When the police went to Vanessa and Raymond Jackson's house in Collingswood, New Jersey, in the early morning of Oct. 10, they were stunned to discover four boys aged nine to 19 starved to the point that each weighed less than 25kg.
Investigators were also shocked to find that three girls, ages five to 12, lived in relative comfort in the rambling rented house. While the boys were locked out of the refrigerator and fed a diet of mashed potatoes and pancake batter, the girls ordered Chinese food, took vacations with their parents to a time-share apartment in Virginia and went to medical appointments.
Disparities in the way abusive parents treat their children are not unusual, child welfare experts said. For a variety of reasons, parents or guardians often provide startlingly different care to different children.
"It is really not uncommon that we see kids that are singled out," said Barbara Wood, vice president of child advocacy and family support programs at Safe Horizon, a victim assistance organization based in Manhattan.
Often there is a cultural dimension. In cultures that prize sons over daughters, girls are more likely to be abused, Wood said. Or a stepfather might abuse a child who is not biologically his, she said.
But in the Jackson case, none of these factors seemed to be in play. All of the children were adopted or foster children.
"It is very unusual for it to be boys who suffer this type of neglect," Wood said.
Richard Gelles, dean of the school of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, said the extreme level of abuse alleged in the Jackson case indicated that the boys were unwanted while the girls enjoyed a better relationship with their parents.
"Where there is extreme neglect or extreme abuse that borders on fatal, those children tend to be unwanted, unrelated or of ambiguous parenting," he said.
"Caregivers treat kids more harshly who are not their own biological kids, or who are untimely, unwanted or have fairly significant developmental or physical disabilities," he said.
Such disabilities can lead parents to abuse a child even though the other children in the home are relatively well cared for, Gelles said.
Sometimes a parent will abuse a child because of a perceived personality flaw -- the child is too meek or too willful -- or sometimes for no reason at all, said Gail Nayowith, executive director of Citizens' Committee for Children of New York.
"It is a very complicated thing," she said.
"It is not necessarily a birth order thing, or necessarily a gender thing. It is usually about whether a child's temperament and a caregiver's temperament are in sync," she added.
Other experts said the adopted Jackson boys could be victims of a parent with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which the parent, usually the mother, pretends that her children are sick to get attention.
In the Jacksons' case, the couple told friends, neighbors and people who attended their church that the four boys had been born addicted to crack cocaine as well as suffering an eating disorder.
They also told friends that they had adopted the boys because they felt that, as born-again Christians, it was their responsibility to care for sick children.
While the Jacksons made elaborate claims about their sons' health, neighbors and friends said, they had not taken the boys to the doctor in at least five years, investigators said.
Law enforcement officials said they suspected a simpler reason for the Jacksons' treatment of their sons: money.
A senior law enforcement official said that it was unclear why the Jacksons had fed the boys so little, but that the investigation thus far pointed to financial considerations. The couple received as much as US$28,000 a year to raise the children.
"They looked at the boys as commodities," the law enforcement official said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion