POLAND – Robert Chapman never intended to write a novel. Even as he penned the words to his first book, “A Certain Fall,” he wasn’t aware what he was creating.
Chapman had stories to tell, and as he wrote each one, he realized that they could not stand alone.
“A Certain Fall,” set in the 1950s, is an account of a family torn apart by abuse, neglect and alcoholism. While names and some details are made up, Chapman’s book is about a family he knew intimately as a child, and whose lives would eventually become a part of him.
“The astonishing thing was that it all really happened,” he said. “I couldn’t have fictionalized it and made it much worse,” he said.
The story has affected Chapman throughout his life, he said. “I think that the story is the most important thing to me. Whether it was well-written or not is up to other people, and everyone will always have differing opinions. I just wanted it to do justice to the kids.”
It was for these “kids” that Chapman spent a year and a half writing a book. He hoped that by telling their story, he could help more people become aware of the long-lasting effects of abuse.
“It takes a lifetime when abuse happens to kids. It doesn’t just go away because [they] happen to end up in a good situation,” he said. “The impact is still tremendous.”
That impact is illustrated in his book, as the children of the “tragic family” become adults who are unable to escape the haunting memories of their childhood, regardless of their current circumstances.
Chapman, a licensed social worker, has worked for more than 20 years in child welfare in various roles, including child protection, foster care and adoption. “A Certain Fall” has come to represent the discrepancy between what children in the 1950s didn’t have compared to what is available for children today in the child welfare system.
“Child welfare, back then, was relatively passive. It was there to capture those kids who were literally abandoned,” Chapman said.
The system received children but didn’t investigate and look for abuse, he said. There wasn’t a mechanism to bring children to safety because there wasn’t a child welfare system to intervene in an “aggressively protective way.”
It wasn’t until the 1970s and early 1980s that child welfare became a more aggressive system. During that time child protective laws changed on a national level, and the Child Welfare League of America was born.
Although he is now retired, Chapman, 58, stays actively involved in child advocacy. He continues to follow, with great interest, the changes in the current system, and occasionally speaks at workshops throughout the area.
When he is not doing that, he can be found spending time with his wife, children, and first grandchild, or working on his next book, “Spider Lake,” which he says is “shorter and a lot more fun to write.”
Comments are no longer available on this story