well as child advocates and
early childhood experts, in consultation with the Ad Council.
Supported by contributions from major corporations and
private foundations, the campaign coordinated the efforts of
state and community child advocacy groups to engage national,
state and local media.
In April 1997, the years of planning paid off. A weeklong
series of reports on national morning broadcasts of “Today” and
“Good Morning America” profiled practical concerns related to
stimulating the minds of young children. A prime-time special
on ABC-TV, hosted and produced by Reiner and featuring
Hollywood stars, told parents how to promote intellectual
growth and emotional security in their offspring.Then
President and Mrs. Clinton held a widely reported White
Yes, the quality of early care is important to healthy brain
development. But perhaps more important than talking and
singing to young children is how caregivers ensure adequate
nutrition, prenatally and postnatally, because of the young
brain’s reliance on folic acid, iron, vitamins and other nutrients.
Beginning at conception, mothers encourage healthy brain
growth by protecting the child from exposure to alcohol, illicit
drugs, viruses (like HIV and rubella), environmental toxins (like
lead and mercury), and other biological hazards.These protections are among the most important ways that parents can
promote healthy brain development, yet there was little in the
public campaign to inform parents about this.
From that one campaign, the idea of
promoting early learning — upon which
much good science has been established —
was reduced to a fad.
T H E
B E A T
Ross Thompson is the Carl A. Happold
Distinguished Professor of Psychology
at the University of Nebraska.
2 0 0 1
Perhaps inevitably, there was a reaction against this campaign.
In the book “The Myth of the First Three Years of Life,” author
John Bruer criticized the findings of brain development
research and questioned the importance of early childhood.
Media reports of his work added more confusion to the public’s
understanding of the science of early childhood development.
There is nothing wrong, of course, with public information
campaigns advocating action plans to the public.The science
described in advocates’ campaigns is not necessarily less accurate
than traditional science journalism. But reporters, and we scientists, must be prepared to talk beyond the campaign’s message
points.The public, who funds much of our research and
supports your reporting, may not realize that these campaigns
are focused on the goals of concerned interest groups, political
officials, celebrities and other non-scientists.The science
described in the campaign may be overgeneralized or incomplete, and scientists and journalists must try to fill in the gaps.
There is another risk in failing to tell the full story behind
the science of public advocacy campaigns. If a campaign’s
promise, be it for intellectual achievement or socioeconomic
advancement, fails to be fulfilled in the lives of young children,
public confidence in developmental
science and interest in early childhood
may evaporate.
House summit conference on early childhood development. A
special issue of Newsweek magazine, and the release of a book,
video and CD-ROM designed for parents and practitioners,
focused on promoting early brain growth. A host of state and
local media events emphasized the same concerns.
It would have been impossible to miss the central messages
of the campaign: early experiences are crucial in shaping the
lifelong capabilities of the brain; critical “windows of opportunity” provide time-limited chances to stimulate brain
development; sensitive, nurturing parental care is among the
most important formative influences on early brain growth.
Advocates crafted these messages to appeal to policy-makers,
practitioners and middle-class parents.
For me and for colleagues across the nation, this campaign
was a dream and a nightmare. On one hand, we witnessed
unprecedented public interest and concern with the development of young children. For years, our work on how young
children think, feel and relate to others had been solely reported
in the inside pages of local newspapers and women’s magazines.
Now that these developmental processes were portrayed in terms
of the “wiring” and “connections” of the brain’s “neural architecture” — terms chosen to have broad appeal, especially to men
— the development of young children was front-page news.
But when we looked closely at the coverage of early brain
development and its scientific foundations, we discovered that
many of the central claims of the public information campaign
were based on overgeneralizations from very shaky evidence.
Moreover, some of the most important and exciting discoveries
about the developing brain were receiving no attention at all.
Yes, the early years are an important period for brain development, but it is not the only significant period of brain
growth, or even the most important.The greatest advances in
early brain growth occur prenatally, when nearly all the neurons
that populate the mature brain are created and the brain’s essential functioning takes shape. Furthermore, the most exciting
recent scientific discoveries concern adult brain development, as
neuroscientists have discovered that the mature brain creates
new neurons and is capable of growth and new organization. As
a recent (but underreported) study from the National Research
Council, From Neurons to Neighborhoods:The Science of Early
Childhood Development, concluded, emphasis on brain growth
from birth to age 3 “begins too late and ends too soon.”
Yes, there are “windows of opportunity” during which stimulation must occur for brain development to occur normally.
But these sensitive periods are exceptional, not typical, for early
brain growth, and they require experiences that are extraordinarily common early in life.These experiences include the
opportunities to see light and visual patterns, to hear sounds
(including language), and to move — experiences that do not
require special effort from parents. Beyond these, there is no
evidence that narrow, time-limited windows of exposure govern
the growth of intelligence, emotions, sociability or other essential human capabilities.
15
covering the unthinkable:
the murdered child
perspective that only newspapers can provide. But we tried to
focus on this one child.What was her life like? Who had a
chance to save her? What laws, rules or circumstances kept
someone from intervening to save her? We had considered
profiles of the two people charged. Instead, we spent our
energy compiling a lengthy profile of Shelby and her short
and painful life.
Find allies. Plenty of people, from courthouse clerks to day-
Don’t overwrite. This was a tragedy. No question. But the
only time I used that word in a story was when quoting
someone else.
many stories to write after such a horrible death: reviews of
departmental policies, reaction from lawmakers and child
advocates, a look at recent trends.Write those stories. It adds
Don’t be surprised if prosecutors produce limited hard
evidence at trial. I am a general assignments reporter with little
both acquitted of murder.
B E A T
opposite: Shelby’s mother and her live-in boyfriend were
experience covering abuse trials, but I was struck by how little
evidence is useful to prosecutors. Fingerprints are of no help,
since you would expect the child’s body to show fingerprints
from her caregivers. Even blood could be explained away. Maybe
she had a cut and her mom or the mom’s boyfriend got blood
Keep the focus where it belongs, on the child. There are
T H E
care workers, are outraged when a child dies violently. Many are
very willing to provide information or help you find out what
happened. One source provided us with an unedited version of
the human service department’s internal review of the case.
Another source directed us to a previous child endangerment
charge filed against the mother. Some allies came from unusual
places. Iowa Gov.Tom Vilsack stunned reporters and residents of
the town where Shelby died when he revealed to a packed
town hall meeting that he, too, suffered abuse as a child.The
governor continued to speak often about child abuse and
helped keep the issue in the public eye.
2 0 0 1
What Dr. Brett Olson saw that cold January afternoon left an
empty place in his soul.
Paramedics had pulled 2 1/2-year-old Shelby Duis from her
bunk bed, laid her on the floor and began a hopeless attempt to
revive her.
She had massive bruising around her head. Her mouth and
tongue were badly bruised. An autopsy would reveal that both
her hands were broken. So were five of her ribs, injuries
inflicted weeks before.
Officials from the Iowa Department of Human Services
responded the way state law allowed:We cannot comment on
individual child-abuse investigations.
This cloak of secrecy protected the child’s mother and her
live-in boyfriend, who were later arrested on murder and child
abuse charges.The law also shielded the state’s child-protection
system, which had received numerous warnings that the child
was being abused.
The Des Moines Register helped lift this cloak of secrecy. Over
the next 12 months, we told Iowans how a small child died,
how the system failed to protect her and how her death might
eventually help other children. Here are a few approaches we
took in covering a difficult and emotional case:
P H O T O S C O U RT E S Y O F T H E D E S M O I N E S R E G I S T E R .
B Y M A R K S I E B E RT
17
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
18
on their clothes.There are rarely eyewitnesses to
child abuse, so it’s difficult for prosecutors to link
someone directly to the fatal injury. In this case,
both Shelby’s mother and the boyfriend were in the house
when Shelby was killed. But neither made a credible witness
because both were heavy drug users.
So who killed Shelby? A jury acquitted her mother’s
boyfriend of murder and sexual abuse charges, saying prosecutors hadn’t proved he killed the child. His attorneys
successfully turned the spotlight on Shelby’s mother,
pointing out inconsistencies in her story and numerous
examples of poor parenting. A judge later acquitted her of
murder, but found her guilty of multiple counts of child
endangerment. She was sentenced to up to 50 years in
prison. She has appealed.
This case was frustrating for a number of reasons. As
soon as we began raising questions about the response by
human services, seemingly everyone with a complaint
against the $2.3 million-a-year agency pleaded with us to
take up their cause.We had to keep our focus.
