COMMENTARY: Child Abuse That Fools Even Experts

On a recent Huffington Post Live segment, a panel of homeless advocates, including The Doe Fund’s Executive Vice President Harriet McDonald, was convened to discuss a recent NBC News exposé about an organized ring of women who use small children as props to attract sympathy and cash from passers-by.

NBC’s report unravelled a series of serious and troubling aspects of this practice:

• The children are suspiciously docile for long stretches of the day in uncomfortable weather and on noisy subway platforms.
• The women with these children regularly change shifts and reportedly exchange children, as well.
• The women are not homeless, and have been followed, travelling in groups by car and subway, back to their apartment buildings.
• The women refuse all offers of real help from individuals, city agencies, and outreach groups.

All told, the practice of using these children as panhandling bait is directly related to the crimes of child abuse, child endangerment, and forced child labor. And yet the stories told by the women involved— and the sophistication of their scam— has managed to fool even some experts.

One panelist on the Huffington Post was incredulous, refusing to even entertain the possibility that these women are anything but desperate mothers, fighting for their children’s survival–despite video evidence to the contrary.

And that is exactly what makes this situation so difficult for our society and so untenable for the children involved: The images of these children and the women who use them are so heart-wrenching, so well designed and executed, that even experts in the field cannot distinguish the tragic facts of youth homelessness from the deliberate fiction of scheming adults.

And while the scam artists collect money all day long, the children’s situation remains exactly the same: exposed and exploited in broad daylight, on New York City streets, sidewalks, and subway platforms.

A scam of this nature is deplorable by every measure: it endangers children, it manipulates the public, and it draws valuable resources away from people who really need them. But when even experts in the field are duped, what hope does a child have for real help?