"I wonder how many of those men in Congress and the Bush administration now preaching 'abstinence-only' were virgins when they got married?" It was an intriguing question that frankly had never entered my mind -- can't wait for the next press conference to find out.
But Jatrice Martel Gaiter, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, is good with questions like that. She also has given some thought to the problem that brought us together for a breakfast meeting this week in Washington.
Ah, yes, our town: where the federal city is preoccupied with Saddam Hussein, terrorism and Wall Street scandals; where downtown offices house assorted hired guns who now scheme to get an absent-minded mayor on the Democratic ballot; and where, far from the city's power centers, too many unwanted children and their errant biological parents are slowly drifting into the state of nature.
It is the last problem about which Gaiter and I confer.
There are no smiles. The nation's capital, I fear, has struck bottom: The neglectful and often abusive District government is bringing up our neglected and abused children.
Gloom, and news of the week, envelop my side of the table.
It started with reports of a 7-year-old boy who was yanked by the city from his abusive home and shuttled among seven institutions and families in a two-month span, only to end up in a city-sponsored group home with older boys who proceeded to sodomize him -- an act they almost got away with because the group home's assistant manager (of whom more will be said later) elected not to report the abuse immediately to authorities.
The week ended with additional disclosures of unreported cases of sexual abuse involving other boys in city-sponsored foster group homes -- young, brutalized kids taken out of unstable settings, only to be assigned by their city to dysfunctional group homes where they are further brutalized by predators.
The only comic element in this unfolding tragedy is Olivia Golden, director of the embattled D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, who manages, after each calamity that befalls children entrusted to her agency's care, to express wonderment that all of this is happening on her watch.
On the recent occasion of male child rapes, Golden allowed as how she was "surprised and saddened." Favorite words, as in "these are sad conversations," which Golden uttered last year while discussing the seven children under her agency's supervision who died in a five-month span, including a 2-month-old infant. The social worker had not visited the family for seven months and didn't even know the baby had been born.
But Gaiter and I did not meet to berate the city's child protection agency -- a perverse and unfunny title if there ever was one. Because when it comes to inflicting misery on children, the Child and Family Services agency and its contractors, who annually pocket millions of tax dollars, are not alone.
I look, as I write this, at a criminal history request form, which was submitted to the Metropolitan Police Department by one James Rice in connection with his employment in the city-sponsored group home where the 7-year-old was assaulted. It asks the police department to indicate whether or not he, Rice, has had any convictions within 10 years.
On the form, I see a D.C. police seal that is dated Jan. 16, 2002, and stamped with the words "NO RECORD."
It is a lie.
Thanks to Post reporter Sewell Chan, we know that assistant group home manager Rice has a criminal record that includes several convictions and imprisonment on drug and gun charges -- the sort of life experiences that should stand in the way of foster care group home employment, according to city regulations.
Rice's criminal records were "sealed" in federal court, but they were inadvertently included in his case jacket at the D.C. Superior Court, I am told by a police spokesman who berates this newspaper for disclosing the truth. But, I ask both the police and later the U.S. attorney's office: How is a group home to know that it is entrusting the care of children to convicted criminals if evidence of said convictions is withheld and the police check presents a result that is at variance with the truth?
The law enforcement people do not know. Also unknown is how many other James Rices are currently employed in dozens of city-sponsored group homes where more than 400 District foster care children are placed.
Given the mayor's absorption with saving his own political skin, and sensing on my part that such an issue directed to Golden will only sadden her further, I suspend the inquiry.
I turn to Gaiter.
She is frustrated by society's penchant for dealing with problems on the back end -- when young women land on the welfare rolls with babies on the way; when youths are standing before the judge as perpetrators or banged-up victims.
She believes in reaching and socializing children and young teens before they become unsocialized adolescents and adults.
It is not inevitable, she argues, that boys from tough neighborhoods and parentless homes will become toughs themselves or that girls born into homes without attachment to well-grounded parents can't themselves grow into young women who care about their studies, their bodies and their futures.
"But you can't turn a child's life around simply by handing her a Bible or by sending him away for a prayer weekend," said Gaiter, a person of faith herself. "To stop the cycle of bad parenting that is destroying our community and producing kids who end up in foster care requires behavioral changes." Producing that kind of transformation in young people requires consistency, sustained involvement and, above all, the investment of time, she said.
"A lot of sex is being had in our local area," Gaiter observed, "and it's not being done responsibly." The city's teen birthrate is more than twice the national average, and the incidence of the venereal disease chlamydia among females between 15 and 24 is more than three times the national average -- almost an epidemic, she said. Teens in the District, noted Gaiter, are among the new faces of AIDS.
She thinks it's long past time for us to summon up our courage and start telling girls and boys the truth about sexual health, teen pregnancy prevention and responsible sexuality. Gaiter points to a public housing community in one of the city's most impoverished areas where, for nearly 10 years, Planned Parenthood has been working with a group of young women at risk for teen pregnancy. Most of their moms were teen parents.
"We recently reunited these girls, and out of 60 program participants, only one of these young women had become a teen mother," she said. "That can happen across the city."
And, maintains Gaiter, at-risk preteen and teenage boys, despite being poor and raised in tough conditions, can be just as successful in preventing premature fatherhood if they too receive the education, counseling and support of caring adults in the community.
But it means getting to them early and often with the kind of attention that convinces them there are people in their communities who need them, want only the best for them and are willing to put something on the line to make it all happen.
It's the element missing in so many of their lives that the District government simply can't supply: It's called love.
e-mail:kingc@washpost.com
