by Dahleen Glanton
No one spoke up for the 10-year-old girl. At least five grown men allegedly raped the little girl over three years, beginning when she was 7. And no one said, “Stop.”
Her mother and father did not speak up for her. No other relatives came to her rescue. Though they were apparently aware of her abuse, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services did not try to save her. Nor did Chicago police.
Perhaps authorities didn’t think her case was urgent enough to intervene. Maybe she fell through the cracks. Regardless of how it happened, she endured three years of torture while the predators roamed freely.
Brenda Myers-Powell wants you to know that stories like this aren’t anomalies when it comes to little Black and brown girls. This kind of abuse occurs more than we want to admit. She knows this because it happened to her when she was a child.
Myers-Powell told me about the time police arrested her for soliciting prostitution when she was 14. She was just starting out in the life but ended up in it for 25 years.
Someone could have stepped in to help her, but no one did. Police only made it worse.
“I sat in the back of a police car and was treated terribly,” she said. “I was a kid. I was scared. I remember what the police said when I told them my age. They said, ‘I don’t care about you,’ ” and then called her the N-word and “b****.”
“They pulled up to (police headquarters) and took me out of the car in handcuffs and locked me up with grown women. They treated me like a criminal, not a child.”
Now at age 63, Myers-Powell is a survivor. She co-founded the Dreamcatcher Foundation, a Chicago-based group that advocates for trafficking survivors, and she was appointed by the White House to serve on the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking. Her book, “Leaving Breezy Street,” will be released in June.
Stories like this one involving a 10-year-old remind her of how little progress has been made when it comes to protecting Black girls from sexual predators. It is not an isolated problem, she said. It is systemic.
It is exacerbated, she said, by the predisposition of police and child protective services to see Black and brown girls as promiscuous young women rather than children, regardless of their age.
“They sexualize our girls. They stop being little girls to the system,” she said. “They’re fast. They’re over-sexual. They deserve what they’re getting because of who they are.”
So, whether a Black girl is missing, sexually assaulted or murdered, it’s handled differently than it would be in other communities, she said.
We learned about this little girl because of the dogged reporting of CBS 2 investigative reporter Dave Savini. In February, he revealed the disturbing story of her abuse and how the system that’s supposed to protect children failed her, though officials knew she was in trouble.
DCFS was familiar with the fifth grader. She had been in the system since she was 6, and more than a dozen reports of abuse or neglect had been filed, according to CBS. DCFS was alerted to the abuses as early as 2016. Numerous calls, including from her school, were made to the abuse hotline, CBS reported.
Some of the men who allegedly assaulted this child were in their 40s and 50s. At least one was a registered sex offender. Police reportedly knew their names but did not arrest them. And DCFS never placed the child in protective services.
Registered sex offender Samuel Brown, 37, allegedly met the girl online and assaulted her in a Chicago-area parking garage last May. Though authorities knew his identity, police only arrested him just over a week ago.
Even after that, DCFS didn’t remove her from her home. Instead, the agency recommended counseling and parental training but never provided the services, CBS reported.
In another incident, a 22-year-old man allegedly took her across the state line to Gary, where he repeatedly sexually assaulted for days. Police traced him through his cellphone, but they charged him only with misdemeanor harboring a runaway and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, CBS reported.
In October, a 47-year-old man allegedly sexually assaulted the child in a motel on Chicago’s Southwest Side. Concerned employees of the motel called police, but according to CBS, they never took her to the hospital to have a rape kit performed.
DCFS took the child into protective custody and placed her in a psychiatric hospital in December. She was released to a residential care facility in mid-January, CBS reported. Her alleged assailant was not arrested.
These are the kinds of things we don’t like to think about, much less talk about openly. It is heartbreaking to learn that a child was used as a sex toy for predators over and over again. It is scary to accept the truth — that she is not the only one.
There is lots of blame to go around. But one person who should never be blamed is the little girl.
Dahleen Glanton is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