Department officials rarely did us favors.We had to file
several FOI letters before the department released internal
memos, which were made public by a new state law.
Their lack of cooperation made it difficult to remain
objective and fair. The veteran child-abuse investigator in
this case, for example, was widely criticized.The DHS
said little in his defense.We had to find others who
considered him a compassionate and dedicated social
worker to balance our report.
Lawmakers eventually broadened privacy laws, allowing
more public and legislative access in serious child-abuse cases.
DHS officials eventually acknowledged they mishandled the
case and disciplined two employees.They also uncovered
shortcomings in the system, including a lack of training for
mandatory abuse reporters, heavy caseloads for some social
workers and the need for more medical expertise to assist
child-abuse investigators. More changes, including more
money for abuse prevention, are expected this year.
So our work made a difference. Readers were disturbed
by our stories. Like Olson, the county medical examiner
who pronounced Shelby dead, there seemed to be an
empty place in their souls. Some were angry. Some called
in tears. But this case clearly meant something to them,
and they wanted us to get to the bottom of it. In some
respects we did.We also managed to keep an important
issue — how Iowa protects its most vulnerable citizens —
in the public consciousness for an entire year. And we
made sure this sad story didn’t simply
fade away.
Mark Siebert is a general
assignment reporter for
The Des Moines Register.
He joined the paper in 1991.
shelby duis missed many
chances to be saved
By Mark Siebert • Register Staff Writer • August 27, 2000
Who killed Shelby Duis? We may never know.
Who had a chance to save her?
Many.
Child-abuse investigators, social workers, doctors and relatives
saw warning signs that the 2-year-old was being beaten. Yet no
one rescued Shelby from an inattentive, drug-dependent mother
and her boyfriend, portrayed in court as manipulative and violent.
Shelby lived a sad life. Her biological father wouldn’t admit
paternity. Her mother lived with a series of men, worked
construction full time and smoked a toxic form of methamphetamine almost daily. Still, eight months of interviews, testimony
from two murder trials and confidential state records obtained by
The Des Moines Sunday Register reveal that Shelby almost made it.
At least eight people called the Iowa Department of Human
Services to report possible abuse. The department investigated
Shelby’s mother, Heidi Watkins, seven times for child abuse or
neglect. It finally threatened to remove the girl unless her mother took
her to the doctor. Hospital staff saw Shelby’s black and blue face. Dr.
Thomas Kalkhoff examined her that day, Jan. 3. He would later testify
that the toddler showed “no indications of serious illness.”
Her mother explained away the bruises, and took Shelby home.
The telephone rang several times the next day at the tiny green
house in Spirit Lake. Watkins could not be awakened from a druginduced slumber. Two calls came from Heather Wright, the social
worker who was to meet with Watkins about her parenting skills.
Caller ID logged the unanswered calls at 8:29 and 8:41 in the
morning of Jan. 4. Doctors say Shelby was sexually abused and
brutally beaten, strangled or squeezed to death between 8:45 a.m.
and 12:45 p.m. that day.
The wispy-haired toddler with a cute pout, who came so close
to being rescued, was dead. … After Shelby’s death, the final
Department of Human Services report alleging physical and sexual
abuse was written up.
The conclusion is typed in bold.
For the first time, it reads: CONFIRMED.
Editor’s Note: In another outgrowth of the case, Gov. Tom Vilsack
signed the so-called ‘boyfriend bill,’ on Feb. 16, 2001, holding all
household members responsible for a child’s well-being. If the child
is harmed, those adults may now be charged with child endangerment instead of harder-to-prove murder or sexual abuse charges.
This 10-year-old girl, a runaway and
alleged prostitute, has already spent
K I M B E R LY S M I T H / A J C
months in jail.
B Y J A N E O. H A N S E N
Child prostitution was not a topic on my backburner of stories to pursue. I was familiar with the issue, but everything I’d
read involved children and women from other countries who were being exploited overseas or in the United States as immi-
T H E
B E A T
While working on another project, I got a call from some juvenile court workers who said there was a growing problem of
child prostitution in Atlanta. I agreed to meet with them to hear
more.The meeting consisted of probation officers and courtappointed special advocates who said they’d quietly tried for a
year to get the district attorney to crack down on pimps
exploiting young girls. But they said he’d done nothing.They
told me about 13-year-olds dancing in strip clubs.They said
children were being sold for sex in exchange for getting their
hair and nails done or a place to stay.They spoke of men with
street names like “Batman” who kept girls against their will yet
were rarely arrested or prosecuted. I was stunned and interested.
2 0 0 1
grants. I had seen nothing suggesting there was a homegrown version of the problem.
covering the unthinkable:
child prostitutes
19
Clairee Jones allowed Hansen to use her daughter’s name
and photo in a story. The 12-year-old runaway told her
mother that she was a prostitute.
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
20
I told them that to do the story, I would need to meet the
girls.The trickiest part in doing a story like this is getting
access, both to court proceedings and, more importantly, to the
girls themselves.The girls’ stories are critical to showing readers,
rather than just telling them, what’s going on. But in this case, I
was told I couldn’t talk to the girls because of confidentiality.
I kept insisting, and in time, I won the officials’ trust. But it
did take several months. I had to set up a face-to-face meeting
with a juvenile judge who was key to the issue but new to the
bench.The purpose of the interview was so she could get to
know me. At the end of the interview, I asked if she would
introduce me to the girls, and she agreed. On another occasion, I
set up a meeting solely to ask her to let us bring a photographer
into the courtroom. I brought an official memo outlining our
reasons for the request and citing other stories I had done with
the help of her predecessors. She eventually granted us permission to take pictures of the girls. I requested a similar type of
meeting with a detective who had never met me. He had agreed
to a phone interview, but I asked to meet him in person. I
wanted him to have a sense of me. I wanted to win his trust.
Winning officials’ trust is one part.Winning the children’s
is the other. I have always loved to interview children and
adolescents. Each child is different, and my approach is to
listen carefully and do the interview on their terms. If that
means they’re more comfortable sitting on the floor, we sit on
the floor. If it means they want the lights off, as one teen pros-
titute insisted — perhaps because she was ashamed — we sit
in near darkness.
Once the interviews are concluded, we always grapple in the
newsroom with whether we should name the children. On the
one hand, the credibility of the children’s stories is at stake, and
the newspaper is extremely reluctant to publish stories about
people we can’t name. In dealing with child prostitutes, particularly older teen prostitutes, the question is, are they juvenile
offenders or victims or both? On the other hand, some children
clearly are victims. Again, I listen to all parties, most importantly
the child and the child’s parents, where there are parents. I ask
myself if the child is a victim and whether the public’s need to
know the child’s identity outweighs the child’s need for privacy.
In these stories, we named two girls: Llyodia Richardson and
Shamila Jones (age 12).We ran both girls’ pictures.The reason
was, both girls were missing.Their loved ones were desperate to
find them, and the juvenile judge and their probation officers
gave the OK.The other girls, however, feeling shame or fear,
asked me not to name them.They lived dangerous lives, and I
had to consider that violent pimps might hurt some of the girls
who cooperated with me. I knew their stories were important,
but we could not name them.
This project took a lot of time, and I’m fortunate to work at
a newspaper that gave it to me. But in the end, I think adherence to some fundamental principles make it possible for
anyone to do a story like this:
■ The best ideas for stories bubble up from a well-covered
beat. People came to me because they were familiar with other
stories I’d written about children and teens.
■ The best stories about children feature the children.Without
them, the story is little more than talking heads. I always use the
example of child abuse statistics in making the case. I can tell
readers that 40,000 Georgia children were abused or neglected
last year, and that will not move the public or politicians. I can
show the life of one child behind the statistics and it will.
■ Gaining access requires winning trust.Winning trust requires
always getting the information right. And it requires treating
everyone — from high-level officials to child victims — fairly
and honestly. It’s that simple.
Jane O. Hansen is a staff writer at
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She
joined the paper in 1982 after graduating from the Columbia School of
Journalism.
selling atlanta’s children:
Runaway girls lured into the sex trade are being jailed for crimes while their
adult pimps go free.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
Jan. 7, 2001
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
Reprinted with permission from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The courtroom door opened, and a guard led the defendant inside. She was dressed in
standard jailhouse garb — navy jumpsuit, orange T-shirt, orange socks and orange
plastic flip-flops. Metal shackles around her ankles forced her to shuffle.
“All rise,” the bailiff said.The judge entered and took her seat on the birchwood
bench while the defendant sat down at a table and chewed her finger. At issue was
what to do with her.
