It’s a book I read during my college years. I just kinda to remember it, because a friend just info some news about a mother who irons and hits her son with a pestle. Then I remember about the story of Dave.
The book sure made me cry. To think a child aged 5 would suffer that much, almost died because of the wounds. But God helped him. Through his teacher, Dave was able to survive. Glad he did 
STOP CHILD ABUSE!!!
A Child Called “It”: One Child’s Courage to Survive is Dave Pelzer‘s autobiographical account of his alleged abuse as a child by an alcoholic mother, Catherine Roerva. It was published on September 1, 1995.
Surviving a childhood of not only severe abuse by his mother, but the apparent apathy to his plight by his father, Pelzer suffered one of the most severe documented cases of child abuse in California history.
The book starts with a normal day washing the dishes and Dave hopes he can get food. He is caught by his mother that he took his hand out of the water and is slapped. He was then late for school and he would usually run because he would have no time to steal food. So his mother had driven him as he usually would not. He was late so he needed to go to the office to place as late.
He would steal food from the kids’ lunch boxes and gobble down whatever he could in just a short amount of time, just because he was rarely fed. When the children started to notice that some of their food was missing, Dave was caught and the teachers called his mother, not knowing the effect that would have. At this point he began to be punished severely, made to do extra chores, and was banned from family activities.
The frequency of the beatings increased and they now occurred with his father present. That summer he was excluded in a family vacation. At first Dave’s father tried to stop the abuse but as time went on felt unable to intervene. His mother would never exclude his other siblings, who were treated well and never punished as severely as Dave.
The next year abuse intensified and he was no longer allowed to eat meals with the family. Dave was in charge of all the chores in the house while his siblings had few responsibilities. That Christmas, Dave’s mother showed him a letter she claimed that came from North Pole. It stated that Dave was a “bad boy” and would get no toys for Christmas. A few months later, his mother attempted to burn Dave on a stove. Abuse increased even more after that.
By the time he was in second grade, his mother began to make him go without food for extended periods of time. David was forced to sleep in the basement. He got an average of half a meal a day. When David was 10, she stabbed him in the stomach and did not take him to the hospital. The wound eventually became infected and he was forced to squeeze pus out of it himself. (though she did take care of the wound herself). By this point he was no longer considered part of the family and lived in the basement; he was denied basic contact, play, and food. His mother stated that she did not want Dave to interact with “her family.”
Over time the depth of the abuse worsened. David claimed he was forced to sit in the “prisoner of war” position (head bent backwards facing the sky, sitting on his hands). His mother stopped using his name and began referring to him first as “The Boy” and finally “It”. The punishments are reported to have evolved into “sick games” in which she made her son suffer. His little brother becomes his mother’s ‘Little Nazi’, who, brainwashed by the woman, enjoys watching Dave suffer.
Incidents cited in the book include forcing ammonia down his throat, sitting in a sealed bathroom while inhaling the fumes from a bucket of ammonia mixed with bleach (Gas Chamber), inducing vomiting followed by forced ingestion, smashing his face against a mirror while forcing him to say “I’m a bad boy”, lying in the bathtub naked with freezing water for hours, then made him sit in the shade while sunlight was just out of reach, rubbing his face in his baby brother’s soiled diaper, trying to make him eat his youngest brother’s feces, as well as starvation and general malnutrition, and accidentally stabbing him with a knife when he didn’t meet the time limit to do the dishes. Dave’s mother also attempted to force him to lie on a gas stove, saying, “Now sit on the stove so I can watch you burn and die.” Although she only held his arm over the flame.
In each of the sequels, the author reveals more forms of torture he did not describe in this book (e.g., his mother hitting his neck with a broom handle, causing his neck to swell so that he was unable to breathe).
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Child_Called_%22It%22
-lee-
