‘Silent’s’ Loud Message

You can mess up somebody’s life just like somebody done mess up yours.

--Victim-victimizer Tasha, 15, in “Scared Silent”

After heroically punching out a child-pummeling brute in “Dick Tracy,” Warren Beatty gives the sadistic lug a stern lecture: “We got a place for people who beat up kids.” Applause, applause.

If only it were that simple.

The complexities--along with the horrors--of such widespread criminal behavior are peeled back in “Scared Silent: Exposing and Ending Child Abuse,” a jolting hour that emphasizes solutions while encouraging abusers and their family-member victims to speak candidly and explicitly.

In a rare move regarding a non-news program in prime time, three networks--CBS, NBC and PBS--are airing this special simultaneously at 10 tonight, virtually assuring it of an enormous audience and impact. As a bonus, ABC will air it at 10 p.m. Sunday.

Because the hour is fully underwritten by USAA insurance company, executive producer Arnold Shapiro (“Rescue 911”) was able to offer it free to the networks. That the three snapped it up, and ABC agreed later to come aboard, is evidence that historic television rivals can be induced to temporarily set aside their competitiveness and provide public service.

When the price is right.

Shapiro’s wise choice to host this emotional and disturbing program, Oprah Winfrey, has a personal stake, having publicly revealed in 1985 that she had been molested in her youth by three family members, the first time when she was 9.

What a difference eight years make. It was 1984 when the ABC movie “Something About Amelia” broke prime-time’s taboo on openly addressing incest, depicting the damage to a middle-class family when a father repeatedly molests his young daughter. Other TV venues, including daytime talk shows such as Winfrey’s, have continued to examine the topic with varying degrees of sensitivity.

By regularly displaying “800” numbers that viewers can call for help, however, “Scared Silent” is much more user-friendly than other shows on the same subject. And also more intimate, with Shapiro and director Charles A. Bangert--whose camera observes close-up without seeming to intrude--repeating some of the visual techniques that Shapiro used so effectively in “Scared Straight!,” his famous 1978 documentary showing hardened prison inmates attempting to literally frighten cocky street kids away from crime.

The camera is tight on 48-year-old Del’s wife, Jan: “My husband didn’t have an affair. He went out and made mistresses out of my daughters.”

What follows is one of the program’s most indelible segments, as a remorseful Del and his eldest daughter, Eva, alternately recall his relentless molestation of her. Home movies depicting him as a doting father to a very young Eva give their words a haunting, tragic poignancy.

Later, when Eva and Del (who spent a year in jail for his crime) meet face to face, the result is one of those rare moments of television when emotions are raw and pretenses fall away. Even after all that’s happened, you can sense a bond between victimizer and victim. Yet she remains skeptical that he has recovered, and he predicts that, unless she gets therapy, she’ll end up marrying an abuser.

It’s a terrible, yet not unthinkable prospect. “Scared Silent” examines the cycle of abuse, the awful legacy handed down from generation to generation. It turns out that all of the six perpetrators appearing on this program were themselves victims, from Del, who was molested by a neighbor when he was only 6, to 52-year-old Jill, whose uncontrolled rage caused her toddler son’s death and who has traced her family’s abusiveness all the way back to the Civil War era.

Plus, there’s 15-year-old Tasha, whose volcanic anger at her brother explodes during a group therapy session: “He molested me with objects!”

When she was only 11, she, too, began sexually abusing members of her family, including a 7-year-old cousin. “I want to talk about my last victim. He’s a boy. He’s in my family.”

Her therapist says Tasha has come a long way, but “will never be cured.” Does that mean child abusers, like alcoholics and some others with addictive personalities, are sentenced to a lifetime of recovery? Unfortunately, the question is not addressed, and viewers will have to draw their own conclusions.

Their conclusions about the rest of this extremely valuable program are likely to be positive.

Television is at its best when it holds a mirror up to society. The best hope is that the “Scared Silent” audience will include child abusers who will watch this program, be deeply affected by the anguish of the victims, examine the faces of the criminals who caused it, and see themselves.