When was dave pelzer abused

A stab to the stomach later it was switched to the heart in another book but I'll stick with stomach is something that requires immediate medical attention. Not only would the stomach acid pose a very real risk to the rest of the body but the injury would need to be cleaned and sutured.

From what I remember, he cleaned and sutured it himself--all before the age of So while he's bleeding and in pain, he's tending to his own medical needs. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense but let's move on. Bleach and ammonia create a very toxic gas chlorine gas which was used as a chemical agent in WWI that causes respiratory distress and after repeated exposure can cause severe health issues and even death.

Many men from WWI died from chlorine gas but a little boy survived. That doesn't make much sense either. Then there's the 'lying in freezing water'. Now freezing is 32 degrees Fahrenheit so that number is where I'll base my logic. Hypothermia can set in at temperatures around 70 degrees but that's after extended exposure hours and even days. But this is freezing water he mentioned, and the survival time dramatically drops.

How fast? An average man can survive about half an hour before his body shuts down statements from the Titanic survivors estimate people who died in the water were gone in about minutes. Now Dave claims he was forced to lie in freezing water for hours. That statement doesn't hold up against known scientific facts. And finally, being force-fed ammonia and Clorox. Both are poisons and both kill. Simple as that. Even a tiny amount can cause extreme harm to child and he reports it happened multiple times.

Those are the stories I find the most unbelievable because there are reports of grown men dying from those types of physical harm, so how could a weak child who is suffering from abuse survive without immediate medical attention?

I can see an abuser forcing a child into a freezing shower for minutes but to make them lie in freezing water for hours on end? Forcing a child to clean with toxic chemicals but locking them in a room for hours with chlorine gas? While cleaning, a drop or two of a chemical splashes into a child's mouth and the abuser isn't concerned but force-feeding deadly chemicals?

See where I'm going with this? What originally is true abuse turns into sadistic torture on the part of the mother who is portrayed as viciously hating Dave while loving to her other children and is, in every sense of the word, an evil antagonist.

Like I said in the beginning, I'm not going to say he wasn't abused because he easily could have been. What I am saying is his stories seem exaggerated to the point of fiction.

There is a very real vein of abuse to his stories, I won't deny that, but many of the stories recounted seem larger than life and the abuse seems not to have effected Dave in any way. It's all very, very strange and add in the fact that his stories are graphic and vivid but leave very few clues to trace the authenticity of his childhood like both parents are gone, one sibling confirms the abuse while a grandmother and another brother say he's always been over the top and a trouble maker, and very few records on him exist if it were such a horrible abuse case records must exist somewhere.

His story is not something that is easily traceable and no one's come forward with hard evidence that "Yes, the abuse was this bad. It's a miracle he survived and here are the documents to prove it". People who have been abused relate to this book and helps the healing process and it brings to light the subject of child abuse so I can't condone hating it and pulling it off shelves.

Even though Harry Potter is fictional, it's effect is real. Even though the Iliad and Odyssey are fictional, the epic tales are classics.

Just because something is fictional doesn't take away from the truth pulled from it's pages. So even if this is ever discovered to be a huge hoax a la Million Little Pieces, I don't believe it's impact and effect become negligible. So to answer your question "Why do people think this is a fake book? Some people deny the abuse ever happened; I'm of the opinion it happened but not to the extent he claimed. View all 9 comments. Write a comment Heidi Sep 14, AM 7 votes.

I read all theses books as an adult and a counselor. This abuse happens all the time and some people process this better than others.

Davids writting about it helped him to let go of the anger and the hate. People want to say it is fake there are a lot worse cases than this but the child is dead so they can't talk about it.

How about the boy whose step mother and father duck taped him then bit him to death The child in CA who was kept in a cage and tortured and peed on by his dads drunk friends? Just because a man has processed the pain and can speak about it and doesn't go to the same amount of therapy as some one elses doesn't mean it didn't happen what it means is he knows he has to process it and learn to move on or he will never heal. I hear case after case in my line of work and some get better move on and some can not let go and dwell for ever in their past they even take medication and on the worse side, many become addicts.

We criticize a man who over comes his past and triumphed and helped others and typical of our society hate to see that so people call him fake very sad. Reading this post really annoyed me. Who are you, or anybody for that matter, to say that a persons account of child abuse is fabricated.

That is the exact reason parents are still getting away with abusing their children in this day and age. I understand that someone might read this book, be absolutely horrified by the accounts and decide that none of it is true to protect themselves from the horrors that occur in our world, but the fact is that the things David and his brother Richard went through in their childhood are similar to what children go through every single day.