She had been in and out of an Atlanta jail since August. It was now November. Her
sister was in another jail. As lawyers and officials debated whether she should remain
behind bars, probation officer Gail Johnson asked whether the defendant could address
the court.
A little girl, her hair pulled into a tiny pigtail and her head bowed, rose from the
defendant’s table. She was 10 years old, a runaway and an alleged prostitute.
“I think I have been locked up long enough,” the girl said in a small, high-pitched
voice. She began to cry and rubbed her eyes with balled-up fists. “If you would just let
me go home ...”
But for children like her and her 11-year-old sister, also an alleged prostitute, it’s not
that simple.
In Atlanta, prostituted children often go to jail while the adults who exploit them
go free, a review of court records shows. Attitudes toward prostitution are partly to
blame, say Juvenile Court judges and others.The lack of children’s programs in
Georgia, particularly for girls, has left some judges no choice but to place exploited
children, such as these, in detention for their own safety.
“The last thing I want to do is detain her, because that comes across as punitive,”
said Fulton County Juvenile Court Judge Nina Hickson. “But I’ve got to make sure
that she’s safe.”
In Georgia, pimps are rarely arrested, even when the prostitute is a child.When pimps
are charged, their cases often are dismissed or result in a small fine, court records show.
No reliable statistics are available to gauge the number of prostituted children,
although Atlanta judges say they are seeing an alarming growth in their courtrooms.
But statistics for adults show a clear disparity in the system’s treatment of pimps and
prostitutes. Since 1972, 401 adults — nearly all women — went to prison in Georgia
for prostitution. No one went to prison for just pimping.
“I think there was an unwitting bias that the woman was the perpetrator,” said
Mike Light, Department of Corrections spokesman and a former parole officer. “She
was the one out having sex. … The pimp was just collecting the money.”…
Today, the 11-year-old seems to be doing well at home, officials say. But less than
three weeks after the 10-year-old went home, she ran away again. In early December,
police picked her up and returned her to [detention]. Judge Hickson says officials will
try once again to find a place to rebuild her life.
In the meantime, the child remains in jail.
“It’s not the judge’s fault. It’s not anybody’s fault,” said (child advocate Alesia) Adams
of Victims of Prostitution. “There’s just no place for these kids to go.”
21
selling atlanta’s children:
‘Once you live in the street by yourself and nobody tells you what to do, it gets addictive’
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
22
Yvonne Freeman wonders how both her twin daughters could have chosen lives of
prostitution. “If you get in the wrong car, that’s it,” she says. “I don’t understand
what would make you go out and sell your body when you can get the things you
need at home.”
On this day, one of her daughters has recently returned home, saying prostitution
is too dangerous. But the other is still out there, even though she has been severely
beaten by the men who exploit her.
Pimps and prostitution hold a powerful allure for young girls. Sometimes the
violence drives them back from the streets. And sometimes it doesn’t.
The twin who has returned says she was 13 when she met her first pimp, Ray.
“He said he and his brother were trying to start an escort service,” she says.
Attracted by the money and his car — a Lexus — she went home with him.
“He never asked me did I want to prostitute,” she says. “He gave me some
clothes. He gave me a wig. Every pimp has a whole closet of clothes.”
Yvonne Freeman
Ray’s 18-year-old girlfriend showed her how to sell herself, the girl says. “She
waited for her twin
says, ‘Ask them if they want a date and don’t date under $30.’ So that’s what I did.”
girls’ return.
At first, she didn’t earn more than $175 a night. “But I was thinking it’s fast
money,” she says.
“Once you live in the street by yourself and nobody tells you what to do, it gets
addictive, and you keep running away.”
But her mother never stopped searching for her.The girl was sitting in Ray’s car outside a strip club one
night when she spotted her mother looking for her. Ray overheard Freeman telling police her missing
daughter was only 13. “He thought I was 17,” the girl says. “But he let me stay.”
She says Ray took care of his girls, arranging to have their nails done and their hair styled and buying
them clothes. “Little clothes,” she says.
On a typical night, Ray’s girls would go to Metropolitan Parkway and walk the street. Many of the johns
stopped when they saw her.
“They’re looking for the babies,” the girl says. “The tricks are tired of the same faces, and they like the
young girls.”
But one night, her “date” proved to be treacherous, she says, when three men brutally raped her. “It was
terrible,” she says, her head bowed.
After that experience and going to jail six times, she decided to get out.
“The pimps got a game,” she says. “They sell you dreams, tell you you’ll have stuff — the big house, cars.
But you never see it.
“I ain’t going back.The only thing that got me is raped, locked up and maybe dead — and a wore-out
body.”
Now she plans to complete high school and get a good job. “I’m really smart,” she says. “I got a high IQ.”
Her one wish, she says, is “to get my sister away from prostituting.” She worries her twin will wind up dead.
Freeman, in the meantime, says she’s becoming increasingly frustrated. “I’m never going to give up on
them,” she says. “But I’m tired.”
Reprinted with permission from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Read Hansen’s series at:
www.accessatlanta.com/partners/ajc/reports/prostitutes/main0107.html
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
Jan. 7, 2001
What They’re
Trying to Prove
A look inside the “gender wars”
and the perils of covering research
BY JOAN HENNESSY
C
hristina Hoff Sommers has the no-nonsense bearing of a college professor, credentials that include work at a
prestigious Washington think tank and a book described by at least one critic as a polemic.
“Everybody gloms onto one idea and writes the hell out of
it. …Things come into vogue, almost.”
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
Dissecting research
If journalists report and write through the lens of the
moment, researchers are subject to the same bias.
The American Association of University Women, known for
research on gender bias, first launched a study in 1885 to
“dispel the commonly accepted myth that higher education
was harmful to women’s health,” according to How Schools
Shortchange Girls, a noted 1992 study by the AAUW
Educational Foundation.
“If you took the historic viewpoint, writings are the product
of their time.There is an evolution in public opinion,” said Tom
Snyder, a U.S. Department of Education statistician. “An article
on race relations as written in the ’30s, if you put it in the
paper today, it would be absurd.To some extent, researchers are
subject to the same kinds of things.”
The problem for journalists, as seen by Cornelius Riordan, is
also one of timing.
“I think that journalism is a decade behind,” said Riordan,
professor of sociology at Providence College in Rhode Island.
Gender discrimination in schools, he said, “was, in my view,
a sufficiently large problem in the ’70s, so that you could say a
focus on gender…was appropriate,” he said.
“Somewhere in the ’80s, that changed.”
During that decade, “and culminating in 1992, you have
these women’s stakeholder groups who were dominating the
reports, and journalists were responding to that,” he said. “In
fairness, …I don’t think there was social science research that
was contradicting the stakeholder groups in the 1980s.”
She has become renowned as a visible critic of both the
research and press coverage of gender equity.
Well-respected newspapers, Sommers said, occasionally print
“factually-challenged” articles. “But I have found that this is
especially true when it comes to stories about...women and
victimization.There’s a lot of reckless reporting, over-reporting
of victimization,” said Sommers, author of “The War Against
Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.”
“There’s also a lot of questionable research about (adolescents)
and how badly they’re faring.”
Educational researchers have debated whether culture or
chromosomes give children different educational experiences.
And Sommers, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,
makes a three-part argument: One, a widening academic gender
gap “threatens the future of millions of American boys.”Two,
researchers who said girls were subject to gender bias favoring
boys at school were wrong.Three, journalists believed them, and
the stories they wrote were wrong, too.
Other academicians make similar charges. In fact, even
researchers behind gender equity studies say news coverage
glossed over complexities and was too narrowly focused on the
problems of girls. In their criticism of gender equity reporting
lies the seed of a more disturbing issue: the coverage of
research.
“I think journalists are too quick to write about whatever
study is presented without looking at who did the research,
who funded the research,” said Virginia B. Edwards, editor of
Education Week. “There is a failing in the journalistic community about evaluating research and presenting it to the public.”
This is compounded by the fact that one news story often
begets others. Journalists, Edwards observed, are like lemmings.
23
The gender equity tango
In recent times, interpreting gender equity research has become
an intricate dance, complicated by a myriad of findings from
academicians.
An AAUW study in 1998 acknowledged that progress had
been made and that girls were excelling in academics.The U.S.
Department of Education most recently compiled statistics that
give a snapshot of gender equity issues, Trends in Educational
Equity of Girls and Women. It concludes that “females are now
doing as well as or better than males on many of the indicators
of educational attainment and that the large gaps in educational
attainment that once existed between men and women have
in most cases been eliminated and, in others, have significantly
decreased.”
