Our heart breaks every time we hear of a child who is senselessly killed. Last month, 7-month old Mateo Harding was drowned by his mother in a Bloomington hotel bathtub. Also in March, three-year-old Eastyn Deronjic was found unresponsive in a Moorhead apartment and later died under conditions police call “suspicious.”
Every year, around 2,000 children die of maltreatment — including about 2 children per month in Minnesota. Unfortunately, many state governments fail to count many of these deaths or release information that would help determine their causes. Why is this? How can we prevent these deaths?
We invite you to join us for the public launch of Lives Cut Short, a new project to track child fatalities due to maltreatment nationally. At the heart of the project is a new database called CANDID, which will make information available on child fatalities in every state — including Minnesota.
The goal of Lives Cut Short is to improve public awareness of the extent of child fatalities, encourage states to be more transparent about the number and reasons for these deaths, and eventually promote practice changes to keep children safer.
Lives Cut Short is a joint effort by the American Enterprise Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Safe Passage’s founder serves on the advisory board and has been involved in its development.
To access the livestream of the event, RSVP using this link. We hope you can join us.
As heartbreaking as this project will be, it is a necessary and worthy investment of time and passion.
This is great to see. Our children must not remain invisible. We must identify and bring to light what needs to change in our world for all the children, to be loved, be safe, be nurtured, and be protected.