Stunning Social Failure

 

What an incredible indictment of society, an utter and complete failure of parents and their extended families to give emotional support and guidance to young children.  And those young children, from infancy onward, left to their own devices to attempt to understand their place in the world that surrounds them.  A world where their parents have no emotional attachment and sense of responsibility.

Where, instead of security and comfort, the child is exposed to neglect and brutality.  A result of which a child who never in his life had any meaningful direction, no one to positively pattern himself after, anyone whose values would be a credit to society, is now, at age thirteen, accused of first-degree murder in the killing of his two-year-old half brother and the sexual abuse of another, five-year-old half-brother.

Children naturally enough know very little but what they observe and what they experience and what they suffer.  What has been done to them and considered normal, is what they have been given instruction to repeat, themselves.  At the age of two, Cristian Fernandez was discovered wandering a street in South Florida, naked, dirty.

He was in the charge of his grandmother, who was herself found to be in a motel room, shooting up cocaine, while his fourteen-year-old mother was absent completely.  His father was convicted of sexual assault and Cristian was sexually assaulted by a cousin, later beaten by his stepfather, who then committed suicide.

The State of Florida has decided in its prosecutorial wisdom in the search for justice to charge the boy as an adult.  He is, understandably, the youngest inmate awaiting trial in Duval County whose conviction of first-degree murder, if he is indeed found guilty, may bring him a lifetime in prison as a consequence of his actions.

This is a child who was horribly deprived of all the comforts and emotional support and societal, ethical and moral guidance that children have every right to expect.  That his direction in life has been morally depraved is the responsibility first of his family, and second - albeit at a remove - of the society in which he lives.

If the young boy is detached from what occurs around him, and reacts without anticipating what will result, it doesn't represent a mystery why that could be.  He should be brought to trial in a youth criminal court.  What this young boy whose needs were denied and himself abandoned to the fate that developed really needs is a return to the very basics of what it is to be a human being.

If rehabilitation is a goal for adult offenders of society's normatives, why would it not be far more of a necessity in recognition of the boy's humanity-  denied, for Cristian Fernandez?