After watching the Angelina Jolie film, Changeling, my mind began to ask many questions about how far we have come or have we? In the film, Jolie's character, Christine Collins, returns home from work one day to find her son missing. He is a young boy, nine years old. She asks for help and is first put off.
Later, a boy is returned to her, who is not her son, and the police tell her, the mother, that she is mistaken. As a mother myself, I don't understand how I would ever be able to mistake my own child. The police made her take home this child, whom she knew was not hers and then proceeded to make her think she was crazy through the rest of the movie to try to avoid embarrassment. Had they taken the time to hear her out and not simply try to protect themselves they may have been able to save the lives of many other boys as well as hers, missing from the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders.
How many times does this really happen, could it be true in our America, were there other instances, does it compare to any thing else? The police had Christine committed to a mental institution to keep her quiet and there were many other women committed for similar issues. Anything that could cast a dark shadow on the LA county police department. Clint Eastwood brought to light the corruption of the police department in this film.
I watched this film with my son, 7 years old, and because I try to incorporated any opportunity for teaching into idle television usage, we discussed the comparison of the way women were treated in this time to the way blacks were treated (we also watched Miracle at St. Anna). In both cases, if the "powers that be" did not like what was happening, they could just remove the nuisance, with no questions asked (usually). The Jolie character wins in the end, but how many women came before her and how many came after? If she had no help, being a single mother, would she have died in the Los Angeles County Hospital or would she have lived there until all the fight was stripped form her being?
