He was called "It"

Tortured, physically and mentally, from the time he was four years old to thirteen, David Pelzer's story compels you to understand and think about the amount of abuse and torture a physical mind and body can take before reaching a breaking point, if there is indeed a breaking point that one can reach.

Autobiographically written, Mr. Pelzer has divided the memoirs of his abuse-ridden life into three segments, the first being A Child Called It.

What seemed like an ordinary life suddenly and abruptly turns into a nightmare from hell for David as he approaches his fourth birthday. His parents are both alcoholics, and his father is a weak, co-dependent person who allows his mother to abuse both his body and mind on an hourly basis.

The type of torture that David endures is a repetitive pattern of starvation and humiliation, along with harsh physical beatings. There is no time that his mother feels even the slightest bit of remorse. There is no time period where David is invited back into the fold of his family, his two brothers (along with the birth of two new brothers after he is born.)

At one point, during his sixth year, a neighbor catches on to what is happening at the Pelzer household and notifies the Social Services system. This is after she babysits for David and his brothers while their mother is having another baby. The babysitter quickly sees the amount of bruises and gets suspicious.

Since the mother knows that she has called Social Services, she allows David to sleep upstairs with the family for the first time in three years. Usually, David sleeps on the basement floor, covered with newspapers. She holds him for the first time and allows him to eat dinner with the family. Usually he waits outside while the family eats and comes in afterward to wash their dishes and to dig some food out of the garbage when no one is looking, or eat the remains of the dog food dish after the dog is through.

David lives a normal life for two days, until he realizes why. The social worker arrives and David's mother casually puts an arm around him and encourages him to tell the Social Worker how wonderful everything is. David's spirit and heart breaks further when he realizes this is the real reason his mother has been nice to him and has allowed him to eat dinner. Once the social worker leaves, his mother resumes the abuse and violence, and David returns to living like a dog.


Mr. Pelzer never fully explains why or gives the reader an explanation as to why he receives all of the abuse and his brothers none. One of his typical punishments was to remain naked and lying in a tub of ice cold water for hours upon hours, keeping his nose beneath the line of water most of the time. His brothers would use the bathroom and just ignore the fact that he was in the tub, or they would bring their friends into the bathroom to wonder and amaze that yet again, David managed to be in trouble. "What did he do this time," a friend would ask. "I just don't know," replies his brother. This is because in essence David does nothing to warrant the animalistic life style he must endure.

He gets beaten daily. He gets starved daily. He steals food from the other children's lunch pails to survive. When his mother realizes that he has found a way to eat, she forces him to regurgitate and vomit on a daily basis to check to see if he has any food in his system. David records a time where he was forced to dig regurgitated franks out of the toilet, save them, and then subsequently eat them later in front of his mother and father. He is also forced to swallow teaspoons of ammonia as a punishment for eating as well.

This segment of book one ends with David finally, FINALLY, being rescued by social workers and teachers and placed into foster care, after years and years of looking the other way as the child arrives at school in the same tattered clothes, smelling, beaten and scarred.

How does a world like ours allow there to be a David Pelzer in our midst? A Child Called It will bring your attention to the abuse situation that resides somewhere in your neighborhood, or maybe somewhere in your own home. It will make you shudder and cry, and it will make you learn to appreciate and love yourself and your children just a little bit more after reading.