Sylvia - XIII: Coda

At a remove of fifty years, the story of Sylvia Likens is a commingling of fact and myth. 

It’s not likely we will ever have a complete picture of Sylvia and her life before Gertrude Baniszewski.  Only a few people who knew her well are still alive, and she lived in an era before people had the technology to overzealously document every other moment of their daily lives.  Even then first-hand accounts of the weeks the Likens sisters stayed with the Baniszewskis have a Rashōmon-like quality.  Nevertheless what we do know is sufficient to draw the appropriate conclusions, if not about Sylvia, then those concerning human nature and the state of society.   

It’s significant that the cinematic treatment of the Sylvia Likens case was titled An American Crime.  The inflicting of violence cloaked in angry self-righteousness upon people less able to fight back is quintessentially American though few of us will admit it.  It’s our seamy underbelly, the obverse of our Mom-and-apple-pie self-conception.  It’s difficult to think of a murder whose enactment was so protracted, so over the top in its cruelty occurring in another culture.  Recall that the chain of events leading to Sylvia’s death began as simple acts of bullying which subsequently escalated.  Violence and the threat of it is an institutionalized part of American life.  From the playground to the workplace to the street the whole calculus of American society is predicated upon exploitation of the weak and vulnerable by the strong and amoral. 

But before you have violence you must have cognition, a definition of the situation on both ends of the transaction.  The aggressor’s definition, of himself and his victim, is most often implicitly and mutually accepted.  The victim does not have a definition of his or her own because understanding is a function of naming.  Self-understanding itself is a matter of framing self-concepts.  We don’t understand what we can’t name.  Anything else is mere intuition, though intuition at its best can motivate discovery. Gertrude Baniszewski and the denizens of 3850 East New York Street defined Sylvia for themselves and used that definition to justify ending a young life. 

Why Sylvia was so passive in the face of the violence visited upon her will never be known though the theory she was protecting her sister Jenny is convincing.  I think Sylvia’s family was her whole world and she would have done anything for them.  If Sylvia sacrificed herself for her physically vulnerable sister it was from a deeply ingrained sense of responsibility.  Solidarity entails, no, demands sacrifice.  Sylvia would never have broken faith with her sister or any other family member, and I don’t think that under the circumstances any sacrifice would have been too great for her. 

Having turned the question of why over and over in my mind for many years, I am no closer to understanding the savagery of Gertrude Baniszewski and her confederates save to say that every walk of life contains a small percentage of what I will call “wreckers” for lack of a better word.  These are individuals with a nihilistic need to break things.  Or people.  In more affluent walks of life their destructive behavior may take the form of white collar crime, fraud, embezzlement, confidence games, and such.  Among the poor and ignorant it invariably takes the form of violence and physical destruction.   Society tolerates this behavior to a point.  Their misconduct serves a purpose for those living more gracious lives in that it permits them to indulge in self-congratulatory self-superiority.  And when their dissoluteness leads to murder?  We shake our heads, cluck disapprovingly, and more often than not do nothing further once the guilty parties are convicted and imprisoned.     

There will always be people who will question Sylvia and Jenny’s failure to report their own abuse.  This question is absurd on its face.  Even today, with mandated reporter laws and greater public awareness of child abuse and domestic violence, comparatively few victims come forward on their own.  Sometimes it’s from fear of retaliation.  Sometimes it’s dependency on the abuser when there is no place else to go.  Then as now it isn’t until the police are involved, most often when the worst has happened and someone is either badly injured or dead that abuse comes to light.  Together with the common acceptance of corporal punishment of children in 1965 the greater credibility of adults would have made an attempt to tell on Gertrude foolhardy and an invitation to even harsher treatment.  The sisters were in an untenable situation from the start.