Consider:
■ Women are making headway in receiving college degrees.
They received 55 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in 1996;
43 percent in 1970.
■ They received 48 percent of business management and
administration degrees in 1996 and 9 percent in 1970. In
1996, women received 27.5 percent of bachelor’s degrees in
computer science.That’s up from 1970, when 12.9 percent of
degrees were given to women.
■ Boys were more likely than girls to answer correctly questions that focused on political knowledge. In a 1996 survey,
more boys were able to identify the jobs held by Al Gore and
Newt Gingrich.
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
24
■ While boys were more likely to repeat a grade, 17-year-old
boys outperformed 17-year-old girls by five points in math
and eight points in science in 1996. But girls outperformed
boys by 14 points in reading and 17 points in writing.
“There is a gap in math and science favoring boys which is
small and narrowing,” Sommers said during a forum last fall at
the University of Maryland. “There’s a gap in reading and
writing that is huge and not changing.”
The statistics had been reported piecemeal before, said
Snyder, the Department of Education statistician. “When you
put it all together, it gives a different perspective.”Women have
made significant gains in education.
But for a defender of gender equity research, David Sadker,
the matter of gender equity is more complicated.
Sadker, a professor at The American University, along with
his late wife, Myra, wrote “Failing at Fairness: How Our
Schools Cheat Girls” (Touchstone Press, 1995).
“We looked at how teachers talked to classrooms,” he said,
recalling the research he did with Myra Sadker. “We found that
teachers talked to boys more, questioned them more, rewarded
them more, helped them more and disciplined them more.
Now, we expected (teachers) to discipline (boys) more.We were
actually surprised that they also praised them more.”
Christina Hoff
Sommers
David Sadker
Sadker sees a hidden curriculum in schools. “Guys get more
of a public voice than females,” he said. “I think that’s one of
the reasons...that maybe females in the workplace are less likely
to be seen and heard.”
Sadker said the research he and his wife did in the 1980s
took place in 100 classrooms over a three-year period in four
states and the District of Columbia. “And what we found in
those classrooms was that teachers were teaching boys more
intensely than they were teaching girls. Girls weren’t
complaining. Girls were being trained to be quiet. …They were
getting good grades.They were smiling. But boys were getting
more instruction.” Other research done since then has shown
similar results in most classrooms, he said.
But Tamar Lewin, a New York Times national correspondent,
recalls that several years ago, she called up Sadker to ask about
his research, including questions on the call-out rate — the rate
at which boys call out answers before most girls even raise
their hands.
She recalls asking for specifics: “How many call outs in how
many classrooms in how many places over what period of time
with what ages?”
She didn’t get the specifics she sought. “They said they
didn’t have data like that. It was just an impressionistic finding
based on spending a lot of time in classrooms.”
There’s nothing wrong with an impressionistic finding,
Lewin added. But that conversation made her cautious about
reporting the Sadkers’ work. “Whenever you are doing something presented as quantitative, it’s helpful if you say, here’s how
many people we looked at.”
Sadker said the full report has data from Virginia,
Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut and the District of
Columbia.The data in the 1984 report, Promoting Effectiveness
in Classroom — available through the Educational Research and
Information Clearinghouse — specifically focused on interactions that were observed between students and teachers.
In retrospect, according to Sadker, there is valid criticism
made about data on the call-out rate. “We initially reported a
higher rate than there was,” Sadker said. “That’s because we
found a higher rate in the pilot study than in the full report.
“You can make a case that there’s no gender bias.That’s all free choice, they like caring for
people so that’s where they are going,” Sadker said. “I think there’s more complicated
things going on in the culture.”
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
Consensus
The attention to gender equity also had policy implications.
Judith S. Kleinfeld, a professor in psychology at the University
of Alaska Fairbanks, drew national attention for a 1998 paper
that challenged AAUW findings. Attention to gender equity, she
contended, diverted focus from more urgent educational issues
faced by African-American boys.
Also critical of the AAUW findings was Diane Ravitch,
an author, education historian and former assistant secretary of
educational research and improvement at the U.S. Department
of Education under President George Bush. “They (the
AAUW) used dubious research to draw attention to people
who were not suffering,” she said, adding, “dubious at best,
fraudulent at worst.”
Ravitch wrote an op-ed piece focused on the fact that more
girls than boys were in college. “Something’s wrong if, when
you cross the finish line, there are more girls than boys,” she
said. But she said journalists weren’t listening.
“The consensus was in,” she said. “There was no willingness
to stand back and say, ‘wait a minute’.”
Academicians who say there is a crisis for girls have also
critiqued the news coverage that followed their studies: Media
reports failed to convey the multidimensional nature of the
research.
“Attention to girls doesn’t mean there isn’t space for research
on boys,” said Pamela Haag, director of research at the AAUW
Educational Foundation.The Foundation sponsored a symposium last September to highlight that point.
“To understand boys, we have to understand girls,” Haag
said. “There are problems boys face that are unique to them.
They both need to be looked at.”
The research is complementary, she said.
“I disagree with Christina Sommers that the media blindly
misinterpreted the research on girls,” Haag said. “They (news
reporters) raised important points that were clearly supported
by a large body of research.”
The challenge, said Haag, is “getting the complexity into the
sound bites.”
For example, How Schools Shortchange Girls, the 1992 AAUW
report, also noted that boys are at greater risk for dropping out
of school. But news stories focused primarily on the issues
faced by girls. Similarly, the report included the fact that more
girls than boys go to college.
“We mentioned it in two different points in the report,”
said Susan McGee Bailey, the report’s principal author and
executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Women.
“A general proclivity for any news media to hit the headlines
and the big stories means that the complexities of issues aren’t
front and center.”
The coverage of gender equity, however, is just part of
another challenge.The knottier issue is covering research.
Journalists “just don’t have time to read the material.You’re
not expected to read the (academic) journals. But you don’t
even have time to read the reports,” said Riordan, the
Providence College professor. “What you do is you read the
executive summary. Scholars don’t put out executive summaries.
We don’t have the resources, and we probably wouldn’t do
it even if we had the resources. Executive summaries are
basically biased.”
Executive summaries oversimplify, agreed Bailey of Wellesley.
“I think it’s the problem researchers always worry about, that
the subtleties and the complexities and the intricacies will be
simplified so much that they will be misinterpreted by readers
who are skimming the surfaces.”
“When we reported on the full report, we weren’t as clear as
we should have been,” Sadker said.
“As soon as we saw the error, we fixed it, but we didn’t see
it right away.” Other researchers also have counted the call-out
rate, he said. “It’s about two-to-one,” said Sadker. In other
words, boys call out answers twice as often as girls.
Ultimately, men end up in higher-paying fields, he said.
While an increasing number of women are pursuing engineering, more than 80 percent of degrees in engineering are
still given to men. “The programs that pay the best, that cost the
most to run are overwhelmingly male,” Sadker said.
Women are still being typecast in nurturing roles.
“Elementary school — which I think is a great place for
men to work, I would love to see more men at elementary
schools — it’s 80 percent plus female,” he said. “So there’s a lot
of job segregation.
“You can make a case that there’s no gender bias.That’s all
free choice, they like caring for people so that’s where they are
going,” he said. “I think there’s more complicated things going
on in the culture.”
25
P H I L S K I N N E R / AT L A N TA J O U R N A L - C O N S T I T U T I O N
At the August 2000 opening of a new girls’ school in Atlanta.
“Journalists just don’t have time to read the material.You’re not expected to read the
(academic) journals. But you don’t even have time to read the reports.”
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
26
He said, she said
One short step beyond this point-counterpoint is a more
emotional debate. Academicians on both sides say their opinions
have subjected them to personal attacks.
Kleinfeld, the University of Alaska professor who has assailed
gender equity research, said she has paid a price for writing
about gender equity. Peers have accused her, she said, of trying
to build a career on this issue.
“If someone publishes a report and it gets published in
major newspapers,” Kleinfeld said, “other scientists have to be
able to say wait a minute, there’s another side of this.”
But are they willing to have that dialogue?
During a session for journalists last fall, Sadker did not want
to speak during the same session as Sommers. Sommers then sat
in on Sadker’s presentation and interrupted him repeatedly.
Sadker took issue with Sommers’ writing, saying it is a
“myth…that there isn’t much research (about gender equity)
and that it is not peer reviewed. I don’t know where this comes
from.There are thousands of studies.There’s a mountain of
research. …Has my research been peer reviewed? You bet. Is my
research in libraries? You bet.”