Just last week I was reading an article in the paper about a child who was starved so badly by his mother and her boyfriend that when he died of head injuries inflicted by the very woman who was supposed to protect him, that he resembled a concentration camp victim. This boy had so many scars and bruises on him that the authorities wondered how he had survived as long as he did.

He also had a brother who was healthy and happy who would tell his teachers that his younger brother had fallen over when asked about his injuries. Back in the 60's there were almost no laws regarding child abuse and people who noticed the signs preferred to look the other way rather than make trouble with the neighbours, but even today, where people are more vigilant and have the law on their side, abuse goes unnoticed and children fall through the cracks.

I believe that Dave, and his brother Richard, survived everything they say they did because I refuse to fill my head with fantasies, preferring to look at the world for what it really is - a place where things you never thought were possible happen.

FACTS - survival will always kick in when you need it too and the children who were not abused will always lie about the ones that were because they feel guilty and feel the need to protect the parent who showed them love.

Levi Sep 19, PM 3 votes. I can see how some people would think it was fake, especially people who have never experienced or witnessed abuse themselves and don't know to what extent it can go to. I also see how some people can think he at least exaggerated a bit in his stories due to the extensive abuse his mother had put him through, however the story was not entirely impossible.

What happened in this story was a boy got neglected by his family. His mother had a problem, that we were not told of, but I imagine that it was either an alcoholic problem or a physiological one of some sort.

His brothers also neglected him due to his mothers actions, they were at the age where they knew no better. His father neglected him, or didn't protect him to a certain extent, due to the power his mother had over the family. That is basically what happened. Some of the stories were extreme to an extent, but realistic at that.

They were possible and they may have happened, however there is no way to actually tell if he is exaggerating or not, we can only trust his word. His mother broke his arm, his mother tried to burn him over the stove, his mother wouldn't feed him, his mother would clothe and provide proper shelter for him, his mother would make him do an excessive amount of chores, his mother would not consider him a human, etc.

They were all possible and could have happened, so you can keep an open mind in these cases. So the stories could have been exaggerated, but there is no sure fire way to know.

Not unless you trust his word that is. I believe that this story is real because abuse can reach to this extent, however if you choose to or not is your choice. View 1 comment. I have just recently discovered this so called "drama" surrounding Dave Pelzer and his validity.

Being more curious, I set out searching for more information on Dave's father, mother, and brothers. Like us all, I wanted to know the dynamic of the family. Why were his brothers so ambivalent about the abuse? Why didn't his father help him? Why, when his father left, didn't he take Dave with him? What I found, is that these very questions are fueling the fire of falsehood in Dave's story.

I m sickened. I dont think any of us, who have not experienced the extreme abuse he did, can ever, ever, ever walk in his shoes and make a judgment. People are saying, "If it's real, why didn't Dave talk about what made his mother the way she was?

I could conclude she had borderline personality disorder, from what I read, but does that make a difference in what she did? Frequently, an abuser chooses one of their children as the target.

Frequent in sexual abuse, which people don't seem to negate, but when Dave says he was the only victim, people cry hooplah. Why, because it is physical abuse, should it make a difference?

Also, once Dave was recused from his home, his mother turned the abuse onto the youngest son, and that son wrote a book as well, confirming many of of Dave's accounts. People also seem to negate his story, because if it were true, his brothers and father would have done something. What about the story of Sylvia Likens, who died form here extreme abuse.

Things done to her were just a sadistic, grotesque, and she suffered physical, emotional, mental and sexual abuse, while many other children weren't touched or tortured, and didn't step up to help her. I guess the only reason people aren't crying "false" on her accounts is because she isn't here to confirm or deny, and it would be tacky to call the deceased a liar. Zoe Sep 15, PM 2 votes. I don't understand why everyone keeps going on about how there are people who "choose not to believe" in child abuse.

Nobody is saying that, people are all too aware that it goes on. The people who believe that this book are fabricated believe that because of the human body's ability to withstand what Pelzer claims he went through, and because of other things he has said or done. They are talking about this specific case, not child abuse in general. If you can survive what Dave Pelzer did as a kid, you can survive anything.

That might be why people are buying his books in such huge numbers. They relate Pelzer's childhood years in Daly City growing up in a household dominated by an alcoholic. His mother singled him out for horrifying abuse as his father looked the other way. He was finally rescued in , when the evidence of starvation and physical abuse -- he was 12 years old but weighed only 68 pounds -- became so obvious that police and social workers acted.

