By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Tribune Reporter

Dr. Renee Ornelas remembers the child who learned to sleep standing up.

His parents were always too drunk, too angry, too gone to care for his baby sister, left alone for hours in her crib. He wasn't old enough to do much for her but to let her see that he was there, that she wasn't alone.

"So he'd stand next to the crib and rest his head on the crib and stay there at night to be sure she was OK," said Ornelas, an Albuquerque pediatrician who for the last 12 years has seen some of the worst consequences of what violence and neglect can do to a child.

Across New Mexico, there are other little boys and girls trying to protect their younger siblings from the violence around them that is often wrought by their parents and the other adults in their lives who should be protecting them the most.

"All children should be safe," said Ornelas, director of Para Los Ninos, an agency that provides medical care for sexually abused children. "All children should be in an environment that supports them. But New Mexico apparently doesn't view children as important in terms of that."

The question for New Mexico is what will become of that little boy and girl when they grow up?

"Many of those children who grow up in a cycle of violence learn to think and accept that it's OK to be violent, it's OK to be a victim," said Agnes Maldonado, executive director of the New Mexico Coalition Against Domestic Violence. "The cycle continues."

Fifty-six percent of adult domestic violence victims and 59 percent of the offenders in New Mexico reported that they had been abused as children, according to a 2001 Health Department report on domestic violence.

New Mexico's high rate of household poverty - the worst in the nation, according to the latest census figures - combined with other issues, including substance abuse, lack of education, rural isolation and lack of affordable day care, have turned the state into a battlefield, child advocates say.

But a child does not necessarily need to feel the weight of a fist to be hurt. Domestic violence between the adults in the home can have devastating effects on the child, Maldonado said.

"Our children, even the babies, are the silent witnesses to domestic violence," she said. "We don't realize how much they are picking up from us. But they are listening. And they are learning that even in their own homes this world can be an unsafe place."

One in six incidents of reported domestic violence was witnessed by a child, according to the Health Department report. Maldonado estimates that even more children are witnessing the violence because an estimated 50 percent of the incidents go unreported.

About a third of the children in state foster care whose cases were overseen last fiscal year by the Citizen Review Board were affected by parental domestic violence, according to the volunteer advisory board's 2002 report.

Repeated exposure to violence threatens children's healthy physical, intellectual and emotional development, according to a 1994 report by the Carnegie Corp., a research foundation.

"That violence touches a part of the brain, though these children are not able to verbally put together what they are feeling," said Anne Worthington, executive director of the New Mexico Child Fatality Review, which examines child deaths to help reduce them in the future. "That is a damage that doesn't go away."

Parents - particularly mothers, who make up the vast majority of domestic violence victims - often have little concept of the damage being done to their children by the domestic violence in their home, Maldonado said.

"Mothers will take abuse and stay with their abuser because they think he isn't going to hurt the children," Maldonado said. "When they understand that witnessing the violence does hurt their children it's like a light bulb goes on over their heads."

Neglect is another aspect that advocates say can crumble a child's feeling of security. In many cases, the child sees neglect as even more harmful than a punch or an improper touch, Ornelas said.

Forty-eight percent of the cases reviewed by the Citizens Review Board last fiscal year listed neglect as the reason for the children coming into foster care.

"We are horrified by child sex abuse, but if you talk to kids the most horrible thing to them is neglect," Ornelas said. "We as a society don't do a damn thing about that. But if you ask these kids to talk about their life they won't talk about being sexually abused or hit or hurt. They will talk about not being fed, about eating out of garbage cans, about having to hide under the bed because their parents are so busy fighting they don't have time to feed them."

Child advocates and studies indicate that a child's violent world can be made safer with improvements in four major areas:

Providing affordable day care.

Improving screening for abuse and neglect by the state's Children, Youth and Families Department.

Improving access to shelters and assisting abused partners to separate themselves from their abusers.

Discussing with children early on that violence does not solve problems.

The latter is an issue Maldonado is attempting to address.

Maldonado said she hopes to continue a youth domestic violence pilot program she began last fall to go into the schools and talk with students about the harmful effects of domestic violence and what they can do if they are around it.

Breaking the cycle of violence in families where for generations abuse was bred is a key element in domestic violence prevention, she said.

"We need to teach even our children that it's not OK to be violent. It's not OK to be a victim or to victimize," she said.

Maldonado remembers a high school student who complained about his girlfriend, how he wanted to hit her, how he didn't want to "allow" her to go out without him.

"He didn't even realize that what he was saying was spoken like a potential abuser," she said. "I asked him if he would want to be treated that way. Of course, he said no."

A younger student she recalled told her how his father pushed his mother and how he didn't like it.

But he had no idea what to do with his feelings about it or whether it was right to hit a woman, she said.

"In many cases these children have no adequate role models," she said. "The older teen, for example, came from a home where the father domineered the mother in much the same way as he was trying to rule his girlfriend. He hadn't even seen it that way."

About 14 programs throughout the state are attempting to educate the adults who batter. Of those, a vast majority are men, but a very minute percentage of women also abuse their partners, experts say.

But domestic violence education, Maldonado said, needs to begin at even a younger age. Grants are now being sought to help fund program as early as the kindergarten level, she said.

Maldonado said she is exploring ways to make such education more interactive and imaginative, possibly using puppets or plays.

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