Riding To The Rescue: The Unlikely Heroes Making Kids Feel Safe

At a suburban park on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, Zoe*, a 10-year-old girl with long black hair, is racing her little sister, purposely slowing down to let the seven year old win. Suddenly, Zoe stops and backs up towards her mother. She can hear them coming. A pack of bikers roars into sight, too fast and too many for Zoe to count, a blur of chrome and black leather. They rev their motorcycles and then park, side by side, against the curb, shut down their engines and push up their sunglasses.

Zoe looks up at her mother, incredulous. “Just for me? All of this?” Since she was abused by a man she should have been able to count on to keep her safe, trust no longer comes naturally to Zoe. But sadly, fear does. Though her family has moved to a new apartment, she can’t escape the terror of what was done to her, not even at night when she’s sleeping. Her abuser often hijacks her dreams and she wakes, terrified. Now, on this sunny morning, she stands wide-eyed before 67 bikers – a posse of tattooed men and strong, formidable women in black leather. And she couldn’t be happier.

Rembrandt, a 56 year old with long hair and a scraggly beard, leads the bikers to where Zoe stands with her mother and five siblings. One biker stays with the motorcycles; others fan out behind Zoe, evenly spaced, and stand guard, their arms folded across their chests. Rembrandt smiles. “Didn’t I tell you I was going to bring some friends?” Zoe nods and laughs. Her mother smiles at the sound. She doesn’t hear it very often anymore. “These people,” says Rembrandt, sweeping his arm over the half-circle of bikers, “will always be here for you. This is your family.” One by one, the bikers introduce themselves, the biggest of them getting down on one knee to shake her hand. “Hi, I’m Bear.”Zoe raises her eyebrows at some of the names – Cannon, Hulk, Fat Daddy, Cue Ball – and smiles at others: Goofy, Tink, Grumpy. There’s Pipes. Hippie. Mo Money. Uno. Smiley, Nytro … “All these people are here for you,” Rembrandt tells her. “Always.”

Zoe has just met the Maricopa County, Arizona, chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse International (BACA). Their motto – stitched into their black leather vests, and printed on their T-shirts and the bandanas tied around their heads – is simple: no child deserves to live in fear. To that end, the bikers, often at the behest of therapists, bring children who have been abused into their motorcycle club. They give each child a denim vest and a road name and assign them two bikers, “their primaries”, whom they can call anytime, day or night. It works because no-one understands better than kids who have been hurt by someone bigger and stronger than them that sometimes it takes someone even bigger, and even stronger, to make you feel safe again. And everyone knows that nobody messes with bikers.

On behalf of the group, Rembrandt makes a promise to Zoe. If she ever needs them, if she’s ever afraid, the bikers will be there – no matter what. They’ll do anything to make her feel safe. And if a child is threatened, the bikers show up in force, keeping watch at the house overnight in shifts, standing silently in the darkness, firearms strapped to their hips, for days at a time if they have to. The bikers don’t hunt down child abusers, but Rembrandt says anyone who wants to get to one of their kids has to get past them first. “They are our little brothers and sisters,” he says. “We are there to empower them. We do whatever it takes.” On this Sunday morning, the bikers start by making Zoe look part of the family. Rembrandt hands her a vest covered in patches. One patch says, “I will not live in fear.” On another is her new road name: Handspring, for her love of gymnastics. “Thank you,” she says again, as Rembrandt helps her into it. Nytro ties a BACA bandana under Zoe’s ponytail, just like her own.

Rembrandt gives vests and road names to Zoe’s siblings because they’re part of the BACA family now, too. They each receive BACA bracelets, T-shirts and temporary tattoos. “No real tattoos, I promise,” Rembrandt stage whispers to their mother. But there’s one gift that’s just for Zoe. Taking a black BACA blanket, Goofy rolls it into a messy ball and hugs it to his chest before handing it to the next biker. After every biker has hugged the blanket, Grumpy staggers over to Zoe, pretending he can barely hold it up. “It’s so heavy,” he says, as he lowers it into her arms. Rembrandt tells Zoe she can put it on her bed or curl up in it when she watches TV. One child tacked it up over her window to keep her perpetrator out. “If you ever feel like it’s running low, you call us and we’ll come and fill it back up,” Rembrandt tells her. “We’ll fill it with love.” Handspring wipes away her tears with her fingertips. “It is a reminder that we will always
be there for you.”

Bikers Against Child Abuse was started in 1995 in Utah by John Paul Lilly, now 56, a social worker, play therapist and professor at Brigham Young University. He’s also a biker who goes by the name Chief. At the time, he was working with an eight-year-old boy who was so afraid of his abuser that he wouldn’t leave the house. Lilly thought having the support of a group of bikers might help the boy feel safe.

Twenty-seven motorcycles, some carrying two bikers, accompanied Lilly to the boy’s house on that first ride. The boy came outside, pulled on the vest with a Harley-Davidson patch on it, and rode his bicycle in circles on the street.

