A Child Called "It" by Dave Peltzer

This book was only 184 pages so I flew through it. It was a really difficult book to read as the accounts of child abuse were so bad. It is about his life from age 4 to 12.

Dave Pelzer had a wonderful caring and fun mother. His brothers and he had wonderful vacations and holidays together. As the years went by though his mother changed and turned into one of the most abusive parents I have ever heard of. It says in this book that at the time it was the 3rd worst case of child abuse in California . As horrible as the things that happened to this little boy I cannot even imagine what the other two worst cases were like. Even writing this I am sick to my stomach over what I read.

As I started reading the book I could not imagine the abuse getting worse but chapter after chapter his mothers viciousness grew and the intensity of the abuse got worse.

Dave's mother starved him for days at a time sometimes up to 10 days. He tried to find any way he could to get food. When his mother found out he was getting food from neighbors or stealing it she punished him by making him stick his finger down his throat every day after school to make sure he wasn't getting any. This part was extremely hard to read as the mother then scooped the food from the toilet and made him re-eat it. His father allowed his mother to punish him this way. Hearing that made my anger towards the situation so much worse. I just wanted to be able to go back in time and take this child out of the home and help him. I love my kids so much I cannot even imagine anyone treating a child this way!

At one point Dave's mother wiped his little brothers dirty diaper all over his face and tried to make him eat it. She dislocated his arm, stabbed him with a knife, burned his hands on the stove, made him swallow bleach and dish soap as well as locked him in a bathroom filled with a bucket of bleach and ammonia. So many of the things she did could have killed him. He had a will to survive because he knew if he died his mother would win.

Dave was not only abused in the worst way at home but bullied in school as well. Picked on for his dirty smelly clothes and beat up by other children. My heart just broke reading this book.

In 1973 he was thankfully taken away from his parents. There is a sequel to this book that I look forward to and dread reading at the same time.

This is the 25th book I have read in 2015.

I originally wrote this post on personapaper.com on June 4, 2015. The site is shutting down and I never earned any payment. I have transferred this post here on this awesome new blog site and deleted the article on personapaper.