The books are hard to read. Pelzer was subjected to sadistic mistreatment for years. He was beaten, starved, burned, stabbed. He lived like a prisoner of war in the basement of the home, sleeping and shivering on a cot. The two books are testaments to the indomitable quality of the human spirit. Pelzer, 35, now lives near the Russian River when he's not on the motivational-speech circuit.

After he was removed from his home -- his father was a San Francisco fireman and his mother was a homemaker with four other sons, who were spared her malignant attentions -- Pelzer was in eight foster homes until he entered the Air Force at age He sits on a picnic bench overlooking the river, a spot that has an almost mystical significance for him because one summer he and his father had a pathetically brief moment of bonding there.

Dark glasses hide his eyes, and he uses long, winding riffs in which words come pouring out at machine-gun speed. He uses self-deprecating humor and gifted mimicry of famous voices like Arnold Schwarzenegger 's and Bill Clinton 's to direct the conversation when it veers in directions that make him uncomfortable.

I feel at 48 that I can finally put it away and start life. But penises, mouths, thrusting movements: these are sexual triggers, and whether we like it or not, they are arousing.

It's only conjecture, but I wonder whether by describing his childish pleasure in these things, Thornton isn't in some sense normalising abuse. The problem with victims, of course as Princess Diana well knew is that you feel a louse attacking them. Pelzer and Thornton have already suffered unimaginably, so who are we to make matters worse?

This certainly seems to have been Pelzer's response to an article in March in the Mail on Sunday, under the headline, 'Did he make 'It' all up? One refused to comment; the fourth is writing his own account of how really bad it was, entitled You're It.

Pelzer spent much of an interview in which he was challenged about this impersonating Robin Williams and Bill Clinton. As a result of the subsequent article, he no longer talks to the British press. He calls everybody "sir" or "ma'am" and hides behind characters. He protects himself and tells jokes all the time. He is a terribly injured man, there's no question about that - very intent on pleasing. I always say, you can meet people and think, "What a pain", but you don't know their stories.

Well, we do know his. I think it's sloppy, lazy to misinterpret his behaviour. All I can say is, he believes it to be true. And he is a person who genuinely wants to use his notoriety to help others. Unfortunately, the books' omission of background detail makes the foreground harder to trust. If, between the ages of four and 12 when he was admitted into foster care the abuse were consistently as bad as he describes it, he would have died.

So there must have been lulls. In the second book, he seems to place its onset closer to when he was seven. In the third, he talks about his 'eight years of constant torture,' but only a few pages on, describes an idyllic interlude fishing with his mother when he was seven.

And if he hated her so much, why did they talk for an hour on the telephone when he got into the airforce? It is also unclear why he was finally removed from the family home. In the first book there is no attempt at explanation.

In the second, we infer that it's because he has been thrown down the stairs; by the third, it seems to have been because his arms were thrust into a bucket of ammonia and bleach an incident not previously described.

Pelzer would no doubt argue that this confusion arises because each book is written from the perspective of the time as he rather inelegantly puts it, with 'the language and wisdom that was solely developed from my viewpoint as well as that particular time period'. Whatever, it gives him alarming licence to change his story and leave things out.

Why, for example, did no one intervene when these appalling things were happening? He describes his icy baths: 'At times when I laid in the tub, my brothers brought their friends to the bathroom to look at their naked brother. Their friends often scoffed at me. My brothers just shook their heads saying, "I don't know.

My own hunch is that, substantially, he's telling the truth: there seems no reason to dispute the assertion by his former teacher that at the time Pelzer was removed from his mother, his was the third worst case of child abuse on record in the state of California. No charges were ever brought, however, and it is left unclear on what terms he was removed; his mother appears to have had the right to see him if she wanted.

But there is a definite feeling of exaggeration in the later two books, which, in turn, slightly throw into question the first. The Mother, as she is called by the second book, becomes ever more of a pantomime villain. Although ostensibly dealing respectively with Dave's life as a foster child and in the military, these second and third books return relentlessly to his childhood, replaying the scenes in - as is the way of sequels - more lurid detail.

In The Lost Boy she is a monstrous figure: 'Mother's ice-cold, evil eyes locked onto mine as her face came into full view I caught a whiff of her putrid body odor.

Catherine Roerva. Where is Dave Pelzer from? Daly City, California, United States. What are the names of David Pelzer brothers? Richard B. Who is the author of the Child called it? Dave Pelzer.