THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, February 16, 1995 TAG: 9502160350
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 106 lines
She's still Julie Valentine to the police and people of Greenville, S.C., this little girl found dead in a Sears vacuum-cleaner box just days after her birth.
That's what detectives named the unknown infant, discovered the day before Valentine's Day in 1990. She and her bloody blanket were left in the cardboard container among wildflowers in an illegal dump off Interstate 85. The detectives wrote in their reports that she deserved better than the standard but anonymous ``Jane Doe.''
They couldn't find her parents, after a search that included tracking down all recent buyers of the same-model vacuum cleaner. They wonder if the mother could have been someone passing through on the interstate, pulling off the highway, giving birth and then going on.
But no one could fathom the unfathomable: How could anyone do such a thing to a new baby?
Now, five years later, heads are shaking again, this time in Portsmouth. Police and residents are wondering how someone could give birth to a girl and then toss her into the trash. She she was discovered Monday - again, the day before Valentine's Day - at the Southeastern Public Service Authority's garbage-processing plant on Victory Boulevard.
Police have no clues. And child-abuse experts agree only that such a mother must have been terribly, tragically alone with her unwanted pregnancy.
``That person's life must be totally out of control. And she must be hopeless and helpless and not have anywhere to turn to for help,'' said Katharine C. Kersey, a professor and director of Old Dominion University's Child Study Center.
``It's such an unthinkable action. And somebody must just not have any other options at their disposal.''
``No family backing. No support. Just a hopelessness,'' agreed Rae Coughlin, client services director at the Virginia Beach Crisis Pregnancy Center. Coughlin often sees young women frantic about pregnancies.
``That is a very desperate act,'' she said. ``It's even more desperate than an abortion. Because they had to hold it, in order to do that.''
Beyond that, child-abuse experts say it's hard to generalize about the mother. Abandoned newborns are considered fairly rare among the 1,200 children killed each year by abuse in the United States, but no separate statistics are kept on them, said Deborah A. Daro, research director for the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse in Chicago.
Bessie P. Abner, program director of Good Beginnings, a child abuse-prevention class in Portsmouth, sees anxious mothers-to-be from all income levels.
Most are young. A poor woman might fear not having enough money to support a child while a richer one might fear losing her social status. Shame, fear of parents, low self-esteem, unrealistically high self-standards, the fear of losing a boyfriend all could be factors, she said.
``There are a number of stresses that could cause somebody to do something like this,'' Abner said. ``The teen might want to correct it on their own . .
Once their babies are born, mothers who abandon them remain detached and don't allow bonding. Dr. Robert M. Reece, a pediatrician and director of the Institute for Professional Education at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Boston, sees it not as an act of cruelty but one of desperation.
``It's ridding oneself of a shame or burden or responsibility that is unable to be assumed,'' he said. ``I think the baby is seen more as an object and not a human being.''
Two abandonments so far this year in the Chicago area involved ``very young mothers who hadn't recognized their own pregnancies,'' said Dora of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse. ``They simply wanted the pregnancy to go away. Plain and simple.''
Both babies survived. Others haven't been so lucky in recent incidents in Hampton Roads.
In April, an hours-old girl was found wrapped in plastic in a trash bin outside a Norfolk State University dormitory. A 19-year-old student from Philadelphia is awaiting trial on murder and child-neglect charges.
In October 1991, another newborn girl was found similarly wrapped in plastic on a window ledge of a Hampton University dormitory.
A visiting 18-year-old Maryland high school student who gave birth to the girl in a dorm restroom was convicted of second-degree murder and given probation. But the Virginia Court of Appeals overturned her conviction last August, saying it wasn't proven when the baby died.
In the only other Portsmouth case in recent memory, an infant boy was found dead from hypothermia several years ago under a bush in a residential neighborhood, said G. A. Brown, police spokesman. The child never was identified, and no arrest has been made.
A name is all that police in Greenville, S.C., have been able to give Julie Valentine, and her case remains open. But she has become a symbol of child abuse in that area.
Valentine's Day vigils or memorial services mark her death each year. Activists used Tuesday's service to dedicate a permanent memorial to Julie Valentine in a city park. They're hoping to build something on which children can climb and play, said Terri L. McCord, prevention director of the Piedmont Council for Prevention of Child Abuse.
``While remembering her,'' McCord said, ``we're trying to celebrate children here now and trying to protect them.''
A local band wrote and recorded a song in the infant girl's honor that's used to raise public awareness of child abuse. It goes in part:
``Little Julie never learns a lullaby; loving arms will never rock this child to sleep. . . . Julie Valentine, treated so unkind; how can we be so blind to all the Julie Valentines?''
KEYWORDS: MURDER CHILD ABUSE by CNB