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Invisible children
90% of the children in the U.S. Juvenile Justice
system have come from the Child Protection system. Over 90% of the
adults in Criminal Justice have come out of Juvenile Justice.
Legislators predict the need for new prisons by extrapolating from the
number of children in their Child Protection System. America is the only
nation in the world to build prisons based on the number of children in
Child Protection.
America has created a prison feeder system for poor
and abused children. Abused children are 66 times more likely to enter
Juvenile Justice than children who are not abused. Most of the children
in the Child Protection and Juvenile Justice Systems are people of color
and poor. Income and color seem to be great un-equalizers. For many
years America has suffered about 40,000 murders per year (plus millions
of assaults and robberies) and for twenty of the last twenty-five years
between one out of four and one out of five Americans has been a victim
of a crime every year. For a long time the United States has had the
highest per-capita rate of incarceration (imprisonment) of all the
industrialized countries (except for Russia).
Today, there are 600,000 felons in Florida (without
counting the current prison population in Florida). About 600,000 felons
are released each year in America, with little chance of employment, or
fitting back into to the community. We the People have decided that
prisons are for punishment, not rehabilitation. For many years, the U.S.
rate of recidivism (returning to prison) has been greater than 66%.
America executes more people who were prosecuted while juveniles than
any other country in the world. We are the only nation at the UN to
refuse to sign the Child Rights Treaty (190 other nations have signed
it), simply because we refuse to stop executing juveniles.
Consider these truths the next time your DA charges a
16 year old who randomly shoots someone outside a convenience store, as
an adult (or, the 12 year old girl who left her baby in a shoe box under
her bed). Both children were terribly abused by their parents (national
and local cases this year). Children sent into the adult Criminal
Justice System are 8 times more likely to commit suicide and five times
more likely to be raped than if they were in the Juvenile Justice
system. The prison industry is a good business in America and it makes
big money. Prison related industry has a much larger PAC (money raising
political action committee) than do the abused and neglected children of
our nation (there is no money raising PAC for children's issues).
Nationally, a disproportionate number of the children
in abusive homes, Child Protection, and the Juvenile Justice system are
children of color and poor. They are invisible, and they have no voice
in their own affairs. We don’t see them until they have done something
terrible. Then we punish them. As a nation, we don't spend much money
helping children in need of protection, or the ex-convicts they become,
to fit back into our society. We do spend a fortune on prisons, parole,
and the court systems that send them to jail.
Child Protection Systems vary widely from state to
state. When a county gets bad press (a child dies forgotten, or lost in
the system) county child workers get the blame. The media doesn't bring
attention to the huge caseloads of the social workers, or the lack of
services that are available within the system to help the worker to get
results. The community may be outraged, but it continues to provide
minimal funding to run these systems.
Fifty years ago, senior citizens were ignored by their
community & discovered by the media to be eating dog food out of cans
and sleeping under bridges. The media brought attention to the
communities neglect of seniors and the community got involved, people
called their senators and legislation was changed to make the lives of
seniors better. Seniors are much better represented today because of
Social Security, AARP, & the active awareness of the groups Seniors have
formed. Abused children don’t have the knowledge, or the capacity to
call their senators, protect themselves, or even to bring attention to
their circumstances. Abused children can’t form groups, or lobby to have
laws changed. It takes an involved and aware community to deal with the
problems of child abuse, or nothing changes.
The social workers and service providers that I have
met have all been committed hard working people who work in this field
because they want to make a difference and they care about people. Most
caseworkers are overburdened and working without the resources needed to
complete the job they were hired to do. Their community needs to stand
behind them and provide them the necessary tools to help the children
they work with succeed. Caseworker moral is often low, turnover high,
and this results in inconsistent service to children. I know of several
children in my experience who have had between thirty and forty
different caseworkers. These are children who are removed from their
family and have little or no other consistent contact with any care
provider, or family member. One young man had 27 foster placements over
an 8 year period. American children need more help than they are
getting. I work in a Child Protection System in a county that is better
funded and better respected than many others and it is only marginally
addressing the problems of the children in its system.
Funding the future well being of abused and neglected
children is the right thing to do and it will save us money. Funding
prevention and early intervention programs is a practical investment and
it will return big dividends. Our Child Protection and prison policies
are costing us much more than the just the cash to build and maintain
prisons. Children in Child Protection who are too old, or too troubled
to be adopted, can be part of the Child Protection System for ten years
or more. These children are 66 times more likely to experience both the
Juvenile Justice System and the Criminal Justice System. The cost of
institutionalizing millions of American citizens for ten to thirty year
periods runs into many millions of dollars per child/inmate (and it is
common). By not removing children from abusive homes in a timely manner
(as the rest of the industrialized world does) we incur huge ongoing
costs related to crime, mental health services, educational failure, and
the livability of our communities.
