UNITED STATES
Salisbury Post
Sunday, May 27, 2012
By Francis Koster
www.TheOptimisticFuturist.com
As a futurist, I write about emerging threats, and the need for successful interventions to address them. In that spirit, today I bring good news about something bad.
The United States has begun to turn the tide on how we deal with child abuse. I am not saying the problem is solved — but progress, compared to where we started decades ago, is being made.
The term “child abuse” covers much ground, from lack of food and hygiene to emotional abuse, battery and sexual abuse. Using that big definition, it appears that out of the roughly 75 million Americans under the age of 17, more than 1 million American children are victims of child abuse each year. More than half of the abused are reported to suffer from “neglect”; they were not physically attacked, but they were not fed or supported in ways that their little bodies and minds require. Of the remaining group, about 300,000 suffer physical abuse, about 150,000 suffer emotional abuse, and around 135,000 suffer sexual abuse. Hard to believe these numbers represent progress, but they do.
In 1873, a church volunteer doing a home visit found a 9-year-old girl chained to a bed, malnourished and beaten. The volunteer’s first efforts to rescue the child failed because the law and custom of the day made such behavior within a household a private matter. Local officials ignored the reports, and when an investigation was finally begun, the community leaders failed to follow up. In desperation, the church worker turned to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for help because animals were protected under a better set of laws than children were. ASPCA sued the officials, arguing that humans were animals, too. The resulting publicity successfully rescued the child.
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