Erica Parsons: The Hallmarks of a Homeschool Child Torture Case

The story of Erica Parsons, the little North Carolina girl who was homeschooled, tortured and then missing for years, may seem like it has come to a close today as charges were finally brought against her adoptive parents for her 2011 murder. However, there is much to learn from the case, and Erica’s memory must continue to live on, especially as we near Disability Day of Mourning on March 1st, a day to remember disabled people who were killed by parents and caretakers.

Erica Parsons’ body has now been laid to rest in China Grove, North Carolina. Her remains were found by law enforcement in 2016. They were led to the site of her shallow grave by her adoptive father, Sandy Parsons, who, along with his wife Casey, disposed of the child’s body on his mother’s farm after the two of them murdered her when she was around 11 or 12 years old.

Sandy and Casey, prior to these latest charges, had already been serving prison time for fraud, which they were both charged with for stealing disability and state money meant for Erica, even after she was deceased. Law enforcement and the judge in their fraud case have long suspected that they were responsible for Erica’s murder, although both Sandy and Casey Parsons went on TV many times to claim their innocence, even appearing on Dr. Phil.

More details about Erica’s story can be read here.

Autopsy reports indicate that after years of abuse, the little girl died from homicidal violence, and her body was dismembered and then buried in a shallow grave on Sandy’s mother’s rural property. Erica Parson’s life shows all the signs of child torture, and a medical examiner stated that was indeed what she had gone through.

Torture is prolonged, severe abuse, and often includes starvation, isolation, and deprivation, among other abusive behaviors. Erica was starved and malnourished, had stunted growth, and her body showed many signs of severe abuse which had occurred over the years. The abuse was so bad that it was difficult for the coroner to say what finally killed her. It could have been strangulation, suffocation, or blunt force trauma. The final report indicated that homicidal violence of some kind is what ended her life. With a case like this, the abuse is so severe and ongoing that it is not difficult to understand how any number of abusive acts could have been the one that led to her death. The fact that Erica’s body was undiscovered for almost six years after her passing also made the autopsy difficult.

Patterns

Many aspects of Erica’s case are common among child torture cases. Torture and severe abuse often is carried out by the mother . From Time Magazine:

Elizabeth Skowron, a professor of counseling psychology and a research scientist at the University of Oregon’s Prevention Science Institute, says that in her group’s work, mothers are very often both the perpetrators and initiators of abuse. The NCANDS [National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System] data backs that up, with 70% of victims mistreated by the mother, the large majority of those times without the participation of the father.

In Erica’s case, both parents participated in the abuse, but it was masterminded and especially cruel at the hands of her adoptive mother. Mothers, stepmothers and adoptive mothers make up large numbers of those found to have been torturing children. According to the journal article Child Torture as a Form of Child Abuse :

-Typically both adult caregivers are involved in the torture to some
extent
-Women figure much more prominently as perpetrators of torture than in other forms of physical abuse
-Siblings are aware of and may be coerced to participate in the abuse, and also may be abused to a lesser degree

In Erica’s case, both adults tortured her, with the mother figure being dominant. Casey Parsons also encouraged the other children in the home to gang up on and abuse Erica, even making her adoptive brother Jamie break her arm, as he testified to during the fraud trial.

Another characteristic of child torture cases is that the victim has been placed in the home of extended family members in an “informal arrangement”. According to a study of child torture cases performed by the researchers in the above mentioned article Child Torture As a Form of Child Abuse:

Several children came into the torturing households through informal family arrangements. We observed that 79 % of the primary abusers were not the child’s first degree relative; they included such caregivers as boyfriends, girlfriends, aunts, uncles, grandparents, adoptive parents, and stepparents.

Erica was placed in the Parsons home through an adoption which occurred between her biological mother, Carolyn, with Sandy and Casey, as Carolyn was unable to care for Erica, and Erica’s father was a severe addict who was always in trouble with the law. Sandy Parsons was Carolyn’s former brother in law. Casey Parsons reportedly was not enthused about adopting Erica and took out her anger at Carolyn on the little girl.

Another aspect of Erica’s situation which needs further research in these specific types of cases is the fact that she was disabled. Readers of this blog know that disabled children are at greater risk of being abused. More research needs to be done on numbers of disabled children who are tortured, because there are differences in the psychology and manifestations behind torture than there are with other child abuse cases.

Erica had intellectual disability, and people with intellectual disability are at high risk of being victimized. Erica also had hearing loss, and deaf and hard of hearing people are also at a much higher risk of being victimized. Whether that victimization specifically turns into these types of torture cases needs to be better understood. However, according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE)’s database of homeschool child torture cases, Homeschooling’s Invisible Children, many victims were disabled.

