With noon sun glowing on her freckled face, Claudia Ford sipped on a freshly made strawberry smoothie and glanced at three girls wearing pastel-pink tutus last Monday.
"Oh, my daughter loves to wear those!" said Ford, a visiting environmental sciences scholar at the University, with an excitement normally reserved for kids in candy stores.
She was talking about Vyanna, her three-year-old adopted daughter and the inspiration for her book, "Why Do I Scream at God for the Rape of Babies?", which she will be signing at Quest Bookshop today.
Ford is also a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa and works in international development.
Ford met her future daughter at a hospital in Johannesburg on Dec. 10, 2001. Just one week earlier, the five-month-old baby had been raped by two of her birth mother's male acquaintances.
The incident occurred in the baby's home, a dilapidated theater in Johannesburg that showed pornographic films around the clock and rented cubicles to prostitutes for $3.50 a night. The baby's birth mother, one of the prostitutes, returned that day to find her daughter in a mess of blood and in pain. Alone.
The baby was rushed to the hospital and operated on immediately.
"Your bedside is cluttered with official-looking people doing things to you and for you, women and men wearing the uniforms and impedimenta of their jobs. Stethoscopes, notebooks, cameras, needles and charts. Nurses, journalists, doctors, social workers and police. I ache to push the others roughly out of my way and beat a path to your crib."*
"I was feeling so many different emotions at the same time," Ford said, bringing to mind the moments just before she met her daughter. "I was horrified and I didn't really know what I was going to see. And the first thing I saw was a light beam in this little round face and these big black eyes staring at everybody as if she knew everything that was going on. It was overwhelming how small she was, and this aura of innocence that didn't square with the whole tragedy."
When Ford discovered the hospital was planning to release the infant, she volunteered to take her home.
"I felt I had to do something," Ford said. "To walk away from her -- I couldn't do it. I tried to come up with an excuse, but there was no way I could do it."
"Do children choose their parents? I always used to say so, half jokingly. Have you chosen me?"
The baby never cried. Often left by her birth mother for upwards of eight hours alone in the porn theater, the infant had learned crying didn't do much. Ford described it this way: for the first five months of her life, the baby "was the loneliest person in the world."
"She was a baby who had to learn to survive," Ford said. "And no infant should have to do that."
When Ford took her home, she gave the infant everything the little one had been missing. Stability. Comfort. Attention. Love.
"We quickly made her into a diva," Ford said.
"It took a few weeks of food, songs and stories before you felt secure enough to really sleep. Then you fell into the ocean of deep and dreamless rest that belongs to babies, sinking into my down duvet and my love -- your life raft."
The arrangement was only supposed to last a little while.
"I was telling my oldest son Juma about it, and I said it was just temporary," Ford said. "And he said 'You, mom? Temporary? Yeah right.'"
Sure enough -- after arduous months of courts, hospitals and social service offices -- the baby became Ford's legally adopted daughter. Ford named her Vyanna.
"I do realize her life has changed completely. My life has changed completely."
Now, despite the horrors she has suffered, Vyanna (nicknamed Princess Moonbeam by Ford) is a healthy and happy child -- a child whose mother beams and giggles at every mention of her daughter.
"Probably a lot of people on Grounds have already seen her," Ford said. "She's always dancing on stage. She's a charismatic, high energy, outgoing, dancing, singing, normal terrorist three-year old."
But then there are the children who haven't been so lucky, who aren't taken in and pampered and who continue to have nothing but their own survival. What happens to them?
That's where "Why Do I Scream at God for the Rape of Babies?" comes in. Through the book, Ford aims to spread awareness of child sexual abuse and fight the silence surrounding rape.
Even the title is a call to action.
"I used to scream at God for allowing babies to be raped, until I realized that in allowing babies to be raped God was screaming at me."
Ford said she couldn't remember where she heard that statement, but its significance struck her: It is in our hands to do something.
And Ford is doing something. Fifty-one percent of the proceeds from the book are going to "research, prevention and treatment of child sexual abuse," through an organization Ford founded, the Princess Trust.
