What happens when a human being grows up without experiencing love?
The answer is living and breathing in the form of a 12-year-old Leesburg boy who was physically, emotionally and sexually abused by his mother until he was 5, when the state took him away from her. For the next seven years, he languished in the foster-care system, his condition steadily deteriorating.
Sunday's column examined the life journey of the preteen, who is due in a couple of weeks to be released from a psychiatric hospital in Ocala. This is a turning point in his life, and he knows it.
The state Department of Children & Families seemed to kick into gear in 2009 to help the boy heal. Caseworkers stopped the never-ending evaluations, and instead started providing the kind of counseling and the specific type of home the boy should have had from the time he came into the system.
Still, the youngster was aggressive with other children, stole what he wanted, sometimes masturbated in public, destroyed property and failed in school, though adults know he is far from stupid. What grownups around him found the most difficult was his simmering fury that often exploded into uncontrollable rages and emotional meltdowns.
The boy spent 4½ years in a foster home where parents ignored his needs and kept him isolated in "a separate room attached to the foster family's doublewide trailer." Later, a therapist would state that the boy suffered "severe deterioration" in development, behavior and emotional status during that time. Caseworkers in October 2009 moved him to a therapeutic foster home, where parents are specially trained to deal with his type of behavior.
"The foster parents put their arms around him and said, 'We love you, and we want to take care of you,' " said one person familiar with the boy's case. "The reason it didn't work out is he didn't know what love meant."
By the end of 2010, DCF was out of solutions, and in February it finally placed the boy at The Vines, a for-profit psychiatric hospital. Almost immediately, he clicked with a therapist there and began working through the sexual abuse that left him so angry and isolated from the rest of the world.
'Highly sexualized'
And then, it happened again.
During a stormy therapy session, the boy told his therapist that his roommate had touched and fondled him. He didn't want his roommate to touch him, but he didn't know how to stop the advances, the boy blurted out.