Camren Baker napped in the living room the day he turned 6 months old while his mother, Jaime Swan, 20 years old and 12 weeks pregnant, smoked a cigarette on her apartment’s fire escape, shooing her 4-year-old nephew away from the smoke. Doctors, Swan was explaining, had told her that Camren might have permanent blind spots after police say he was beaten by Swan’s now ex-boyfriend, but otherwise he would be fine.

Two days later, Swan took Camren for a routine check-up that ended in the emergency room.

Camren had already spent five days in the hospital, beginning on May 17, after police say 19-year-old Steven Waterman beat him, inflicting some 25 bone fractures amid other hemorrhages and bruises. On June 7 the baby was admitted to the emergency room again, this stay ending with surgery to drain fluid from his swelling brain.

Camren’s stitches were removed at the end of June, though the shunt inserted to drain the fluids is too dangerous to remove and will stay permanently. Doctors told Swan again that her baby would recover, but he will have to visit a neurologist for follow-ups. It’s not yet apparent whether he will develop blind spots from his beating, as doctors have suggested. Swan said her baby responds to toys passed across his line of sight. Other long-term effects could include learning disabilities that are not immediately perceptible.

Camren continues his recovery two months after the beating, his mother has turned 21 and a paternity test recently confirmed that Shawn Baker, 19, now living in Windham, is the baby’s father. The man accused of beating him, Waterman, sits in jail awaiting trial on three assault charges carrying a maximum sentence of 25 years. As one of the thousands of children in the United States who suffer from abuse each year, Camren – at the center of a family marked by teenage pregnancies and tangled, volatile relationships – faces an uncertain future.

In 2004, there were about 17,000 reports of child abuse or neglect in Maine, with 8,800 reports requiring investigation, according to the state. About 2,300 cases were substantiated as maltreatment. Nationally, there were nearly half a million substantiated cases of maltreatment. One recent study conducted by Dr. David Zielinski for Duke University’s Center for Child and Family Policy found that one in seven adults reported suffering some kind of maltreatment as a child, including physical and sexual abuse as well as neglect.

The Duke study concluded that abuse increases a person’s chances of becoming unemployed and impoverished. According to the report, nearly 20 percent of unemployed adults report being abused as children, compared to 13 percent of employed adults. Nineteen percent of low-income adults report being abused as children, compared to 12 percent of adults whose families make more than $70,000 a year.

A 2001 study by Prevent Child Abuse America estimated that direct and indirect costs of child abuse costs the country more than $94 billion every year.

Three babies, three men, one mother

Jaime Swan first got pregnant when she was 17 with her boyfriend at the time, Chris Fogg, while she was on birth control, Swan said. When she found out she was pregnant, she told herself she had to take responsibility for her actions.

“I thought I could do it on my own,” Swan said.

Swan didn’t stay with Fogg, though they were together five years. Swan said he was abusive.

Two years after Swan had her first child – Emma Fogg, now 3 – she got pregnant again, after what Shawn Baker described as a one-night stand. Swan said doctors had told her she wouldn’t be able to get pregnant again after Emma due to some medical problems that she wouldn’t elaborate on.

Camren Baker was born Dec. 5, 2006, when Swan was 20 years old. Swan and Baker had known each other for about 10 years. Swan said Baker was her first kiss. Until earlier this month, Swan questioned whether Baker was actually Camren’s father. Even though the baby bears his last name, his name doesn’t appear on the birth certificate. The results of a paternity test on June 20 recently came back confirming Baker as the father.

Baker, meanwhile, is currently awaiting trial on 11 charges after being accused of having sexual relations with and taking nude photographs with a cell phone of a 14-year-old girl this winter. He’s facing a maximum sentence of 40 years on charges that include sexual exploitation of a minor and sexual assault of a minor.

Regardless of whether Baker goes to jail, Swan is not best friends with him. She is on only mildly friendly terms with Fogg. She said he has been “surprisingly” supportive after Camren was abused and is taking good care of their daughter.