"I want to be able to look my daughter in the eyes and tell her that what happened to her will never happen to another little girl ever again..."
Crucial as it is to battle ignorance, Ford admitted the book was born out of a need to put the experience in writing for her Princess Moonbeam -- and this need remains Ford's priority.
Ford said it was probably a more selfish goal that motivated her to write.
"It started from me wanting a record for her," Ford said. "A story that she and I can create to make sense of what happened by developing almost a fairytale for her -- a story for her."
The book is also a bold answer to those who wonder if Ford should shelter Vyanna from knowing what happened.
"I would never dream of not telling her," Ford said.
"You may not remember, but I must assume that you might."
Even now, Ford is paving the way for her daughter to unravel the truth.
"Since she's been two years old, every night I tell her how special she is," Ford said. "And as I keep telling her, one day she'll ask me, 'Why am I special, Mommy?'"
"My daughter is not to blame for what happened to her. She will always know that this horrid crime is not who she is -- it is just a thread in the tapestry of her as yet unfinished story."
"Why" is a diary, spanning the two years since Ford first met Vyanna. Its entries are peppered with an eclectic mix of fairytales, letters, poetry and even an academic paper -- a bundle of Ford's efforts to both understand and publicize the horror that befell her daughter.
To understand.
"How many tears of frustration have I now cried over this damn colostomy bag anyway? I watch her crawling around the house with a bag of poop hanging off her waist and it infuriates me. It is a constant reminder of what has happened to her."
Why would anyone even fathom doing such a thing? In her book, Ford says she knows she doesn't have that answer, but eventually she will have to provide one for her daughter.
To publicize.
Ford said some estimate that in South Africa, there are 200-300 rapes of children under 12 years old every day. Many have suggested the myth that having sex with a virgin cures disease is largely responsible for this pandemic. But Ford pointed out that the virgin myth has existed in many cultures throughout history; it is not unique to the situation of AIDS and Africa.
She doesn't believe the virgin myth motivated her daughter's rapists.
"They were stupid, drunk," Ford said. "I don't think it was premeditated. It was just... evil."
The men who raped Vyanna were released on lack of evidence and insufficient witness testimony. And although punishments are harsh for those convicted of sexual crimes, Ford said, South Africa continues to be known as the rape capital of the world.
"The particular combination of apartheid and traditional patriarchal views just led to this strange mixture where women were victimized sexually as a part of the struggle, so the townships -- there were gangs, and part of their rite of passage was raping women," Ford said. "And that was both urban and rural. So it's just really terrible mixture of those things that's led to a very violent society."
How to even begin battling this brutality? Ford said she believes it comes down to a fundamental problem of how societies relate to children. Ideally, she said, children should be seen as objects of love and nurturance. With child labor, child slavery and child sexual abuse so widespread, Ford said, it's clear the world doesn't cherish the innocence of its children.
"I plunge into the roiling sea of studies on crime, violence and masculinity with my intellectual curiosity as a life line. You sit, wide-eyed and quietly..."
Another issue that Ford is studying in her efforts to understand child sexual abuse is the way parents bring up their sons, often equating violence and aggression with masculinity.
"Part of my thesis has to do with the socialization of men as boys," Ford said. "Obviously because I have sons, and I looked at this little girl, and I looked at my three sons, and I thought, 'well hang on a second, there's no way they would do this to a five-month-old baby.' So what did I do differently as a mother, as a parent, that I could raise three men who wouldn't dream of doing this?"
And those three men love their baby sister.
"She has three brothers who idolize her, and she adores them," Ford said.
Does Ford worry that Vyanna will grow up traumatized, despite the love of her adopted family? That the scars will never heal?
"We all have trauma," Ford said simply.
She added that she's more concerned with helping her daughter deal with being an adopted child. Ford has already begun to do research in that area.
"My friend said to me, 'Claudia, you want to change the world.' And I said, 'Yeah, I probably do. And I'll do it one baby at a time,'" Ford said.
*All italicized excerpts come from "Why Do I Scream at God for the Rape of Babies?"
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