We were at Lydgate at a friends Bd party, Leilani came running breathlessly. A boy has a crab, come quick mommy… i dropped everything and came along. I talked to him for 5 minutes, surrounded by 5 other kids, while the boy did not say a word, but kept playing with the crab, talking 2 legs off while we tried to get the crab. The Samoan kids were talking how it was OK to eat crab, but… The haole kids talked about pet crabs. Leilani tried to buy it for a handful of candy.
After i gave up another adult tried without any success, but after everybody walked away the boy dropped his – now useless – toy wrapped in a plastic bag. Leilani got it and brought it to me, and seeing its sorry shape really infuriated me. I tried to find the parents and when i could not sneaked away to put the dying crab back on the beach. Leilani saw me and came running, but when she saw the unwrapped crab started crying hysterically, I probably should have killed the poor creature to put it out of its misery, but I just held the sobbing Leilani.
We brought the crab to a more sheltered space where it hid under a log, and walking back Leilani picked up a big stick, and held it like a war club. I told her how violence breeds more violence and how it’s never a solution, how much trouble she could get into, and how much bigger the other kid was, and finally to aim for the nose… Nothing helped. I did not disarm her forcefully… Fortunately she is easily distracted and went for the birthday piñata instead, and somebody got the war club and hid it in the meantime.
I did finally find the parents after talking to everyone at the beach, and while talking I realized that the kid was a girl (a full-on cross dressing 10 year old girl), and also realized that she’d be beaten up without further explanation, not so much for torturing the crab, but more for getting another adult upset enough to bother the parents. Gender equality or not, we always raise our girls to be more nurturing, while torturing animals is awful when a boy does it, by a girl is even more shocking.
And while I had assumed before that the kid was abused himself as hardly ever does a kid develop a cruelty like that without abuse, my anger and sadness had prevented me from looking deeper… at that point I saw the girls eyes, and it seemed to me someone had been ripping parts of her soul off, like she tore off the legs off the crab…
Leilani did not hear any of it, nor see it from up close, to her it mattered that I had found the parents and that they understood and that the girl would be punished, the harder the better, but I still feel haunted by her eyes.