There’s no war on the terrorism of child abuse

  • Monday, December 13, 2004 9:00pm
  • Life

Once every three years, the World Trade Center towers fall on American children as 3,000 die at the hands of parents or caretakers.

The children are as vulnerable as the 3,000 people who perished on Sept. 11, 2001. Most are under 5 years of age. Their average age is 2.

These parents are terrorists. Sometimes the children are tortured: beaten with sticks, belts or fists, or cut with knives or burned with boiling water. Sometimes children die in a moment of parental rage. Sometimes they are abused sexually.

Sometimes they are starved or not given water to drink. Sometimes they are killed in the extended suicide of grown-ups in the throes of despair.

Every day in America, three children who live in these kinds of conditions die from them. There is no escape for them. It begs a question: Why have we not declared war on the terrorism that is child abuse?

There are, of course, programs to address child abuse. I work in such an agency, and the program represents a sizeable community commitment.

At our office, we have a two-volume atlas filled with medical photographs of injuries that often lead to children’s deaths, and descriptions of how grown-ups inflict them. Some parents who kill their children have major mental health problems. Some are just mean or selfish.

There is often an immediate community protest when a child is found dead at the hands of a parent. Media, including letters to the editor, raise questions.

How could Scott Peterson kill his wife and their unborn baby? What kind of mother would let her children starve or die from malnutrition? What kind of father would kill his school-age daughters as part of a suicide act?

But most uproars fade as fast as they burst on the scene in the first place.

Despite programs, investments, research and periodic media flaps, there is no American war against the terrorism of child abuse. No single-minded commitment to abolish child abuse – even fatal child abuse – would get a politician elected to office.

If a foreign terrorist group, or even a terrorist group within the country, were to come into the United States and systematically kill 1,000 of our children every year, we would declare war.

It is the distressing fact that parents kill their own children that dilutes and muddies this issue. We believe that the parents who kill are aberrations; that, really, all parents love their children. Communities can often punish parents who kill their children, but it is hard or impossible to legally intervene earlier.

A declared war on fatal child abuse, like war on other kinds of terrorism, would allow the community to intervene sooner. Sometimes this war would offer help to obviously distraught and desperate parents.

But, a Parenting Act would blur the edges of parents’ rights in an attempt to save children just as the Patriot Act blurs the edges of citizen rights to save Americans. Many or most parents would believe that their rights were being abridged.

The key problem with protecting children is that America lacks a coherent policy on children’s rights because those rights interfere with other rights.

Many Americans still believe that the phrase “my children” means “I own them,” like property, and property rights are sacred to some. Those people react against any direct expression of community concern for their specific children. They reject the belief that it takes a community to raise children.

Oddly, they are political bedfellows of others who don’t have children and believe that children are the exclusive responsibility of their parents. Some of these childless people resent having to contribute to children’s health care or education through taxes.

But even those who believe that children should have protected rights can’t agree on whether children’s rights should lean toward self-determination or toward assurance of health and safety. (I subscribe to the health and safety end.)

In the end, some individual rights of adults – and that can mean parents – comes at the cost of up to 1,000 children’s lives, every year. It is a big responsibility.

Bill France, a father of three, is a child advocate in the criminal justice system and has worked as director of clinical programs at Luther Child Center in Everett. Send e-mail to bsjf@gte.net.

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