For now, Swan will continue to be a single parent, like her own. Her parents divorced before she can remember, but like most of the trials Swan has faced, she says little about it.

“I actually had a lot of problems in school, just moving a lot,” Swan said.

After her parents split and her father got cancer when she was 10, Swan lost what stability she had and began moving constantly to new homes in different communities, staying with one parent or the other. She has lived in more places in the Greater Portland area than she can list in any sort of confident order – South Portland with her father, Casco with her mother, Scarborough with her father, with stints in Portland, Windham, Casco again and Westbrook, where her mother lives now.

When her daughter Emma was born, Swan tried to go it alone. She graduated from high school a year late, though she has managed to enroll at Andover College for a program in criminal justice.

Swan had an apartment on Main Street in Westbrook, where police believe the beating occurred, but she said the Department of Health and Human Services requested she move, citing safety concerns because the location was made public in news accounts. Swan is staying with her older sister and her family in Gorham.

Building neighborhood support

Child abuse is more likely to occur wherever there is more stress in the family, according to the director of the Spurwink Child Abuse Program, Dr. Lawrence Ricci. Stress, he said, comes from a number of different situations, including poverty, unemployment, substance abuse and domestic violence.

Experts in the field are careful to avoid the idea that child abuse is caused by poverty, or that abuse is limited to families with low incomes.

“I think there is a correlation, but there is not a cause and effect,” said Christina Patterson, a co-chairwoman of the Children’s Advocacy Council. The council is a child-abuse prevention division of Youth Alternatives, a Portland-based nonprofit social service agency.

The Children’s Advocacy Council has recently implemented a new program in three low-income neighborhoods that, according to the council, also have the highest rates of domestic violence and child abuse in Portland: Parkside, Bayside and Munjoy Hill. The project, called the Community Partnership for Protecting Children, is all about building “social capital,” according to Lauren Grousd, another co-chairwoman of the council.

The project includes a number of outreach programs to businesses and neighbors, assisting them in identifying the stressors in the lives of people they interact with daily that can ultimately lead to domestic violence and child abuse. Not set up as a policing service, the project instead works toward building community relationships by focusing on the “natural neighbors.”

“We try to look at ways to work in our communities to provide supports,” said Andrea Paul, a third co-chairwoman of the council. “Neighbors need to start watching out for neighbors.”

A Department of Health and Human Services caseworker is also spending time in the neighborhood. Though some may have a vision of a caseworker as a person to take away a parent’s children, Paul said the communities are viewing this particular caseworker as a supporter.

“People are seeing that, and are trusting,” said Paul.

Who you can trust

In Swan’s Main Street apartment on June 5, the kitchen is void of much more than a table, fruit flies flit above a trash can and a few children’s toys litter the floor. The living room is dark, with faux-wood paneling. Unlike the kitchen, it is furnished, with armchairs and a couch, with a blanket draped as a cover. Swan said after the May 17 incident she had only stayed at the apartment long enough to pick something up.

Swan and her sister, Amy Doane, 27, put Camren down on a baby blanket on the couch, where he immediately fell asleep. Swan and Doane looked at him and smiled.

“He’s safe, he’s home, he’s OK,” said Swan, even though later that week he would be back at the hospital.

Swan said Waterman needs to take responsibility for what he did, but she is perplexed by how it could have happened. She had known him for six years, had been dating him for several months.

“It basically tells you who you can trust,” Swan said. “He just made the wrong decision at the wrong time, and now he has to live with it.”

Waterman declined to be interviewed for this story.

Swan stops short of defending Waterman, but she said he has a big heart. She said Waterman was prepared to be Camren’s father if Baker went to jail on the charges involving the 14-year-old girl. He’s not a violent person, according to Swan, who said she’s never seen him get into a fight.

Doane said Waterman was great with the baby, and Camren would “light up” every time Waterman walked into the room. Swan said she had photos developed in early June, and half of the pictures were of the baby and Waterman, smiling and laughing.