We will never know for certain why Gertrude and Paula fixed their hatred upon Sylvia.  Gertrude claimed not to remember many of the events leading to Sylvia’s death, not that she was ever involved of course.  Paula has never offered an explanation following her statement to the police and she will undoubtedly carry her reasons to the grave.  I can only substitute my own explanation.  Sylvia was to the Baniszewskis what Noam Chomsky would call the threat of a good example.  She was proof that hard circumstances do not necessarily create hard, heartless people.  She saw the best in others and could not conceive that she would inspire the rage which was turned upon her.  Perhaps her manner was misread, though one has the impression Sylvia was as guileless as they come.  Even so, Marie Baniszewski testified Paula hated Sylvia because she believed Sylvia thought herself better than Paula.

I find it hard to believe Sylvia ever thought she was better than anyone else, even an execrable specimen of humanity such as Paula Baniszewski.  Sylvia Likens was one of nature’s aristocrats.  Despite her poverty, her rough surroundings, she possessed a certain innate grace which was anathema to her housemates.  Each of them, particularly Gertrude and Paula, was shamed by this.  They could not live up to her gentleness, her quintessential goodness, and so they had to destroy her.  Their crime against Sylvia was a morality play in which the moral exemplar wound up dead.  They killed Sylvia not only because they could, but because they needed to.   

This last point may explain their lack of remorse.  Sylvia’s murder is unforgiveable on this basis alone though it’s hard to imagine anyone directly affected by her death would be disposed to forgive.  The injured are under no obligation to forgive, and sincere expressions of remorse are rare anyway.  People generally apologize not because they are truly sorry but rather to avoid or mitigate consequences.  For the victim, forgiveness can be an invitation for further abuse.  Would Sylvia have forgiven her tormentors?  Only those who knew her well could say.  I can certainly understand why Jenny and other Likens family members were unforgiving.  Had I been in their place I would not forgive either. 

There was an abject failure of consequences in the Likens case.  I do not support the death penalty, but I do believe Gertrude Baniszewski should never have drawn another breath as a free woman once she was led out of 3850 East New York Street in handcuffs.  The others should have served their full sentences before being released rather than the minimum they actually spent behind bars. 

Perhaps the lesson of Sylvia Likens’ death is simply that it happened.  It was an illustration of both human indifference and the godawful baseness and brutality of human nature.  The village was not there for the child, and so she perished due to an absence of community accountability.   The inaction of moral simpletons like Phyllis Vermillion exemplify the inherent dangers of turning away and telling yourself it’s none of your business.   Sylvia and Jenny needed and deserved the love and protection of the people around them.  We did not care enough to save them from the tragedy which befell them.  We only cared about them after the fact, after the damage was done. 

The private nature of the family in our society is also to blame.  Our popular ideology extolls the family, and our laws safeguard its sanctity.  Combine that with our reflexive deference to authority and the relative absence of accountability of parents and caregivers and the nuclear family is rife with potential for physical and emotional abuse.  For every “normal,” nurturing family there must be several more where dysfunction reigns.  Absent greater transparency in the family child abuse and neglect will persist as one of our greatest social ills.

The passage of a half century has not lessened the emotional impact of Sylvia Likens’ death.  Much has been done since to increase awareness of child abuse but still not enough.  The ever-evolving concept of children’s rights has included protection from its beginning.  The legal dependency of children obliges not only their parents but their communities to ensure their physical and emotional wellbeing.  Every child has a basic human right to physical integrity which precludes the barbaric practice of corporal punishment.  Domestic corporal punishment has been banned outright by nearly fifty countries, and over the past twenty-five years strides have been made internationally to protect children.  The Convention on the Rights of the Child, though signed by the United States, does not carry the status of law as it remains unratified by the U. S. Senate.  Once Somalia completes the ratification process, the U.S. will be the only member of the United Nations which is not a party to the Convention.

Old standards die hard.  Ratification of the Convention in this country has been stalled by opposition from the Religious Right which opposes family transparency and whose policy preferences are to scale back or eliminate many of the social services which protect children.  Religious conservatism does not cause child abuse and neglect but the social climate it fosters makes it easier to conceal.  And to justify: The Baniszewskis loudly proclaimed their faith and virtue even as they tortured and killed Sylvia Likens and long after their convictions for the crime. 

Awareness is the first step on a long journey.  So much more must be done.  Will we have to wait another fifty years before we have measures in place that can decisively avert the death of another Sylvia Likens?

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar