Child abuse occurs in families of all demographics.
Earlier this week, the mayor of Atlantic City and his wife were charged with abusing their teenage daughter. Mayor Marty Small is accused of striking his daughter in the head with a broom until she lost consciousness. He is also accused of punching her, grabbing her head and throwing her to the ground.
His wife, La’Quetta Small, is Atlantic City’s superintendent of schools. She is accused of punching her daughter, dragging her by the hair and striking her with a belt, leaving marks on her shoulders.
The alleged abuse occurred while the girl was 15 and 16 years old.
Unfortunately, the school principal, who happened to be a friend of the family, failed to notify authorities after concerns of abuse were brought forth.
We believe child safety should always be the priority. Period.
One of the bills we’re supporting would penalize organizations, such as schools or doctor’s offices, when employees are discouraged from contacting CPS.
Rep. Nash, the author of HF4793, was subject to abuse himself as a child. He was hospitalized eight times as a boy. One of his teachers noticed visible injuries and expressed concerns to his principal, who did nothing.
A column published in the Star Tribune this morning does an excellent job highlighting Rep. Nash’s story and his efforts to protect children. Read it here.
Indeed, the safety of any community begins with the safety of its children. Let’s do everything we can to protect them.
Every parent should be knowledgeable about factual child-development science so that they’re more enabled to rear their children in a more psychologically functional and sound manner.
Therefore, I believe, high-school students should be educated for the most important job ever, even those who plan to remain childless. Understanding the science behind every child’s healthy/functional development can at least enable a prospective parent to make an educated decision on how they wish to go about rearing any future children.
If nothing else, a child-development-science curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood.
Since so much of our lifelong health comes from our childhood experiences, childhood mental health-care should generate as much societal concern and government funding as does physical health, even though psychological illness/dysfunction is typically not immediately visually observable.
Meanwhile, people will procreate, some prolifically even, regardless of their questionable ability to raise their children in a psychologically functional/healthy manner. I sometimes wonder how much immense long-term suffering might have been avoided had these people received mandatory child-development science curriculum as high-school students.
After all, dysfunctional and/or abusive parents may not have had the chance to be anything else due to their lack of such education and their own dysfunctional/abusive rearing as children.
Still, in the book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal it’s written that “[even] well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development” (pg.24).
Regarding early life or adverse childhood experience trauma, people tend to know (perhaps commonsensically) that they should not loudly quarrel when, for instance, a baby is in the next room; however, do they know about the intricacies of why not? Since it cannot fight or flight, a baby stuck in a crib on its back hearing parental discord in the next room can only “move into a third neurological state, known as a ‘freeze’ state … This freeze state is a trauma state” (pg.123).
This causes its brain to improperly develop. It’s like a form of non-physical-impact brain damage. Also, it is the unpredictability of a stressor, and not the intensity, that does the most harm. When the stressor “is completely predictable, even if it is more traumatic — such as giving a [laboratory] rat a regularly scheduled foot shock accompanied by a sharp, loud sound — the stress does not create these exact same [negative] brain changes” (pg.42).
Furthermore, how many of us were aware that, since young children completely rely on their parents for protection and sustenance, they will understandably stress over having their parents angry at them for prolonged periods of time? It makes me question the wisdom of punishing children by sending them to their room without dinner.
Yet, general society perceives and treats human procreative ‘rights’ as though we’ll somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture our children’s naturally developing minds and needs.
Meantime, in protest to newly mandated elementary school curriculum that teaches something undoubtedly controversial, a picket sign read, “We don’t co-parent with the government”. But maybe a lot of incompetent yet procreative parents nowadays should.
Mindlessly ‘minding our own business’ often proves humanly devastating. Yet, owing to the Only If It’s In My Own Back Yard mindset, the prevailing collective attitude (implicit or subconscious) basically follows: ‘Why should I care — my kids are alright?’ or ‘What is in it for me, the taxpayer, if I support social programs for other people’s troubled families?’
While some people will justify it as a normal thus moral human evolutionary function, the self-serving OIIIMOBY can debilitate social progress, even when social progress is most needed. And it seems this distinct form of societal penny wisdom but pound foolishness is a very unfortunate human characteristic that’s likely with us to stay.
But as a moral rule, a physically and mentally sound future should be every child’s fundamental right — along with air, water, food and shelter — especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter. And the health of all children needs to be of real importance to everyone — and not just concern over what other parents’ children might or will cost us as future criminals or costly cases of government care, etcetera — regardless of how well our own developing children are doing.
Though it’s only for the month of April, every day of the year should be Child Abuse Prevention Month in this world.
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“It’s only after children have been discovered to be severely battered that their parents are forced to take a childrearing course as a condition of regaining custody. That’s much like requiring no license or driver’s ed[ucation] to drive a car, then waiting until drivers injure or kill someone before demanding that they learn how to drive.”
—Myriam Miedzian, Ph.D.
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“The way a society functions is a reflection of the childrearing practices of that society. Today we reap what we have sown. Despite the well-documented critical nature of early life experiences, we dedicate few resources to this time of life. We do not educate our children about child development, parenting, or the impact of neglect and trauma on children.”
—Dr. Bruce D. Perry, Ph.D. & Dr. John Marcellus
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“It has been said that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty. Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practicing medicine, ‘I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood’.”
—Childhood Disrupted, pg.228
Thank you Safe Passage for your dedication to addressing Child abuse in our state and nation. I am a Mental Health Professional and a survivor of child abuse ..I continue to be concerned about the level of violence in our culture and hate speech. It is important to call out abuse, racism and misogyny. I value the work Safe Passage does to address child abuse .
Can’t imagine any salvation for people who do these awful misdeeds to children!