Between 50 and 75% of the children admitted into the
Juvenile Justice system have diagnosable mental health issues. It costs
great sums to treat these illnesses, especially if the child has been
abused for some years (the average length of sex abuse is four years).
It costs a great deal more to 'not' treat these illnesses. The cost of
crime in America is estimated at between 500 billion and 1.6 trillion
annually. These numbers are arrived at by valuing the rapes and murders
of our family members at what most of us would consider unacceptably low
numbers ($20,000 per rape of your child, or your spouse, $5000 per
assault, etc..) There are also the misunderstood costs of abused and
neglected children in our public school system. Many of these children
have severe mental health problems and they can be uncontrollable and
dangerous in our classrooms. The national statistical data of
pregnancies, assaults, and students carrying guns on school property is
in the range of 8% to 12% of the student body (for each category).
Private schools don't have to deal with these problems
and that's why their cost per pupil is lower. The next time you are
asked to consider vouchers, remember this. Public school teachers are
under much greater stress in their classrooms than are private school
teachers That's at least partially the reason that some of them take the
reduced salaries to teach in private schools.
Abused and neglected children are being placed in the
public school system without making the necessary investment in training
and support to accommodate them (12 to 14 thousand abused and neglected
children are in the Minnesota Child Protection System this year). Many
of those children are not receiving the mental health services that they
need. The state of New Jersey has recently completely dropped it's
mental health services within their school system. Their abused and
neglected unmanageable children are all going to directly to detention
centers and jail. The issue of abused and neglected children in our
schools is largely underreported and results in a repeated and
undeserved bad press for our educators. I challenge those of you who
doubt this to spend time in the inner city public schools. It's not the
teachers in these schools who are costing us money, it is quite simply
the 900,000 American children who were reported as abused, or neglected
last year for whom our teachers have to provide safety, discipline, and
an education. That's why our national high school dropout rates are not
the 2% and 3% that have been reported over the last few years, but in
fact they are between 20% & 40%. It’s why 25% of high school graduates
are functionally illiterate, and why three years ago on a national test
of high school seniors, one out of three of them could not find Florida
on a map.
If you compare the difference between how the rest of
the developed world handles these same problems, you would find that our
current treatment of abused and neglected children is expensive, counter
productive, and cruel.
What’s a concerned citizen to do? Bring your attention
to the issues and become aware and active in the discourse of what’s
really happening, what’s at stake, and how to make things better. Try to
understand the underlying issues, make them part of your current public
discourse & bring it to the attention of others. Call, write, & visit
your political representatives. Get involved, volunteer, send money to
organizations that are dealing with the issues. In Minnesota; St.
Joseph’s Home for Children, www.friendsofchildren.com, Prevent Child
Abuse MN; www.pcamn.org, or nationally; www.friendsofthechildren.com
become a mentor, Big Brother/Sister, guardian ad-Litem, or call the
United Way and ask for ideas. Every community has the problem. Each one
of us can make a difference. Personal involvement at some level is the
only way change ever occurs.
Abused and Neglected children need the attention of
the larger community (that’s us). Nothing will change until ‘we the
people’ make the changes. Unlike American senior citizens of fifty years
ago, abused and neglected children cannot alert their senators, or even
bring attention to their plight, they are INVISIBLE and they have no
voice. If ‘we the people’ remain silent and neglect to bring attention
to the problems of abused and neglected children, these painful
conditions in our schools, in our cities, in our prisons, will remain
for all of us to suffer as the cycle continues.
The words of the current governor of the state of
Minnesota, “children who are the victims of failed personal
responsibility are not my problem, nor are they the problem of the state
of Minnesota,” (spoken to David Strand and Andy Dawkins in September
2001) clearly define an attitude and public policy that will keep our
prisons full and our police busy.
Today, due to our personal lack of attention and
awareness to the weakest and most vulnerable among us, and the
politicizing of complicated social issues, ‘we the people’ will be
seeing more new prisons, increasing crime & more unnecessary suffering.
Sources: Children’s Defense Fund, STATE OF AMERICA’S
CHILDREN, Youth with Mental Health Disorders: Office of Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention, Handle with Care: Serving the Mental Health
Needs of Young Offenders (Coalition for Juvenile Justice), Getting It
Together, the Health and Well-Being of MN Youth, National Commission to
Prevent Infant Mortality, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical
Abstract of the U.S., U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services, Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, FBI; Crime In the United States,
(Uniform Crime Reports), U.S. Dept of Justice, Office of Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention, New York Times, Minneapolis Star and
Tribune, Minneapolis Spokesman Recorder, Harvard School Of Public
Health, David Strand, NATION OUT OF STEP.
Mike Tikkanen
4 August 2004
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug04/Tikkanen0804.htm
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