If Waterman is convicted of beating her child, Swan said, she doesn’t know if she’ll trust him when he gets out of jail, which is a significant problem as the baby she is nearly five months pregnant with is his.

“It’s something I have to deal with,” Swan said quietly.

Dwindling services

“For many teenagers, becoming a teen parent is an escape for them from their situations. It’s an exciting adventure,” said Evelyn Blanchard, executive director of the Mission Possible Teen Center. “Everybody pays attention to pregnant women.”

Blanchard works with at-risk youth in her center, and is looking at grants so she can implement more teen pregnancy prevention in Westbrook, which has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the state.

Blanchard said she doesn’t know Swan, Baker or Waterman, but she is no stranger to the issues surrounding teen parents through her work at the teen center. Blanchard said many young mothers get into a cycle of getting involved with abusive, destructive partners.

“Without the right supports and assistance in place, we see so many teens making the same mistakes,” she said, adding that many teens say they will “step up to the plate,” but “they have no idea what that means.”

For someone like Swan, who has already passed her years as a teen parent, Blanchard said social service resources “definitely dwindle” the further into adulthood she goes.

Baker said he felt he had to take responsibility for Camren when Swan was pregnant with him. That was what his father had taught him to do.

“If you get a girl pregnant, stand up and be a man,” his father had told him.

Baker, who grew up on Munjoy Hill and in the Kennedy Park housing projects in Portland, also had an unstable childhood. He said his parents lost control of him when he was 13.

“There’s a great deal of peer pressure,” Baker said, “but that’s everywhere. But it almost seemed like you had to do it … Everybody did the same thing. Everybody drank. If you weren’t a fighter, you had to become one.

“The kids I hung out with are now drug addicts and don’t work … I only have a handful of friends who made it out and graduated, and half of those are in jail.”

Baker, who said his parents are still together, has a brother 10 years his senior who is a “seven-time felon” and has “had more jail time than I could dream about.”

Baker hadn’t seen Camren for more than a month after Swan kicked him and his mother out of the hospital on May 22 while Camren’s abuse injuries were being cared for. Baker said Swan showed nurses Camren’s birth certificate, without Shawn Baker’s name, and told nurses the Bakers had no legal right to be there.

“I just wanted to be in his life again,” said Baker.

Since the paternity test confirmed he is the father, Baker said he has seen Camren a number of times. He said he feels good knowing Camren is his child.

Waiting

According to Ricci, child abuse prevention “is not a high priority in this country.” For every abuse case that finds it’s way into the news, he said he sees another dozen cases.

Ricci said that the prevention of child abuse includes multiple agencies, including the police, the Department of Health and Human Services, primary care doctors, mental health agencies and others.

Grousd, of the Children’s Advocacy Council, likewise said that all the stress factors attributing to child abuse need to be viewed together. Substance-abuse counseling, she said, is a form a child-abuse prevention itself.

“If we want to solve problems, we have to be aware of this interconnectedness,” Grousd said.

As Swan and Baker argued in the aftermath of their son’s beating, and while they waited on the paternity test, they accused one another of substance abuse and neglect of their baby.

However, Blanchard, of the teen center, said all the bickering doesn’t mean anything. “The adults can fight as much as they want about who did what. Nobody was protecting that baby,” said Blanchard. “Whoever didn’t injure the baby didn’t protect the baby.”

Camren Baker, like his father and his mother’s ex-boyfriend, is waiting on the outcomes of a number of trials – legal, medical and social. He is growing up with an older sister, a younger sibling on the way, a father facing up to 40 years in jail, an alleged abuser facing up to 25 years in jail, and a mother looking for a job and going to school.

According to Ricci, children who suffer physical abuse face much more than the visible physical damage. Giving general estimates, Ricci said about 15 percent of babies under 2 who suffer head trauma from abuse will die. About 60 percent will have profound, permanent brain damage likely causing blindness, hearing deficits or major developmental problems. The remaining 25 percent will see no or minor brain damage that can cause learning disabilities.

“Nobody escapes unscathed from this,” said Ricci.