He agrees with Sommers on one point: that reporters
haven’t looked beyond the surface in reporting these debates.
But he believes the questions should be raised about Sommers,
who has a doctorate in philosophy. “Here’s somebody who has
no background, has done no peer-reviewed educational
research, and she’s the judge of research. How did that happen?”
More than a decade has elapsed since the AAUW released,
How Schools Shortchange Girls, yet the arguments continue.This
“leads me to think it’s more than just about the research,”
observed Bailey of Wellesley. Some of the reaction, she said, falls
into the category of anti-feminism.
Sommers, who considers herself a feminist, rejects that
charge.
“Just in terms of rhetoric, if you’re upset with someone, you
impugn their motives,” she said. Her book, she added, could
have been titled “The War Against Girls,” because at a time
when girls were doing better educationally, reports indicated
that they had been shortchanged. “I think this movement to
characterize girls as victims is harmful to young women.”
Studies — particularly studies that come from specific
groups — should be viewed with caution, said Lewin of The
New York Times. “I think with a lot of these studies the people
who are doing this have in mind the problem they are trying to
quantify,” she said. “That often leads them to present numbers as
if the only conclusion is the problem they went in to look for.
They don’t often look at the broader context.That’s assuming
there are solid numbers.”
What Lewin recommends is “looking at the numbers themselves, and seeing if the numbers match the conclusions. …”
This carves a different path. “Quite often, the thing that
seems interesting to me,” she said, “isn’t the thing that the
people putting out the press release have led with.”
Joan Hennessy is the Casey Graduate Fellow for
2000–2001. She will receive her master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland this summer. She
was assistant features editor at the Florida Times-Union
in Jacksonville.
gender isn’t the only story
The cliché used so often when talking about gender equity — “an uneven playing
eld” or, alternately, “leveling the playing eld” — is steeped in athletic tradition, a
world of winners and losers.
2 0 0 1
T H E
— Joan Hennessy
But anyone who thinks the contest is as simple as boys vs. girls has it all wrong, said
Beatriz Chu Clewell, principal research associate at The Urban Institute.The gender argument misses greater educational barriers, such as racial background, disability or being a
non-English speaker.
“Disadvantaged kids are more at risk than anybody,” she said. “I don’t think it serves any
purpose to say who is most at risk.”
Maryland high school teacher Patrick McCann believes that educators should pay more
attention to other performance differences.The girls in his majority black school outperform the boys. “They always have,” he said.When McCann worked in a drop-out
prevention program, 80 percent of the students enrolled were boys. McCann said particular
focus is needed on the education of African-American boys.
One of his students, Edward “Tre”Welcher, 17, agrees.
“There’s gender prejudice,” said Welcher. But the African-American senior believes that
racial bias is a bigger issue.When he reached adolescence, he sensed adult attitudes toward
him suddenly changed. “I already see myself labeled. After I hit my growth spurt, people
began to see me like, ‘You look like you’re not going nowhere’.”
Ricardo Carter, 17, has had the same experience. “That’s the reason I want to make it,”
he said. “To prove them wrong.”
By contrast, classmate Carolyn Dustin, 16, can’t see any barriers that will “stop me from
pursuing goals.”
Celia Lewis, 16, also says she is college
bound. She’s considering the picturesque
Frostburg State University, a Maryland
school where mountains form a backdrop
for college life.There, she plans to major
in computer science, a career in which
women are the minority.
Her parents support her. “They say, you
have to go (to college),” said Lewis, a
junior at a suburban Maryland high
school. “If I didn’t want to go, there’d be
some serious arguments.” But her father,
Trevor Lewis, said he had nothing to do
with her daughter’s choice of a less traditional academic field for women. “I didn’t
encourage her,” he said. “That’s just what
she felt comfortable doing.”
B E A T
A university classroom.
27
taking a hard look at research
How do some social issues reporters and editors
evaluate research and advocacy-based studies?
Sources who put forth alarmist ideas send up a red flag, said Pat Etheridge, who was until
recently a parenting correspondent with CNN.
“We look for someone who can take a more reasonable stand,” she said. “A good example is
day care studies. Every other month or so, there’s another study on day care.”
The studies are scary, she said, especially for the millions of parents who happen to have
children in day care.
“They are very often contradictory,” Etheridge said. “And they are very often alarmist.
You have to be very, very cautious. …How big is the study? How long ranged is the study?
What day care centers are we talking about?”
Pat
Etheridge
Linda Lantor Fandel, deputy editorial page editor of The Des Moines Register, said she reads the
research herself, rather than execute summaries.
“It’s not so much out of skepticism that I do that, but in order to get a broader perspective, a better
understanding of the material that they are talking about.”
A study by the U.S. Department of Education might be given more weight than the work of a think tank.
“There’s going to be a tendency to report statistics rather than statistics that meet a specific goal,” she said.
But studies should be reported, she said.“You evaluate the source. …Bounce the study results off as many
other sources as you can. By bringing those broad perspectives, the reader can evaluate for themselves.”
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
28
The mailbox of Jennifer Rose Marino, education writer for The Savannah Morning News, seems
constantly stuffed. “I get different studies from all over the country every day,” said Marino. “And you also
have people calling you and hawking the studies.You always have to wonder what the agenda is.”
Marino has learned to be wary of packaging. One particular study looked professional, but when she read
it, she realized it was a “a shoddy piece of work,” she said. “Had I relied on it without looking at it closely, I
could have found myself in trouble.”
When a big study is coming out, “if you know all the other newspapers are going to write about it, you are
going to jump all over it,” said Stacy Hawkins Adams, a writer covering social issues for the Richmond (Va.)
Times-Dispatch.
“I do look at where it comes from,” she said. “The Children’s Defense Fund is going to have a different
slant than the Cato Institute. …I look at it and try to balance it like I would any story.”
“If it’s any sort of group that has a particular agenda, (I’m) very cautious,” said Stephanie
Dunnewind, a Seattle-area writer.
Dunnewind read an excerpt of Christina Hoff Sommers’ book printed in May’s Atlantic
Monthly. She quickly figured it was provocative stuff.
But Dunnewind decided that her readers would benefit more from a balanced approach.
“As a parenting issue, I didn’t think it was helpful at all to pit boys against girls,” she said. She
decided Sommers’ book was more of a political work.
“Parents want to do what’s best for their kids,” said Dunnewind, who has a 6-year-old son and
is expecting a daughter. “What are some issues that come up for boys? What are some issues that
come up for girls? And what can parents do to address those issues?”
The story she subsequently wrote for The Seattle Times focused on those questions instead of
gender equality politics.
— Joan Hennessy
Stephanie
Dunnewind
They Can’t Both
Be Right
What Should We Tell the Readers?
O
B Y S U E H O RT O N
ne view has it this way: In American classrooms, girls are subjected to neglect bordering on abuse.
As Myra and David Sadker wrote in “Failing at Fairness”: “After years of being short-circuited by
adults, girls eventually learn to short-circuit themselves.”
© 1 9 9 2 S A R A H L E E N / M AT R I X
to our readers to put those
skills to good use.
So what then, without
replicating a researcher’s
work, can we do? For
starters, we should really
look at the facts and statistics quoted.The Sadkers
note an SAT gap between
boys and girls; Sommers
explains it away.These are
statistics to investigate.What do the numbers crunchers at the
Educational Testing Service — who probably know the story
behind the numbers better than anyone — conclude? Both the
Sadkers and Sommers assert that certain disciminatory behaviors
are common in classrooms. In most cities, journalists don’t have
much trouble getting into schools:Why not go into some classrooms and see what you can see? Or convene a panel of
teachers who’ve read passages from both books and see what
they recognize in their own classrooms. Better still, find out if
the authors have plans to come to your city. If so, even if their
visits are months apart, have them accompany you to the same
classroom and see what they can see.Then contrast their observations with your own.There are so many stories to do if we
just ask the right questions.
Journalists have a role to play in the societal discussions of
the day.We should be objective, certainly,
holding all sides to the same standards of
proof. But we should also look for truth.
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
Sue Horton is a Journalism Fellow in
Child & Family Policy through the
University of Maryland. Until recently,
she was editor of L.A. Weekly.
Or there’s another take if you prefer: In American classrooms, girls outshine boys in virtually every way. As Christina
Hoff Sommers worte in “The War Against Boys”: “The research
commonly cited to support claims of male privilege and male
sinfulness is riddled with errors. …The typical boy is a yearand-a-half behind the typical girl in reading and writing; he is
less committed to school and less likely to go to college.”