Now BACA is an international non-profit with more than 120 chapters in 43 American states and seven countries, including 10 chapters in Australia. Children are mostly referred to the group by domestic violence shelters, social workers and counsellors. Valid documentation of abuse – police reports, court filings, criminal cases – is required for BACA to become involved; there are no “he said, she said” accusations. The bikers are all volunteers. They’re not reimbursed for fuel, wear and tear on their bikes or the time they take off work. And while they’re typically tough, they’re also human. To help them cope with the stories they’ll hear, bikers receive training from a counsellor. Rembrandt’s wife, Nytro, 56, reminds them, “It’s not about what [the children] went through; it’s what they will go through from this point forward.” Before they can join BACA, each biker must undergo an extensive background check that sometimes turns up an arrest or a stint in jail. As long as the crime didn’t involve children, domestic violence or something similar, they’re free to join because being bikers, and all that is associated with that stereotype, “is the only thing that makes this work”, says Rembrandt. “If we soften that image, it doesn’t work.”

When two of her daughters – one 11, the other seven, both adopted and both deaf – were asked to testify against the man who abused them, Lisa Chuinard, a mother of five from Tucson, Arizona, called BACA. More than 40 bikers were at her house two days later. They named the older girl Spirit and the younger Moxie. “It was the first time after such darkness that there was hope,” says Chuinard, herself a biker. On the day of the court case, the family left their home in Tucson with an escort of seven BACA members on motorcycles. Spirit rode behind her mother. Moxie rode with a biker called Father T, her arms spread wide to hold on around his middle. Before they reached the courthouse, 18 motorcycles from Phoenix, a two-hour drive across the desert, merged with the pack. Chuinard felt Spirit’s arms tighten around her, a hug of delight. Chuinard blinked back tears so she could see the road.

As they walked into court, the bikers formed a wall around the girls. Others filled the courtroom, squeezing into pews, lining the walls. Their presence brought five bailiffs from other courtrooms, just in case there was trouble. But as Spirit testified, a biker on either side of her, her mother swears the girl grew taller. “She was so brave and courageous,” says Chuinard. Moxie, too. “They stood up and said what they needed to say and they did it because BACA was standing with them.”

“A courtroom can be a scary place, even for adults,” says Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Aimee Anderson, who invited two BACA members to meet her after reading about the group in a newspaper. “Any child would be made to feel very safe by their presence,” says Anderson. The bikers are not there to intimidate the defendant or influence the jury, she says. “They are there for the children.”

Judges dictate how many BACA members are allowed in their courtrooms and what they wear. Some ask them to remove their leather vests. The bikers don’t mind. “It’s not what we’re wearing that matters,” says Rembrandt. “It is our presence that empowers the child.” Adds Chuinard, “When the perpetrator is a family member, trust is out the window. There’s no longer anybody safe in the world. BACA gave that back to my kids.”

And yet months after Moxie and Spirit testified, they still struggled. What had happened in the bedroom they shared crept into their dreams. At night, they climbed into bed with their mother. “Your room is your sanctuary. It’s your haven, especially if you’re a girl. It should be a fun place,” says Chuinard. “It was no longer that. It was a place of horror.”

She was at a loss. The kids were in counselling, the man who hurt them serving a prison sentence. “What do you need?” she asked her daughter. “I need BACA,” said Spirit, simply. “I wanted to feel safe,” she says, now.

The next weekend, the house was packed with bikers. They filled the home tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac in the desert and spilled out the front door onto the driveway. The bikers lined up along the hallway, each waiting their turn to dip a hand in a tray of lavender paint and press it against the girls’ bedroom walls. Then, with a black marker, they signed their road names across the palm prints. Passion. Hulk. Flames. Mad Bull. Pipes – 124 in all, fanning across one wall and down the next, up and over the headboard of the girls’ beds, and across the last wall. Father T pressed both of his hands over the door. Before the bikers left, Spirit and Moxie each dipped their hands in the paint and pressed their hands on the inside of each biker’s vest, one after the other, and signed their names.

Spirit and Moxie slept in their room that night and they have every night since. Twelve months on, Moxie has put her BACA blanket away, though she still has the group’s pillow on her bed. “I’m not scared anymore,” she says, spreading her hand over her handprint on the wall. Like her inner strength, her fingers have grown. There’s still a black BACA blanket on Spirit’s bed, and her bookcase is stacked with letters and cards that come regularly from members, and framed pictures of them, waving out at her. “BACA is my family,” she says.

Every day, Spirit presses her hands against the ones on the walls. They’re all bigger than hers, the fingers stretched out wider than she can reach. The girl says the handprints remind her that the bikers are close, if she ever needs them. She says the prints give her comfort. “I’m not afraid anymore.”

BACA in Australia

Like their US counterparts, Australian BACA* members have a determination to do “whatever it takes” to protect abused children. Founded in SA in 2006 by motorcycle mechanic “Krash”, BACA chapters are now present in most states. As evidence in Australian child abuse cases is generally given by video link, BACA bikers don’t fill courtrooms, but they will escort a child to and from court and guard a home around the clock if necessary. Australian referrals, says Krash, come from “word of mouth” and via the group’s website.

“People who have a child they feel the rest of the system can’t do anything for tend to look for things outside of the system, and we’re definitely something that fits that bill,” he says. And while there’s no official recognition, “What we do get [from individual police],” says Krash, is, ‘I love what you do; I like the idea of what you do; keep up the good work.’”