Homeschool plays a vital part in child torture, since it allows the abuse to be covered and continue to escalate to extreme levels when the child is not around other adults who may figure out what is happening in their home, such as a teacher, principal or counselor. In one of California’s worst child abuse cases, outlined in the book A Child Called It, the autobiography of David Pelzer, David’s abuse at the hands of his mother was discovered only because he was in public school. That was in the early 1970s. Since that time, teachers and the public in general has become more intuned to child abuse and there has been better education about it. Although David was not disabled, he became so after the abuse.

Rising numbers of disabled children are being homeschooled, according to preliminary data, and numbers of homeschooled children in the U.S. continue to grow.

Erica’s story is extremely tragic, especially since no educational authorities ever checked up on her due to lax homeschool regulations. If they had, her story may have turned out more like David Pelzer’s, who was placed in a caring foster home and protected by authorities after his teachers, school nurse, and princepal figured out that something was seriously wrong. Like Erica, young David was starved, beaten and subjected to cruel torture at the hands of his mother for several years. He knew it would only be a matter of time before she killed him. The end results of torture cases is often homicide.

A perpetrator in a case like David’s or Erica’s will do whatever they can to continue the abuse, since they are gratified in some way by it. They do not have an intention of stopping, and will go to extremes to cover the abuse. In a torture case, that often means keeping the child out of school, and that is where homeschool comes in. Homeschool can provide a long-term cover for pepetrators involved in the most serious of child abuse crimes. Abusers know this, and are not above defrauding the state and everyone else to continue the torture.

This Disability Day of Mourning, let’s take time to remember Erica and every other disabled abuse victim who was murdered by a parent or caretaker and take concrete, evidence-based steps to end it, including more research in some much needed areas that sit in the intersections of disability and homicide.

Isolation, Deprivation, Torture, and Disability in Homeschools

The Turpin parents, shown in the courtroom.

Homeschool can play a vital role in one of the key elements of child torture: isolation. Isolation is necessary to sustain the type of environment where child abuse can escalate to the level of torture.

A uniform definition of child abuse torture has not been officially established, and torture previously has been defined largely in a political or state context, such as by the United Nations. Torture is consistently stated by researchers to be prolonged suffering inflicted on a victim or victims in order to for the perpetrator(s) to meet some kind of need. This need can be political; it can also be emotional. Torture in any context is long-term, severe abuse that can include several elements, such as deprivation, starvation, psychological manipulation, and neglect of medical problems. A major component necessary to continue torturing someone is the total isolation and confinement of that victim. Only in isolation can a perpetrator continue to get away with this level of mistreatment.

Without total isolation, a child or children undergoing severe abuse and maltreatment would certainly arouse suspicion from people outside the home who could potentially put an end to it, such as teachers and doctors. Homeschool is a way for a perpetrator to remove themselves and their victims from environments where the suspicion of authorities might be incurred. Homeschool also allows a victimizer to keep a child confined in a home all of the time. In many of these cases, very little education is really happening, and homeschool is being used as a cover for abuse. The abuse has primacy; everything else is situational, and an unregulated area of the law is being used to provide a cover. It can be quite easy to start a homeschool in many U.S. states, and there is no oversight or regulation involved, something which has been consistently pushed for by organizations like the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, a well-funded arm of the Republican Christian Right.

In every homeschool story I have written about in this blog, isolation is an important detail. The Naugler children were isolated in the woods. Erica Parsons was kept away from society in her rural home, Hana and Immanuel Williams lived in a rural, gated, insular religious community, and before that, they were kept segregated from society in an orphanage, and now, the thirteen Turpin children, who were chained in their house and “homeschooled” shows how it is possible to isolate, torture and deprive 13 humans even in a suburban neighborhood with neighbors close by. Many people have responded to the Turpin story by asking incredulously how it is that neighbors did not notice anything was wrong, and never called police. Neighbors should not be the ones relied upon to make these kinds of reports, and child abuse cases regularly indicate that neighbors do not really know what is happening inside another home in their neighborhood, even if they have suspicions that something is off. It is important to remember that victimizers of children will go to great lengths to not be found out, and it can be difficult to tell just by looking at a child from across the street or driveway that a severe level of abuse is occurring within their home. The optimal type of person to identify and report child maltreatment is found in a professional environment, such as a doctor, teacher, or disability support professional.

Disability and Torture

There is a further element of isolation and deprivation which occurs in a torture case when the child has a disability. Erica Parsons had hearing loss and intellectual disability, Hana Williams had PTSD, Immanuel was Deaf. When a person is Deaf, it can be tremendously isolating in and of itself if there is no sign language, closed-captioning, or capable people around to facilitate communication, let alone in an abuse situation, which compounds the isolation and deprivation that can come with deafness. Not providing access to deaf and disabled children is a form of neglect already.