So what’s a journalist to think? Not much judging from
what we’ve written.We’ve reported at length on these and
similar books, mourning with the Sadkers the inequities
girls face at school, then doing an about face and marveling
with Sommers at just how wrong we were to think girls
had problems.
Papers across the country have run feature stories, editorials
and reviews of the books on gender equity. Most of the features
were determinedly unbiased, adhering to the journalistic rule of
objectivity by reporting what the authors said and (sometimes)
finding someone to disagree with it.
But here’s what bothers me: Sommers and the Sadkers
cannot both be right.They are making statements diametrically
opposed to one another.
Journalists are great at the objectivity game.We’re happy to
write “on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand” stories that let
each side make a case, carefully refraining from sanctioning
either point of view. But does that really serve our readers?
There’s got to be an answer here. Either girls are poorly served
by schools or they’re not. Boys are either failing in school
because of this focus on girls or they’re not. And I, as a reader,
want to know which is true. Unfortunately, journalists are much
better at being objective than at discovering truth.
Two papers, The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times, at
least pointed out the gap between the positions, carrying stories
about how the two sides were sparring.That’s a start, but I’d
love to see journalists do more with these raging social policy
debates. I’d love to see us try to find out what’s true.We’re
trained observers, good observers, and we have a responsibility
29
“This Much We Know”
A N I N T E RV I E W W I T H R A E S I M P S O N , P H . D .
author of the forthcoming report Raising Teens: A Synthesis of Research and a Foundation for Action
P
arenting educators are loath to suggest that there is a “right” way to raise a teen. But in a two-year review of
contemporary research, MIT parenting program administrator Rae Simpson found strategies that seem to cross
America's diverse cultures. Her report, which was embargoed at press time, will be released later this spring by the Center
for Health Communications at the Harvard School of Public Health. Here are excerpts of Simpson's conversation with
Patrice Pascual, editor of The Children’s Beat.
Why was this study needed?
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
30
There isn’t enough information out there reaching parents of
adolescents. I see parents feeling both scared and unprepared for
adolescence.They are scared about risks and worry about losing
their teens to distance and death, essentially.Yet, when parents
turn to experts for advice, they often find the answers
conflicting and confusing. I wanted to see if it was possible to
identify findings from research about which there is agreement,
rather than controversy and uncertainty. And it turns out that
there are many areas of agreement, and that it is possible to
distill from them a number of bottom-line messages for parents,
not to tell parents what to do but to give them ideas and
options. So that’s what the report does, taking the research that
is well established and creating short, clear summaries that can
be conveyed to parents in different ways, such as 10 tasks of
adolescence, five basics for parenting adolescents, strategies for
carrying out the basics, and so forth.
You open the report by saying American teens are in
crisis. However, reporters know that on many measures,
teens are doing better — teen violence is down, teen
births are down, poverty is down, high school graduation
is up. How did you define ‘crisis’?
It’s true that some trends are heading in the right direction, but
they’re a long way from where we want them to be. And my
argument is that in order to keep them headed in the right
direction, we need to engage parents as allies much more than
we have.The crisis I’m really addressing in this report is a crisis
for parents — that they too often feel so fearful, uncertain,
overwhelmed, or ready to give up.
It seems that parents have worried about teens
throughout history. Has anything changed?
I agree that there’s been a pattern of teens being a troublesome
topic for adults in society, but I think a number of things have
changed. For one thing, I think parents are experiencing the
risks as being greater and having higher stakes. For another,
there is a body of research that has accumulated in the last few
decades that is pretty solid and well established and thus has the
potential to be useful to parents.
Your research looked specifically for common ground
among different groups. What percentage of research has
been done on middle-class versus low-income groups?
My impression is that some studies have been criticized for
being about the white middle class, and others for focusing on
high-risk or special populations. All told, we have a good deal
(of research) on both, and we need to understand the common
ground among the studies. And we need to look harder at
where the important differences are.
Do parents of different socio-economic backgrounds have
the same fears?
Yes, anecdotally, it seems to be true across classes and cultures in
this country.
So today’s parents feel less able to help their kids
succeed?
The anecdotal reports are that parents are more anxious and
unsure than they used to be, and that they want more information.There have been some studies, but we really need to know
much more.
How have the roles of stepparents and other adults been
addressed in research?
In talking about parents in the report, I am talking about all of
those who take responsibility for raising teens, including
extended family, stepparents, partners, elders, all kinds of people
who step in and play powerful roles.There is less research on
these roles and less research on the ways in which these adults
influence teens.That would benefit from a good deal more
attention, including attention to the ways these roles vary across
cultural groups.There is a need to reach out to the very
powerful people in teens’ lives and make it clear how they can
and do influence teens.We also need to give them tools. My
hope is that the kinds of information in this report will be
© 2 0 0 1 S T E P H E N S H A M E S / M AT R I X
ground. I pulled out what appeared to be the common ground
and ran it by over 20 experts and said, ‘Did I get it right?’To an
amazing degree, they indicated that ‘yes, on this much we do
agree.’ As important as it was to me to pull together the research
information about the parenting of adolescents, it was just as
important to do this kind of consensus-building, and to show
that it could be done.To me, that is one of the most powerful
things that could emerge from this report.
adapted for many different kinds of quote-unquote parents. It’s a
very important issue and a complicated one.
You devoted quite a bit of space to the abuse and neglect
of teens. What did you see in the research that is particularly significant?
You note that researchers still disagree about teens’ risktaking behaviors, particularly on how to define risk taking
for teens from different backgrounds.
There is broad agreement that some risk-taking is developmentally healthy.The uncertainty seems to come in how to help
parents understand risk-taking and what role to take with their
teens.There is a good deal of research, but this area is ripe for
more analysis and more communication with parents.
Any campaign has to be extremely well designed and extremely
carefully thought through.That’s really critical. Also, we must
learn from past mistakes, and pay attention to what really has
solid agreement. There are also powerful messages that need to
be the focus of an initial wave of a campaign that aren’t of the
sort, ‘eat dinner with your child.’They are about parents being
really important in the teen years.They’re messages not about
changing behaviors as much as attitudes. Not that the behavior
change doesn’t need to happen, but I think the more pressing
need is a powerful change in social attitudes.
B E A T
Contact
The report, which was funded by the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, will be available
online at www.hsph.harvard.edu/chc/parenting.
Printed copies may be requested by contacting the center:
617-432-1038 or [email protected]. Rae Simpson
may be reached at 617-253-1592 or [email protected].
T H E
I’d like to see a call for consensus-building among researchers.
When we are confronted with those conflicting or overlapping
points in different studies, we need to say, please build some
consensus here.Tell us where there is agreement, disagreement,
cultural difference and uncertainty.We can ask the research
community involved in issues around parenting of adolescents
to come together and do more of this.
What I found in doing this report was that, if you took
reports A, B and C and D, there was a great deal of common
One of your recommendations is to build a public
information campaign. Elsewhere in this magazine,
researcher Ross Thompson says that campaigns may
promote ideas that sound like magic bullets, but end up
failing. I’m thinking of one message that came from last
spring’s White House meeting on teens that said, eat
dinner with your teens every night and they’ll be less
likely to smoke. Are you worried that parenting research
will be misused or misconstrued?
2 0 0 1
Your report synthesizes many individual studies. But
reporters generally get one study at a time from
researchers whose conclusions might be significantly
different. Any advice?
It’s a combination, and we can’t fully understand it at this point.
Some of it is market forces, some of it is cultural forces around
whether or not parents are important in adolescence, and some
of it is other factors.The bottom line is that there is not nearly
the quantity there is for parents of younger children, and there
is a perception that it isn’t as important.There is also the issue
of getting parents connected to this information.There is quite
a bit of good information for the book-buying segment of the
population and on the Internet, but less for parents whose
natural way of getting information is from other sources, in
more bite-sized chunks or in other media.
It seemed to be hidden in plain sight. It seemed as if there’s a
reality that we’re not facing as a society. The phrase, ‘first do no
harm,’ came to me because we can’t even talk about these other
important things to do until youngsters at least feel safe in their
own homes.There is also the issue of their safety outside of
home. I was surprised, but when I checked with experts,
they…confirmed that the abuse of adolescents is as common as
the abuse of young children, but that public outrage decreases.
The services decrease, and awareness decreases.We don’t hear
about it.There appear to be a number of reasons why attention
decreases, including a common perception that teens aren’t as
vulnerable. For example, they’re not as likely to be killed (as
young children), and they can run away. However, the psychological damage, I’m not finding anyone arguing that the
psychological damage isn’t profound. It’s small comfort that they
are less likely to die and can run away.
