On Monday, BBC News launched a multimedia special report on child abuse in the United States called “America’s child death shame.”
On Tuesday, I still hadn’t opened it because I couldn’t get past the introductory stats:
• Every five hours a child dies from abuse or neglect in the U.S.
• A congressional report put deaths from abuse at 2,500 in 2009
• The U.S. has the worst child abuse record in the industrialized world
This afternoon, I finally did dig into the thing. I don’t think I’ve read or watched reports as sobering as these in some time. The statistics pile up:
• Sixty-six children under the age of 15 die from physical abuse or neglect every week in the industrialized world. Twenty-seven of them in the U.S. –the highest number of any industrialized country.
• Over the last 10 years, 20,000 American children are believed to have been killed in their own homes by family members. That’s nearly four times the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to date.
• Three-fourths of the victims are under 4, and nearly half have not yet turned 1.
Even more sickening, the report intimates that many of the deaths don’t come out of moments of temporary insanity. They come out of situations that could have been stopped.
Coloring the entire thing is that many of the social realities that cause abuse and neglect – “teen pregnancy, high-school dropout, violent crime, imprisonment, and poverty – are generally much higher in the US.” Which definitely seems to follow on to the news last month that the recession was directly linked to an increase in violence against children.
The report goes on to explore government’s role and struggles in prevention, but at that point I stopped paying attention, my mind completely distracted by two thoughts:
1. This is a horrific tip of an ugly iceberg.
2. If abuse is this prevalent, I must know someone who is doing harm to their kids.
Both freak me out on so many levels. From the big-picture how on earth can we correct so many causes? To the more immediate, gut-ripping (not wrenching) how could anyone do anything deadly to a child? Why do people like this have kids? Why don’t they just give them up? How would I know something was truly up and what would I do?
Finally, I wonder why is it that I have to learn about this from the BBC – the British Broadcasting Corporation? Is this issue not important enough for our media to cover?
For more information and resources, see BabyCenter’s articles on preventing child abuse.
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Photo: Screen shot courtesy the BBC News