The Death of Innocence: Taking the Life of a Child

February 7, 2012 by fidlerten

Yesterday I heard of yet another parent; a father, taking the life of his two young sons by burning the house down around them when they arrived for a supervised visit with a social worker. He allowed the two boys into the house and then blocked the entrance to the social worker who immediately called her supervisor, saying she smelled petro. The house shortly went up in flames.

Every time I hear about a situation like this where children are slain because of an angry parent or anyone for that matter, I’m always overwhelmed with the evil of it all and how someone could do such a terrible thing, especially to their own children. Then it doesn’t matter really, the very idea of harming children and even taking their lives carries a certain evil all its own.

Many of us ordinary people who love children can’t help but hurt deep inside over the death of children in such a way. For someone to commit such violence against a child is so unthinkable to our psyches that we often just need to find a place to cry for a while and for us religious believers, ask God why.

The only good thing about being a Christian is that we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that those children now are in the loving embrace of Jesus who loved children so much. Their killers, I can’t judge where they’re spending eternity but I have this idea that it’s in torment in a very hot place. Of course, only God knows for sure.

When I remember back when I was a child, I could never fathom at that time that someone could cause me so much harm. I grew up in a time when parents told their kids to just don’t get in the car with a stranger or take candy from a stranger. They never got into specifics for our young ears.  It wasn’t until I was about 15 years old that I learned about the true evil that someone could commit on a teenager, let alone a small child.

It was about that time that John Wayne Gacy had been caught up to after killing 33 young men. My aunt Genene at the time warned me about hitchhiking which I was known to do quite often. She told me that I could have been one of his victims, which shook me up a great deal. I became a lot more cautious after that, though it didn’t stop me completely from hitching a ride when I wanted to get somewhere.  Though the killing of those young men was very horrific, it doesn’t add up to the even more horrible killing of innocence that small children carry.

Children are abused all the time by their parents, terrible and frightening things are done to children out of some kind of misplaced anger. I had a step father who was a cruel man when it came to children. He would come in drunk and start beating us without provocation and for no other reason than we were some sort of punching bag that he could take his drunken anger out on. Fortunately my mother left him but only after my aunt; her sister, pulled up in her husband’s hay hauling truck and told her to pack her bags and the kid’s bags because she was leaving him. He was the kind of man that probably would have killed her and us kids; all four of us at the time, if she had stayed with him.

I wish there was something that could be done about people like the man who murdered those kids in such a horrible way but I’m afraid it won’t be the last time. There were warning signs but as usual, they weren’t heeded enough and two young boys had to die.

I do know that if we believe children are in danger, it is our duty as human beings, if anything else, to do something about it; report it to the proper authorities at the very least. I do know that if we don’t and something does happen as it did in this case, we’ll live our lives always wondering if we could have stopped it. That’s surely not something I want to do.

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Filed under: Child Abuse, fidlerten Tagged: child abuse, child murder, John Wayne Gacy, Josh Powell