Rene Denfeld

"Jessica Kate Williams was 22 years old and homeless when allegedly 12 other homeless youth and young adults repeatedly stabbed her, set her on fire, and left her to die under a Portland, Oregon bridge on May 23, 2003."

So Rev. Chuck Currie quoted himself in in 2007, as Rene Denfeld's controversial All God's Children: Inside the Dark and Violent World of Street Families hit bookstore shelves.

Rev. Currie and others working in the homeless-youth-services trade, a growth industry in the '90s (like prisons today), were appalled by Denfeld's supposed sweeping generalizations of homeless kids painted violent and irredeemable.

(I'm reading the book now, and frankly I don't know what to think of it yet; it's riveting and well-drawn at least).

I do have a few early hunches.

Denfeld's book seems a formulaic journalistic exercise in its scope, a micro examination of a complex issue, which is fine. Inasmuch as the book focuses on one particularly violent street family and its murderous, Manson-like degenerate leaders, a sub-subculture of a larger culture (homelessness in general), one may understand the clerics' and service-groups' apprehensions about the book.

The vast majority of homeless youth is unaffiliated with ultra-violence, and I think Denfeld managed to cover her bases regarding that fact. She plunged ahead with her story, perhaps overstating the breadth of the subject. Though her intentions are laudable, as she draws attention to one segment of a growing social problem, it's difficult to imagine how to eradicate child homelessness in the U.S. without overthrowing our present orthodoxy.

Denfeld doesn't touch that one (yet, in my reading), perhaps because it isn't within her journalistic scope. Such redress would have created an altogether different kind of book, of course.

As it is written we get something less than a socioeconomic analysis, with sensational underpinnings.

Neither do the youth advocates and clerics touch the dominate paradigm; the good-hearted ones are brave and making real effort against a systemic ogre. But they're poking a stick at a gigantic, two-headed version.

The murder of Jessica Kate Williams and Denfeld's expose drew worldwide scrutiny in 2007. In my early reading of the book, which I began last night, I think the author has accomplished something important--she has set the table for a lasting debate.

Whether that debate resides in the present orthodoxy or propels a new agenda remains to be seen.

I wish I'd read this book earlier.


TS