Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

This movie , a documentary by Kurt Kuenne was incredibly, incredibly hard to watch. It starts out as a tribute to a friend who was murdered in the prime of his life and turns into something much more powerful. I don't want to give away too much as I think part of the emotional impact of the story comes from not knowing the end at the beginning. Suffice it to say it is about the many ways that the legal system can fail a child. Although it took place in Canada I think a lot of it probably applies to the US.




This hits a nerve with me personally, because I see this kind of thing all too often. Being a pediatrician means that I or one of my colleagues are often the first to realize when a child is being abused. Most of pediatrics is happy and colorful, but this is a slap in the face of harsh reality. Brain bleeds, rib fractures, femur fractures in a child not old enough to walk, and hand-shaped bruises are the dark underbelly of pediatric medicine, no one likes to talk about it but they are always there.

What bothers me most are not the obvious cases, the cut and dried, where in the end mom's boyfriend confesses to shaking the baby. In that case, I can go to bed at night knowing that mom's boyfriend will end up in jail and I can find the silver lining that at least I helped that child escape a bad situation. And perhaps in there I have helped stop the cycle and prevented that child from growing up to become an abuser him or herself.

I am bothered more by the cases that exist in the grey area, when there is no confession. Perhaps there is even no evidence of abuse, just a slightly suspcious story that doesn't quite fit. Or perhaps the social history makes you concerned that the child is growing up in an unsafe enviroment, or that one or the other of the parents is mentally unstable. Without clear and documentable evidence of abuse, under our current legal system there are often no grounds for removing the child from the situation. This means that usually you have to wait for someone to actually hurt the child. I realize that one cannot go around removing children from the custody of their parents on a whim but I wish that the laws favored the child just a little more. Child protective services will often get involved to try and monitor the situation, but the social workers and other people who work there are often overworked and severely underpaid. It is too easy for things to fall through the cracks. I'm terrified by the possibility that I may someday send a child home into a situation like the one in this documentary.

I don't really have any good ideas for how to fix this. I would just like to suggest to you all that you watch this documentary and maybe think about it the next time you go to vote.