A chance encounter with abuse gnaws the conscience

One Sunday a few weeks ago, I bowed out of a stroll around Lenox mall for a slurpy and a crash. Were I sitting idly or meandering through a crowded mall, I hope that I would never have to come to the defense of a child being beaten by his parent. Yet, that day I witnessed an episode of like abuse while onlookers, including me, did nothing.

Watch it with me: A woman and her mother are shrieking at each other. Cursing, poking, shoving, screaming accusations and threats. An ugly, horrid scene.

Through it all, a little girl, no more than 5, stands helplessly by. She begs her mother to stop. “Shut up!” her mother glowers. Then confusion, shame, crosses her face. She tugs at her mother. “Mommy, let’s just go!” Finally the child resigns to that indifferent, I’ve-seen-it-all-before look that says to the onlookers, “Whatever.”

Meanwhile, I sit there aflame in my anger, sad, but just watching. I almost step forward to intervene. What stops me? Perhaps fear that I would worsen the situation.

Undeniably, most of my reluctance is a product of the social more that says, “Don’t butt into other people’s business.”

Finally, the woman throws a package at her mother, screams a final curse, yanks her daughter and storms way.

The incident is over. The evil remains. It still festers in my head. Someone should have stepped in. I should have stepped in. I should have for the sake of a blameless child who had already seen more than enough. She had the right of innocent childhood torn from her and was forced defenselessly into the grasp of violence perpetrated by her own kin.

At 5, she was the one who had been compelled to stop an adult tantrum between her own mother and grandmother. And we all walked impassively by.

What should I have said to those women? Stop it for the sake of the child! She deserves an innocent childhood, not stamped out by people who are responsible for nurturing her! Look at her pathetic, hollow eyes, starved for love and protection! Whatever anger you have, the real harm was to your harmless child!

And they would have told me to go to hell.

Regardless, my butting might have contained something important to rub off on that little girl. Maybe she would have seen that there is a different way, that some grown-ups do protect children, that adults are there to provide safety, not danger, that the kindness and gentleness she witnessed from strangers might teach her not to repeat this horrible abuse on her own children.

Watching her struggle with them to stop devastated me. But I will never forget that look of “whatever” that crossed her face, as she bowed to living a life that was beyond her power to change. And the questions remain for the passers-by of that child’s life: Will we accept her “whatever-ness” as “none of our business”? Or will we use our profound compassion and power of caring to convert “indifference” into “difference”?