You also recommend the development of more parentfriendly information on raising adolescents. But is the
issue that there isn’t enough of this information, or is it
just not being consumed?
31
Research Watch
A signicant government study could offer the rst national snapshot of the lives of children in child welfare systems.
The National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being will provide descriptive, longitudinal data on a nationally representative sample of children who have entered the child welfare system because of suspected abuse or neglect, said Mary Bruce
Webb of the U.S. Department Health and Human Services. The rst report on the study is expected to be released by fall 2001.
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
32
The study was part of the Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Act of 1996, commonly known as welfare reform.
“We did not have a comprehensive study of what happens to
kids who enter the system,” said Ron Haskins, who worked on
welfare reform as staff director of the Subcommittee on Human
Resources for the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S.
House of Representatives. Haskins recently became a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institute.
“Once you have that information, it’s bound to have policy
implications,” he said.
The sample includes 5,400 children, and 700 more who
have been in foster care for an extended time. Baseline data
collection began in October 1999, and will conclude this April.
Follow-up studies will be conducted 12 months and 18 months
after the baseline.
Children, parents or other caregivers and caseworkers are
being surveyed. Data will also be gathered from administrative
records and mail-out questionnaires that are being sent to
teachers.The study will attempt to determine:
■ Who are the children and families who come into contact
with the child welfare system?
■ What services do children and families experience while
in the child welfare system?
■ What are the short- and longer-term effects for these
children and families? How do children and families
change during the time they are in contact with the child
welfare system?
“We’ll be trying to make conclusions on their service needs
and the status of their parents as caregivers or former caregivers,” said Webb, a senior research analyst.
“As far as I know, it’s the largest study of its kind that has
ever been done,” said John Eckenrode, professor and co-director
of the Family Life Development Center at Cornell University
and director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and
Neglect at Cornell. “There have been other studies, but nothing
of this magnitude or this sophistication in terms of the quality
of sampling and data collection. So once it’s finished, it will be
the best data we have available on the characteristics of families
that enter the child welfare system.”
About 20 percent of the cases are considered “unopened,”
said Rick Barth, principal investigator for the study and the
Frank Daniels professor in the school of social work at
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
These cases were investigated, but there were no continuing
services to children involved. It could have been decided that
problems weren’t serious enough or there could have been
impediments to delivering services.Whatever the reason,
by studying the cases, “we can better understand how those
judgments are working out,” Barth said.
This addresses a specific question, Barth said: “Are we overintervening or are we under-intervening?”
The children are from 41 states and 97 counties.The size
will allow researchers “to ask these questions within various
subgroups and get regional differences,” Eckenrode said. “We
haven’t had that luxury in the past.”
The data, which is being collected by Research Triangle
Institute in North Carolina, will be archived at Cornell. “We
archive the actual data so that other researchers who would like
to get hold of the data and do a secondary analysis of the data
can do so,” Eckenrode explained.
“The longer we can follow children and understand what
may or may not interrupt their path into more troubled ways of
life…the more valuable this study will become,” said Barth.
According to the National Child Abuse and Neglect
Reporting System, which bases data on information reported
from the states, an estimated 903,000 children were victims
of maltreatment nationwide in 1998.The rate of victimization
was 12.9 per 1,000 children, a decrease from the 1997 rate,
13.9 per 1,000 children.
— Joan Hennessy
To Know More:
■ The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
will issue a report on the study.While no release date
has been set, an initial report is expected in fall, 2001.
The HHS site is www.acf.dhhs.gov.
■ The National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and
Neglect Information offers statistics on child abuse.
For data from the National Child Abuse and
Neglect Data System:
www.calib.com/nccanch/database/
Books
where teen voices ring true
At 63, Walter Dean Myers is still on a youth beat.
Author: Walter Dean Myers
Awards: Margaret A. Edwards Award for his
contribution to young adult literature; five-time winner of
the Coretta Scott King Award.Two of his books,
“Scorpions” and “Somewhere in the Darkness” are
Newbery Honor Books.
T H E
— Joan Hennessy
2 0 0 1
Those he interviewed were capable of separating themselves
from their actions.This is a key to “Monster.”The main character, Steve Harmon, “is thinking of himself as a good person
and viewing his actions as morally neutral,” Myers said.
Myers wrote Steve as a sympathetic character. His parents
care about him. But he’s confronted by temptation. In fact, he’s
surrounded by it in his Harlem neighborhood.
“You have a community where crime is acceptable,” Myers said. “This is what happens with
Steve. …That is a major problem with
young people. If crime is acceptable, it
becomes much more difficult to say no.”
As he talked to juveniles, Myers said,
“I…got the impression that the topic of
the morality of what they were doing was
never brought up to them. It was never a
formal topic. Every time it was brought
up, it was new, it was fresh.There was no
overriding concept.”
So part of the problem isn’t just that
young people are doing something wrong,
he said. Adults are not putting moral questions in front of them.
One of Myers’ goals is to “elevate the
level of conversation, so that young people
begin to understand that there are things
that we consider right and wrong. It’s not
simply a matter of the legal issue. So often
kids don’t seem to understand that something is just wrong, and it’s not a matter
of them being caught.There are things that we consider right
and wrong.”
And there are consequences, too. At one point in the story
an older prisoner tells Steve:
“They got to give you some time. A guy dies and you get time.
That’s the deal.Why the hell should you walk? And don’t give me
‘young.’Young don’t count when a guy dies.Why should you walk?”
The story ends with Steve pondering his actions.When a
prosecutor used the word “monster” to describe him, was she
right? There is not a clear-cut ending here.
B E A T
His many stories portray the lives of
Harlem-area boys: a 14-year-old
trying to connect with a long-jailed
father. A young man who failed to
get into college, so he volunteered for
service in Vietnam.
The tales may be fictional, but the
boys’ voices ring true.That’s the key
to Myers’ decades-long
success in
writing books about coming of age in
the city for an audience of young
adults and children.
Consider “Monster.” The 1999 book
has drawn acclaim for its dead aim
depiction of a teen-ager charged as an
accomplice in a murder, a lookout in a
robbery gone wrong.
From the first sentence onward,
“Monster” is convincing. Part of the book
is written as a diary in the voice of the
central character, Steve Harmon.
“The best time to cry is at night, when the
lights are out and someone is being beaten up
and screaming for help.That way even if you
sniffle a little they won’t hear you. If anybody
knows that you are crying, they’ll start talking
about it and soon it’ll be your turn to get beat up
when the lights go out.”
Before his arrest, Steve wanted to be a filmmaker.
He was a student at an arts school. And so as his trial progresses,
he imagines it as a film.The trial is written as if it is Steve’s
screenplay.
Myers said his ability to capture the voice and mood of the
teens he writes about is an end product of his research. He
attended trials and interviewed inmates before writing
“Monster.” His research began with a broad focus.
“I wasn’t that sure what I was doing,” he said. “I knew I
wanted to find out why so many young people were in jail.
Something’s wrong here. Something’s wrong.”
He turned his attention to the issue of recidivism. A question formed: Since you know what prison is like, why do you
do something that brings you back?
But as he conducted the interviews, Myers said the central
question changed: How could you do something so wrong that
got you in jail in the first place?
He interviewed people who had committed murder, but still
thought of themselves as good people. “How could you kill
somebody and think of yourself as a good person?” Myers
asked. “They said, ‘I’m a good person, but this happened, that
happened, this happened.’…It came up over and over again.”
33
This Just In
Updates From Our
Fellows
After 22 years at the
San Jose Mercury News,
Joann Jacobs (1998
Casey Medal winner;
1995 national and 1998
regional conferences)
has left the paper. She
spent the last 16 years as Jacobs
an editorial writer and
columnist.
Jacobs is working on a book about
the creation of a charter school and
other projects.
“And I got a teaching offer from a
guy on the exercycle at the Y,” Jacobs
said, adding that she had already known
the political science professor who
extended the offer. “So I’m going to give
it a shot. Just getting off the freeway
should do wonders for my nerves.”
Stay in touch with her through her
Web site: www.readjacobs.org
2 0 0 1
T H E
B E A T
34
San Jose’s freeways have yet to unnerve
Jessica Portner (1998 national conference), who has left Education Week to
join the Mercury News. Portner will cover
education, and expects to report on
health, crime and juvenile justice issues
as well.
