Two Child Welfare Workers Fired After Rolling Pin Beating Death

I have so many thoughts about both this story and the Franke/Hildebrandt case.  And they have a lot in common.  Really the Utah women are lucky that the children didn't die, is the main difference.  And the demographics.  Bottom line, all of these kids were living in hell because of the high-demand Christianity of their parents.  The two youngest Franke children barely survived.

Unfortunately people who directly experience violence in America are automatic casualties of both whatever abuse is inflicted on them, and then of America's toxic narratives.  There isn't much of a good or healthy way to talk about the life and death of this poor child.

It's obvious to note how much more attention the Franke children are getting, and how nobody knows the name Sayra Barros.  If you look at it from the superficial, identity-politics level that everything has degraded to now, it looks like just another death being swept under the rug.  Firing those two caseworkers means nothing.  They'll get other jobs.

But Ruby and Jodi had an actual TV show about how great it was, the way they treated children!  And the Mormon Church referred people to her multimillion-dollar home.  Jodi was looking to buy even more-secluded land to have children funneled to for "repentance."  The police found $85,000 cash in Jodi's home, which was child support for the two starving children.

Whereas Sayra's father and stepmother were just very quietly in a high-demand religion, not exploiting her financially or in the media.  And there was only one of her to take the wrath/be in the way of her stepmother's marriage to her father.

But showering Sayra's case in attention the same way the  Franke case is being treated would be highly problematic for a number of reasons:

• Sayra's family are immigrants from Nigeria
  
• They're black people
  
• They weren't famous child-raising experts in a huge, influential church before Sayra was murdered
  
• The prior complaints about Sayra's mistreatment were nowhere near as public as with the Franke kids
  
• The conversation in America already has never been balanced, and has only spiraled into madness in recent years;
  

and the kicker:

• Most of the discussion around "true crime" is gawking and exploitative piss-taking on the victims anyway.  That's the part nobody likes to talk about, and why Sayra's case isn't really ripe for that sort of attention.  It isn't about support or making anything better. Nothing wholesome comes of it.  It's about ad revenue.  Exploiting and screwing with minority immigrants when they've committed horrible child abuse will only play with one demographic, and they don't care what happened to Sayra because she's black.
  

The other thing that leaps out at me, based on my age and demographic, is how firing these two workers is exactly like weeding out those "bad apple" cops, which is what I grew up being told needed to happen as a white kid in the 1960s.  How did that work out?  Let's ask George Floyd -- or Philando Castile, or a lot of people.

Well as an old lady, I'm a huge fan of body cams, which would never have come to pass if we were still in "bad apples" mode.  I literally watch body cam videos every day, because I'm a believer in "your story, their story, and the actual story."  Not that people are necessarily lying.  But I learned running 911 calls that all the different perspectives of a serious event are needed, and they often conflict for many different reasons.  I know how untrustworthy my own memory is.  The more cameras, the better.   Because come to find out, it was more than just a few bad apples.

Meanwhile, exactly like with the Franke kids, Sayra died because her father deferred to his wife on however she wanted to treat the child.  Period.  Same with my dad.  "I abdicate responsibility.  Good luck, kiddo."  We live in a nation of heroes.

Like Ruby and Jodi, Sayra's stepmother used the child as a dark mirror for all of her own shortcomings.  I have to wonder what about any of this reflects Jesus, in what way.

Eve Franke, when she could finally be coaxed out of the linen closet after several hours, was brought in for questioning.  When she finally spoke, she said, "If I talk to you, it will only make my repentance process that much harder."

All of this is immensely helpful for me personally as a survivor, to see how these children truly believed it was their own fault, that they deserved what was done to them.  I recognized my mother in the Teflon denial of Jodi and Ruby, how they continued to blame first the children, then each other.  But I felt especially liberated by the children's pure acceptance of blame and responsibility for all of it.  How I recognized that.  How wrong it is.

The best thing about this is that Sayra doesn't have to deal with it anymore.