Are children property of their parents even if those parents
are violent, addicted, severely mentally ill or dangerously criminal?
Do teen and preteen mothers own their babies?
Is this child’s child doomed prior to birth?
88 Minnesota Children died at the hands of their caregivers recently
Read parts of Safe Passage For Children of MN
Study of Recent Child Deaths in Minnesota below.
Children have no voice at the legislature, the media or in the home they are born into. They have no rights in court, choice in who raises them or what is done to them. They don’t even know that what is being done to them is against the law. What would a three or five year old say and to whom if she knew?
Over 2.5 million children and adolescents have been born to 17 year old and younger girls. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), teen pregnancy and childbirth costs the United States taxpayers about $9.4 billion annually. There were almost 250,000 births to 15 -19 year old’s in 2012 and 89% of those births were to single mothers.
When a 13 year old becomes pregnant, is the baby her property to do with as she pleases or does the baby have any rights to health and safety? