THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 22, 1995 TAG: 9509220470
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 209 lines
It's not just the faces of the abused children that are seared into Betty Bryan's memory.
She remembers the fetal position one girl assumed when Bryan tried to interview her. The birdlike weight of a baby boy who had been fed only sugar water for weeks. The heart-thumping chest of the girl whose hand Bryan held during court testimony.
She remembers, too, the words of a 4-year-old boy who described in graphic detail how his mother had sexually abused him. At the end, he looked at Bryan with liquid brown eyes and said, ``My mommy loves me, but she hurts me. Will you save me?''
It is a question that Bryan, who spent 15 years as a city child-abuse investigator in Norfolk, tried to answer in hundreds upon hundreds of cases.
But the children didn't always want to be saved. And the system wasn't always able to save them.
And as a child-abuse investigator, Bryan learned to live with the feeling that she hadn't done quite enough. That one more visit might have unlocked the secrets.
``You're always thinking, `Could I have gone one more time? Maybe I should have gone for a protective order. Maybe if I could have interviewed the child a few more minutes.' ''
Yet her peers believe she answered questions like the 4-year-old's with a resounding ``Yes.''
Today, Bryan will travel to the Governor's Mansion in Richmond to receive the Dr. Anthony Shaw Award, a statewide honor given each year to someone who has stood out in working to protect children.
Bryan, 41, recently retired from Norfolk's Child Protective Services. She remains involved with abused children through her work with a local nonprofit group.
During her years as a child-abuse investigator, she was cursed at. She was spat on. Fists were thrown her way. She looked down the barrel of a gun while removing a baby from a home.
But, she says, the courage it took to work in the trenches of child-abuse investigation comes nowhere close to the bravery she's seen in the young people she's interviewed. .
``The children are all such troupers,'' says Bryan, 41. ``The courage these kids have . . . is tremendous. It takes tremendous courage to not tell anyone because you're trying to protect your family, and then it takes tremendous amount of courage to finally tell.''
Bryan's story, in ways, is the story of every child-abuse investigator. It's a job that's stressful but unheralded, a calling that's noble but often unseen because the work is confidential.
``She's a social worker 24 hours a day,'' says Gail Heath, who worked with Bryan at CPS, and who now supervises the region's child protective agencies. ``If she's away from work and sees a situation, she's not afraid to start investigating on the spot. She lives her life as a child advocate.''
Bryan traces her ability to connect with children to a long-ago experience. She was almost 3 when her father, who was in the Air Force, was killed. A neighbor found her crying on the stoop of her home that afternoon. She believes the loss gave her a lifelong bond with children in pain:
``I can identify with the grieving issues, and I can identify with losing a parent.''
Two high-school friends confessed to her that they'd been sexual abused. One later committed suicide. In college, she tried to learn why by taking sociology classes, which led her into the child-abuse field.
After working in foster care and welfare-eligibility programs, Bryan landed her job as a child-abuse investigator in Norfolk 15 years ago. It was exactly where she felt she belonged, even though the cases were unlike anything she'd ever experienced.
``For six months I took it all home with me. For six months I would wake up crying. Being in foster care didn't prepare me for the horrors I'd see as a CPS worker. I'd wake up worried about a child.''
One case in particular stands out in her months as a new worker. She had been on the job for four months when a call came in about a 6-month-old boy. The caller said the baby had been fed sugar water for two months. ``He told me the father had a gun and I should be careful.''
Bryan and a more experienced worker went on the call. The boy's father answered the door. Inside, clothes, empty wine bottles and beer cans were piled several feet high. A narrow trail was the only passage from one room to the next. Bryan asked if she could see the baby. The father walked them to a bedroom.
On the floor of the closet, a skeletal baby covered with feces and urine lay motionless on a bare foam pad. She asked to pick up the child, and the father agreed.
``He was light as a bird,'' she remembers. ``He weighed 3 pounds less than he did at birth.''
Bryan asked if she could feed the baby some formula she had brought along. The father again agreed. When she looked up again from feeding the baby, she saw the father was holding a gun.
``Now you've fed the baby, you can see he's fine, now you can leave,'' he said.
Bryan started to argue with the father, saying the baby needed to be in the hospital. But the more experienced worker told Bryan to give the baby back. Bryan gave the worker a look that showed she didn't agree.
``Give the man back his baby,'' the worker said firmly.
Bryan handed the baby to the father. ``Giving him back was one of the hardest things I have ever done,'' she recalls.
As soon as they were out the door, Bryan's partner said they needed police backup to take the baby. They called police, who met them later that day at the apartment complex.
The father was gone, but the mother was there. Bryan explained to her that they were taking the baby into custody. As Bryan was getting into the car with the child, she looked up to see the father running toward the car. He'd returned.
``Hit the gas!'' Bryan screamed.
Before the car could move, the man leaped on top of the car and threw his fist through the windshield, spraying glass everywhere. ``Hit the gas!'' Bryan screamed again, and her partner backed up the car just as the man pulled back his fist to deliver a second blow.
Bryan remembers testifying against the man, who was charged with attempting to do bodily harm. ``I was shaking all over,'' Bryan says. ``It made me think about all these kids who have to testify against family members in court. It must be incredible.''
After the first six months, she built up walls between home and work, especially once her initial illusions about saving the world began to fade.
She soon discovered the realities of the work: Families who don't want your interference. Children who view you as the enemy. A public who thinks you're either not doing enough to protect children or are unfairly maligning innocent parents.
``I assumed naively that if a child had been severely mistreated they would want to be away from the parent,'' Bryan says. ``But there have been kids beat bloody who I have carried out of the house who have bit me, kicked me, done whatever they could to get me to put them down.''
Children in the custody of the government are often losing their parents, their families, their neighborhoods, their homes. And sometimes they're shuttled from one foster home to another in the aftermath. ``You tell them you're going to take them someplace better, but it doesn't always end up that way,'' she says.
As the years went by, the pressures of the job escalated as the numbers and severity of abuse reports rose.
When she started work as an investigator, the abuse she saw was mainly neglect - parents who had trouble feeding, clothing or sheltering their children.
Over the years, the abuse became worse. She saw more scalding cases. More broken bones. More head injuries.
When she started, she investigated about 35 sexual-abuse cases a year, mostly involving teenage victims. Last year the statistics were closer to 40 a month. And 2- and 3-year-olds were just as likely to be the victims.
``It makes it harder to sort out,'' Bryan says. ``They say things in ways that's difficult to understand.''
The increase in severity comes in an atmosphere where workers are being urged to do more with less, to work smarter. ``But you can't cut an interview short. You can't skimp on documentation. There are no corners to cut.''
Especially where young children are involved, the pressure to get to the bottom of the story quickly is enormous. ``You have 45 minutes, tops. In 45 minutes you have to establish rapport, convince them you care about them as a person, make them trust you enough to tell you something they have never told anyone else, and then get the details.''
In 15 years as both an investigator and a supervisor, Bryan saw a lot of workers come and go. She remembers clearly a case in her last years of working as an investigator. This time, she was the experienced worker going out with the new person.
She and the new worker had to take seven children from a mother who was not cooperating. The police went with them and were holding back the mother, who was cursing and clawing and kicking to get away. The two workers ran with children in their arms, with the older siblings running alongside them to the car.
After the children had been handed over to foster-care officials, Bryan happened to walk by the new worker's desk.
She was reading the help-wanted ads.
For Bryan, it wasn't so much the stress of the job as the worry about her own children that caused her to finally call it quits on the front lines of child abuse last year. Her second child, who's now 1, had a problem with reflux - spitting up frequently - as a baby, and she worried about leaving him with a baby sitter. She decided to quit her job with CPS and take a cut in pay and benefits to work for the Child Abuse Center of Hampton Roads, a nonprofit group that counsels abused children.
That way, she could bring her son to work with her on some days.
``I know she misses being out there on the streets,'' says her husband, Wayne Bryan, a police officer who met his wife when the two of them were paired as a child-abuse trauma team more than a decade ago.
Although she still consults with local agencies on her specialty - interviewing children - and conducts training at two police academies, the pressure of investigation has been lifted. She's on the healing end now.
The absence of that pressure hit home on her first vacation. ``It was the first time I didn't have to worry that a child might die while I was gone,'' she said. ``I could go on vacation with such peace. I had never had that before.''
Bryan sits in a small office in Norfolk, at the Child Abuse Center where she now works, and flips through pictures of children she has investigated over the years.
They fall one by one on her desk.
One photo shows a little girl's buttocks. The left buttock cheek is burned and blistered; the other isn't. Blisters on the little girl's right hand match the blistered buttock.
``You could tell she had tried to cover her bottom with her hand when they sat her on a gas stove,'' Bryan says.
Another photo shows a little boy's leg with an steam-iron mark in red. ``You can tell this wasn't an accident,'' she says pointing to the edges of the wound. ``It burned through all the layers of skin evenly.''
Another photo. This one shows a toddler burned by scalding water. ``See the doughnut shape?'' she says, pointing to a circle of normal flesh surrounded by red skin. ``You can tell they held the baby down in the scalding water because there's a circle where the buttocks were in contact with the porcelain, and kept it cooler. That's malignant abuse, not a momentary loss of control.''
The photos, which she uses in training, are a window on a CPS worker's life.
``It's the children I miss,'' Bryan says, gathering the photos back into a stack. ``Not the abuse.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by BILL TIERNAN, Staff
Betty Bryan, a former child-abuse investigator for the city of
Norfolk, now works for the Child Abuse Center of Hampton Roads.
KEYWORDS: CHILD ABUSE by CNB