What is it about?
In 2013, Los Angeles Emergency Responses received a call from a mother saying Gabriel Fernandez, her 8 year old child, was unconscious. Ultimately, Gabriel would die in hospital care 2 days later, and authorities intervened and discovered a horrific sequence of abuse that was never acted upon by community professionals. The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez is the story of what happened to Gabriel.
Why is it worth watching?
One of the sad things about child abuse that’s taken for granted is that while its impacts are both immediate and life lasting- at times its prevention can be nigh impossible. Since the industrial revolution and the advent of child labour laws, government policies, and a zeitgeist articulating that children are vulnerable citizens actually worth protecting, systems have been put in place to ensure kids can be as safe from harm as possible. The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez, a slick and overly long documentary series about the 2013 horrific torture and death of a 8 year old Californian boy, is about what it looks like when those systems cease to work. For all the right reasons, it’s grueling. For its graphic descriptions and testimonials of a boy’s life being ended by cruel people that he so desperately wanted love from, for sure. But what Trials really gets into is the amount of time an incident takes, in the excruciating delay of any kind of resolution, for society to resolve just 1 specific case of substantiated abuse that traumatizes almost everybody that it touches. It says a lot about the Sisyphean task of protecting society’s more vulnerable citizens, that by the resolution of Trials, we’re presented with yet another case of child abuse- virtually identical to the one we just spent nearly 6 hours analyzing.
Filmmaker Brian Knappenberger assembles a mountain’s worth of archival photos, talking heads segments, and glossy reenactments, that flow together to highlight its grisly subject matter’s charged emotions. Cobbling together the various family members who had a hand in raising Gabriel before he was returned to his mother, first responders, social workers, journalists, jurors, and heaps of court footage involving the case, there is no ugly stone unturned in prosecutor Jon Hatami’s quest to enact justice for young Gabriel. While the trial involves the mother, Pearl Fernandez, and her boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, facing the death penalty for their crimes against Gabriel, their stories are briefly explained, and rarely highlighted. Part of the reason is they themselves never agreed to be interviewed for the series to tell their respective stories (leaving us to only wonder at the couple’s motivations for abusing one but not all of their children), but its mostly because Knappenberger has a more complicated story to tell- that of the safeguards of society failing to protect children.
Today’s phalanx of human services are sometimes referred to as the poverty industrial complex, where organizations such as the police and child protection services are designed to protect society’s more vulnerable members precisely like Gabriel, so the question throughout the series remains- how could this happen? The implications were so deep that 4 social workers involved in the case were also tried for murder (unprecedented in Californian history)- having to testify that they were not guilty of criminal negligence, while the police, also involved in dealing at various points with the family, did not. It says a lot about the stakes involved for child protection. The lack of an appropriate response from the professionals involved begs the question- were the respective child protection social workers poor fits for their mandate of protecting children from harm? To its credit, the series explains that child protection remains a complex and emotionally charged branch of social work practice, and those looking to make a difference in human service professions should take note at the point made here that people invested in impacting social change can be overwhelmed by the investigative and intrusive aspects of child protection- a point that perhaps not all child protection employers (and schools) make evident to prospective employees. The lack of fit creates conditions where social workers, educated in the science of building relationships to foster meaningful social change, contribute to some of the factors that lead to oppression, fostering burn out in workers, and in some scenarios, tearing apart communities through action or inaction. The documentary’s sequence of what some removals/apprehensions can look like, accompanies well documented evidence of the attachment challenges and psychological effects borne of being taken away from one’s caregivers- no matter the abuse that they suffer from those same caregivers. The stakes involved the carrying out of their jobs, are certainly a recipe for some workers to go through what theorists call, “compassion fatigue”- which leads to numb workers unable to appropriately respond to concerns voiced by concerned community members. At least in private, Police members will talk about the difficulties of their jobs in law enforcement- that people want nothing to do with their law and order, that is until their most vocal critics need them to keep them safe. Social work is similar, in the sense the industry faces criticism for being too intrusive in people’s lives, and then not enough. Knappenberger frames this dynamic with degrees of nuance, showing a home visit from a social worker (to what appears to be a protocol investigation on a foster parent) that some would label invasive and unpleasant, and others that not enough work is done to prove the child is safe. It goes to show that it might just be an impossible job.
But after seeing the evidence presented by multiple reporters to Gabriel’s abuse, the answer may not lie in the individuals involved in responding to the case, but to an enormous gap in the system. The amount of sheer work that the system makes its workers generate in the name of actually doing the work, may be the greatest threat to blocking human services’ mandates of protecting vulnerable citizens. And as the series shows, the institutions that govern people may be more invested in protecting themselves, than their clients and employees. It’s a salient possibility, that while the series’ production of evidence into what happened to Gabriel is stomach churning, the scope of possibility involving things of its nature happening again (and again) is the stuff nightmares are made of. Anyone who has read the novels, A Child Called It trilogy, or has heard about the Fritzl case, will feel a familiar bile filled pang of recognition as to the difficulties of being human, and how we as a society need to do better in our response to abuse.
Told simply as a court room thriller, from the crime(s), to the investigation, to the trial, to the juror discussion involving consequences, and of course, the verdict, the results are electric and highly susceptible to binge watching. Given the train wreck attraction to the documentary series that essentially writes itself, the choices of interviewing some of the social workers involved and family members are welcome features (in particular the incredible outcome of one of Gabriel’s birth to toddler caregivers), but telling us about the counsellor’s lives and motivations, as well as creating a reality show dynamic towards the end, comes across too much as grand standing. And a mid story introduction to a data algorithm in Pennsylvania, that purports itself to be a superior screening assessment tool is not only unnecessary to the telling of the story and functions more as a Silicon Valley advertisement than branch of a narrative, but also ignores the fact that social workers don’t need more assessment tools (digital or otherwise)- they need more resources, more boots on the ground, to actually do the work. But quibbles and errant left turns aside, Trials is something worth bearing witness. We know the stakes and how much we love children- that’s why we watch, hoping that in the future we’ll be compelled to act more appropriately to avoid more tragedy.
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