Now, this pile of crap inevitably focuses on an American Mary Poppins
traipsing off to the far corners of the earth for the salvation of humanity. Last week, I believe it was a Playboy bunny that decided to dedicate her life—and a great portion of her husband’s wealth—to opening orphanages and schools for the poverty stricken children of Haiti. There have been other tales, of course, but the formula remains the same. Gracious American selflessly dedicates life to aide impoverished children in some bum-fuck country no one has ever heard of, much less visited.

And while I’m sure these Sally Struthers stories strike a chord in the
American public, warming their little hearts while they heat up Monday night meatloaf, I find them revolting. They spread the idea that horrific lifestyles for children only occur in far off places, a CNN Never-Never Land, if you will, and that the American Peter Pan must sail off to rescue the children from the ubiquitous Captain Hook of Poverty. Unfortunately, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. In America the Great’s streets, children are dying. Slowly. Painfully. And the manners of their death are far more horrific than starvation.

Three years ago, I undertook the project of formulating and running the Frontline AIDS Project. I’ll spare you the explanations, safe to say that it’s a program striving for a realistic approach to the education and prevention of HIV/AIDS contraction. In the midst of this project, I stumbled across Sydney.

Allow me to introduce you. Sydney was twelve. She was beautiful, in that way little girls are before they transcend to women. And she was dying.

I was brought into a state mental facility, where Sydney had been living for two weeks, after being ripped out of her home. Mommy was dead, you see, and Daddy had special uses for his little girl. Once Sydney was “rescued” by the slow moving machine of social services, she was no longer considered mentally competent. This is where I come in—my job is to try and reach the unreachable, and figure out what the hell to do with the short period of time they have left on this planet.

Shall I tell you of initial meeting? How she sat at a table, a small girl with auburn hair, smoking a Marlboro Light? How she looked at me, grinned, and attacked, how she blistered the skin on my right arm with the lit tip of her cigarette?

Or shall I tell you of what came after? After the orderlies “sedated” her with a single shot, reducing her to a drooling vegetable? While she was unconscious, we examined her. I watched as the attending physicians stripped that child, and examined her body, searching for evidence of what had been done to her, what had reduced her to a maniac.

What we found was beyond horror. Sydney, who weighed 92 lbs, measured four feet and three inches in length, had been mutilated. Her back was coated in scar tissue, resulting from at least six years of torture. The scar patterns indicated at least 76 cigarette burns, 48 whip lashings and numerous razor slices. One clear patch at the base of the child’s spine bore an amateur tattoo, which read, “Born to Die”.

Sydney’s torso had also been marked. A Y-incision, extending from the tip of each collarbone, joining diagonally at the bottom of the sternum and extending in a straight line to the pubis comprised a scar representing that of an autopsy. The branding had obviously been ritualistically carved into the flesh.

Sydney’s right nipple had been removed. Three fingers from her left hand her missing, as where two toes from her right foot. Both wrists and ankles bore scars representing years of rope burn, chains and blood.

And the genital mutilation…what had been done to this child reduced me to state of grief and rage such as I had never known. Her vaginal lips showed signs of repeated suturing and tearing. In essence, she had been sewn shut, and then ripped open, repeatedly. Her clitoris had been removed. Cigarettes had been used to sear her inner labia, and the cumulative scar tissue had grown to a point where Sydney’s urethra was blocked. An emergency surgery for the insertion of a urostomy bag was scheduled. This child would never again urinate without the aide of modern science.

Of course, that was all icing on the cake. The real horror couldn’t be seen, except through a microscope, in her blood. Sydney carried the HIV virus, and had already deteriorated into full blown AIDS. Her T-cell count hovered at 32. Any therapy to repair her damaged mind, any surgeries to correct her mutilations were redundant. Sydney would not live another six months.

This is the kind of child I am frequently confronted with. One who has no chance of survival, and a minimal chance of mental recovery. The therapeutic process would require at least three years of consistent treatment for Sydney to regain her sanity…and she had less than six months to live. No point in putting her through the foster care system, for what family would take a violent, diseased child? No money to keep her in a private institution, leaving her at the mercy of a system that noticed her a bit too late.

Eventually, we contacted Sydney’s grandmother, who agreed to break her
retirement trust fund and pay for Sydney’s private care. I spent three afternoons a week with the child, drawing and writing, and attempting to provide anything that would give Sydney a moment of peace. She was frequently violent, and intolerant of men. But she was smart. Dear God, that child was smart. Before my eyes, she would transform herself from a scared child to a worldly woman with insight and witty commentaries on all manner of subjects.

Sydney did not die from AIDS, or AIDS related illnesses. Six weeks after I made her acquaintance, she began showing symptoms of AIDS related pneumonia. Two days following the appearance of those symptoms, Sydney took the craft kit I had given her from its shelf in her closet and removed the scissors.

Children’s scissors are blunt, and plastic coated. I cannot imagine how long it must have taken her to cut through the skin, or the pain that caused. The coroner informed me that she shoved the tip of the instrument deep into a shallow cut on her inner left forearm, perforating muscle and flesh, and then jackknifed the tool up, and cutting along. Sydney cut apart her arm the way most children carve paper dolls from their cardboard homes.

She bled out in less than a minute.

Sydney was twelve. Sydney was beautiful. Sydney committed suicide.

Sydney lived in America. She lived in the suburbs, a middle class
neighborhood with three bedroom homes, redwood fences and block parties. Her father was a retail store manager, and their income was secure.

She was an American child, ignored by an American system, slaughtered by an American man.

I cannot think of a more horrible death than the one Sydney suffered, or a more agonizing life. It happened here, in America. It’s still
happening…her story is one of many I could tell. Every day, we find them; babies abandoned on bus stops, children taken from their homes, victims of a holocaust with no name.

Every day of my life, I’m reaching out to another Sydney, and another Sydney is falling away.

Lauren E. Jones
Frontline AIDS Project
Founder and President

Otherwise known as “Lauren the Great (a legend in her own mind)”