Deaf children may not be able to speak clearly enough for hearing adults to understand, sometimes because they are too young, sometimes because those children were purposely prevented from receiving speech therapy or any instruction or support around communicating with the outside world. Adults who victimize deaf children are aware of this fact, and it actually benefits the abusers, as this story about a school for the Deaf in England, where many children were abused for decades, demonstrates. Not providing disability accommodations or language to a child keeps them isolated, deprived and unable to ask for help. This is consciously done on the part of an abuser, and needs to be understood within the criminal justice system as being particularly reprehensible, and a further level of victimization.

Another element of torture is neglect. Parents who commit child torture do not take their children to the doctor regularly, if ever; they do not get them disability related services or ongoing accommodations, they do not keep them in public school consistently or at all. The Turpin children rarely saw doctors, with some of the children reportedly not knowing what medications or doctors even were. Some may say this was a religious preference, others may say keeping the children from medical professionals, teachers, and other services was vital to maintaining an environment where torture could continue. Total deprivation, isolation, neglect and confinement are of substantial benefit to someone who is committing child torture. It is important to recognize how isolating children in a homeschool can allow all of these elements to occur, and to occur for a prolonged time until the victim dies or is close to death.

In many homeschool cases, the only time anyone found out what had been going on was after a homicide had happened, sometimes years after the homicide occurred. Erica Parsons was missing for three years before law enforcement had been contacted, and no one in the community was aware that she was missing. Keeping Erica isolated in a rural home, registered as a homeschool in name only, allowed Casey and Sandy Parsons to torture the child for many years.

The Role of Disability Law and Criminal Justice

If disability law is extended to cover homeschools in every state, homeschool abuse cases can be potentially found out and prevented. It is not acceptable to allow a disabled child to go without accommodations and access, no matter what your religious beliefs may be. It is neglect, plain and simple, and can cause physical pain and suffering to the child, and allow them to be vulnerable to victimization not just by their parents, but by many people, and keep them from gaining independence.

In the case of abuse, the presence of disability elevates and heightens the terror and pain felt by the victim.

The rights of disabled children to have disability access trumps the desire by parents to isolate, neglect, deprive, and abuse them. This means that the rights of children are more important than a religious philosophy, more important than any “off the grid living” mentality, and more important than upholding lax homeschool regulations. Disability rights are a fundamental human right. And ensuring that human rights are adequately enforced provides a way to potentially crack down on an area where many homicides of children, both able bodied and disabled occur: homeschools.

If a disabled child has the appropriate therapies, access, and medical treatment, this can alleviate stress on the parent or parents of the child. Parents of disabled children need support, and a disabled child needs to learn independence. Mobility aids, hearing aids, sign language, and a disability-rights based education can allow this to happen.

Of course, in the case of severe abuse, control, and deprivation, it is not part of the plan to provide a child or children with any support or assistance. The abused child is being used in a way that benefits the parents. It is not about the child’s rights or access at all. Requiring and enforcing disability access in all schools, not just public schools, is a potential way to catch perpetrators, and it is also a way to catch the absolute worst perpetrators, the ones who torture children.

Disabled children are often selected on purpose to enter into situations of abuse due to a variety of ableist and complex factors, and once in any number of situations, like a home or a school, they are more likely than able-bodied children to be abused. Hana and Immanuel were selected by the Williamses for adoption because they were disabled and it was considered more “Godly” and self-sacrificing on the part of the parents to adopt such children. Once in the home, the reality of having disabled children paired with parents who were already volatile and problematic contributed to the situation escalating to homicide. In the case of Erica Parsons, she was born with disability, and this most likely was a deciding factor in her being placed for adoption with her relatives, Sandy and Casey Parsons.

In the case of the Turpins, it is also likely that the deprivation, starvation and neglect the children endured caused psychiatric, emotional and physical disabilities, even if there were no disabilities present before the onset of the severe abuse. The timeline so far of the case is not entirely clear.

Disability needs to be understood as an element of child torture; something that is used by a perpetrator to further victimize, isolate, and deprive a child, and also as a characteristic that makes a child vulnerable to becoming ensnared in a case of severe abuse in the first place.

Both of these factors necessitate further regulation and law around homeschools, and better understanding of the role that disability plays in child torture and mistreatment.

 

The Turpin family’s California home, and [inset] a photo of the parents and their children. [image description: photo of taupe colored suburban home with van parked out front, in dry desert climate. Inset shows 13 children in matching t-shirts from Dr. Seuss’s “Cat in the Hat”, each designating a child as “Thing 1”, “Thing 2”, going up to higher numbers. They are smiling and posing together in a group. Faces of the children are blurred for anonymity.]