Niños, lejos de Disneylandia

What strange effect, powerful and perturbing, do children have on adults that some times they care and protect them, and at others they subjugate them to cruelty and to an unconceivable lack of mercy?

This is a book of real stories: stories of kids whose lives have been dramatically defined by the will of their adults, youths that will never know anything similar to Disneyworld.

Cristina Civale obeyed the impulse of looking into this issue the day a three-year-old kid by the name of Samuele, was stabbed one winter morning in Italy: the first and only suspect was her mother. In June of 2006, after a long trial, the young woman was condemned to thirty years in prison; however, today she walks free. Civale then began an exhaustive journalistic investigation and this is how began to appear the cases of Francis, the soldier kid who ended up killing kids of his own age; Iqbal, the child-slave, indefatigable carpet weaver; the depressive mother who stuck her little baby Vittoria in the drying machine, saying she had mistaken her with the blanket that covered her; the famous case of Sabine, the kidnapped and abused girl in Belgium, by an older pederast; the chilling story of Horace, one of the many Argentinean babies stolen by their parent’s murderers during the last military dictatorship, a kid who always suspected he was not the son of his parents; the incredible story of Ester, whose mother inflicted upon her disease symptoms and almost drove her to commit suicide; the beaten lives of José Luis and Omar, two Honduran kids. All of them abused kids by their family or by perverted unknowns, or driven from their homes by poverty, into prostitution of crime.

Crisitina Civale has carried out a difficult investigation, crude and realistic, that denounces one of the darkest sides of human beings. She has no need to pull the punches because the straight forward story of reality is sufficiently condemning. This is an indispensable book, with the narrative power of describing horror without gloating; an invitation to recapture our ability for outrage and thus read with wide open eyes.