Steven Manning (2000 national conference) recently signed a book contract
with St. Martin’s Press. Look for his book,
“Kids For Sale: How Corporations Are
Buying Their Way Into America’s
Schools” in early 2002. Manning jokes
that a screenplay can’t be far behind.
Happy in her work is
one way to describe
Colorado Springs
Gazette child/family
reporter Ovetta
Sampson (2000
national conference).
Sampson
“Though I’ve been a
reporter for six years, it
wasn’t until last year when I felt
comfortable as a writer.That’s because I
started covering children and families for
the Gazette’s Feature section,” she wrote.
Sampson says “top editors are dedicated to the beat, and coverage of stories
on teens, child care and foster families
have moved from features to A1.” She
thanks the CJC for helping her with
sources, and providing “a much needed
link to other reporters who are covering
this expansive and complicated beat.”
We gave him a week in
Washington, but Eric
Elkins (2000 national
conference), editor of the
Denver Post Colorado
Kids’ Page, may have
gotten a better deal for
Elkins
the winter. Elkins and a
13-year-old section
correspondent, Philip Pauli, spent a week
in Hawaii reporting on the JASON
project, an underwater expedition
conceived by Titanic explorer Robert
Ballard and uplinked to classrooms.
Elkins, a former teacher, wrote articles on the project for the Post’s main
section as well.
Washington, D.C.’s foster care system.
Eight of their stories ran on A1.
Jane Blotzer, who wrote many editorials on issues concerning children and
families during the past decade for the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is moving to
Connecticut later this year. Her husband,
Mark S. Murphy, will become editor
of Golf World Business, a publication of
the New York Times Co.
Blotzer will continue to write for the
paper for an indefinite period. Her work
for the Post-Gazette has won numerous
awards, says Post-Gazette colleague
Barbara White Stack.
Clare Nolan is leaving the online world
to return to her first love, television. She
had been covering welfare as a senior
reporter for stateline.org, and is now
freelancing as a television documentary
writer and producer. Nolan has lined up
work with National Geographic
Television, for whom she worked as a
scriptwriter before joining stateline.org.
Prior to that, she was on the staff of
CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
“Believe it or not, I received most of
my journalism training in television,”
said Nolan. “And I miss it. But I will be
keeping an eye on the welfare beat and
will keep writing about it.”
More Beat News
Four winners of the 2000 Casey Medals
will receive grants of up to $2,000 to
enrich their reporting on issues affecting
children and families. Receiving grants
are a Newsday investigative team, headed
by reporter Brian Donovan, Jondi
Gumz of the Santa Cruz County Sentinel
and Portland (Maine) Press-Herald
reporter Barbara Walsh.
Walsh plans to start her project
during her four-month maternity leave
from the Portland paper. She filed the
last of her occasional features on teen
issues on Dec. 31, and recently gave birth
to her second child, Nora.Walsh is
married to Press Herald acting Manager
Edior Eric Conrad.
Casey Medals
for Meritorious
Journalism
are awarded each fall to journalists from
11 categories.The top prize is $1,000,
and winners become eligible to receive
travel/study grants for the following
year. Deadline for this year’s contest
is August 1, 2001.
The first story about the murder of 23month-old Brianna Blackmond ran
inside the Washington Post’s metro section
last January.The toddler, who had lived
much of her life in a foster home, was
killed shortly after being returned to her
mother's care. By the end of last year,
metro reporters Sari Horwitz, often
writing with Scott Higham, filed 23
stories on the shrouded decisions made
in Brianna’s case, and turmoil in
After working for a year as an
editorial assistant for the
Boston Herald Lifestyle
section, Cara Nissman was
recently named the paper’s
new teen beat reporter. Her
Nissman
weekly column covers a
range of teen issues, from
fashion trends and college applications
to interfaith families and drug abuse.
This Just In
March 23 Application deadline for CJC regional conference in New Orleans: “Risky Business: Covering
Adolescent Health.” Open to
journalists from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia,
Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee. Info: 301-699-5133;
[email protected]; or www.casey.umd.edu.
April 10 Application deadline for CJC national conference, “Covering America’s Working Families.” Open to all
professional journalists. Info: 301-699-5133;
[email protected]; or www.casey.umd.edu
June 11–15 CJC national conference, “Covering America’s
Working Families,” College Park, Md. (outside of
Washington, D.C.).
B E A T
August 1 Entry deadline, Casey Medals for Meritorious
Journalism. Info: www.casey.umd.edu.
April 20–21 CJC regional conference, “Risky Business:
Covering Adolescent Health,” New Orleans, La.
T H E
Share Your News!
Keep us posted on your stories, beat and job changes and
other developments in your life. Send clips and notes to
The Children’s Beat, CJC, 4321 Hartwick Road, Suite 320,
College Park, MD 20740. Fax: 301-699-9755.
E-mail: [email protected].
March CJC newsroom training
2 0 0 1
Subscribe to The Children’s
Beat (yes, it’s still free!)
In order to take advantage of preferred postage rates,
CJC needs to begin recording subscription requests for
The Children’s Beat. Even if you’ve been receiving it for
years, please take a moment to send us an e-mail or
subscribe online. (www.casey.umd.edu).
To use e-mail, send a message to:
[email protected] subject line should read:
Subscribe to The Children’s Beat. In the body of the
message, simply write your name and mailing address.
Deadline: April 20, 2001.
CJC Datebook
With seminars behind them, fellows in the 13-member inaugural class of Journalism Fellowships in Child & Family Policy
are focusing on projects.The fellowships are a separate, sister
program of CJC, based at the University of Maryland and run by
former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Carol Guensburg.
The program’s three and six-month policy fellows are
reporting on a range of topics:
Stacy Hawkins Adams of the Richmond Times-Dispatch is
addressing health insurance. Sue Horton, who stepped down
in late November as editor of the L.A.Weekly, is examining
perceptions about American teens. Barbara White Stack of
the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is exploring the impact of opening
juvenile court to news media. Jean Hopfensperger of the
Minneapolis Star Tribune is looking at family income. Sarah S.
Karp of The Chicago Reporter is reporting on drug-abusing
mothers and their children, and Dawn Miller of the Charleston
(W.Va.) Gazette is scrutinizing foster care and juvenile justice
issues. Ruth Teichroeb, who returned to the Seattle PostIntelligencer in January after weeks on strike, is investigating
child-abuse issues.
Sue Ellen Christian, public health reporter for the Chicago
Tribune, joined in two seminars while pursuing immersion
studies at the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development in Bethesda, Md.
The program’s one-week fellows included:
Pat Etheridge, former parenting correspondent for CNN;
Linda Lantor Fandel, deputy editorial-page editor of The Des
Moines Register; Kristen King, education reporter for The
Advocate in Baton Rouge, La.; Jennifer Rose Marino, education reporter for the Savannah Morning News; and Mary K.
Reinhart, reporter for the Tribune in suburban Phoenix. Several
policy fellows have CJC fellows as well.
For more details, see www.child-family.umd.edu.
35
Covering America’s
Working Families
JUNE 10–15, 2001
The issues affecting America’s working families cross every beat, from economics and
politics to education and child welfare. Enrich your reporting as one of 30 professional print and
broadcast journalists selected to examine critical social trends.
National researchers and policy-makers will address family structure, income,
health, political involvement and children’s lives. Return to the newsroom
with fresh story ideas and vetted sources.
Application Deadline: April 10, 2001
Fellowships cover lodging, meals, materials and a travel subsidy to Washington, D.C.
To apply, send the following to Beth Frerking, director, at the address below:
■ a biographical sketch
■ a brief statement of why you want to attend the conference
■ a short nominating letter from a supervisor
C AS E Y
J OURNAL I S M
C E NTE R
O N C H I L D R E N A N D FA M I L I E S
4321 Hartwick Rd., Suite 320 • College Park, MD 20740
301-699-5133 • Fax 301-699-9755
[email protected] • www.casey.umd.edu
A program of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and The David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
CASEY
JOURN ALISM
CENTER
ON CHILDREN AND FAMILIES
4321 Hartwick Rd., Suite 320
College Park, MD 20740

UMD.ChildrenBeat.01-03.FA (Page 1)

Transcription

Similar documents

Workshop 1C

Georgy-Porgy

McDade Park, Scranton, PA

McDade Park, Scranton, PA

Athletic Newsletter February 19, 2015

17magazine`s

No Body`s Perfect - Christian Schools Australia

7:07 Attending: Matt Biscan, Matt Fisher, Melissa Nilles, Suzanne

The Rampage - Worth County Schools

FIFTH DIMENSION - University of California, San Diego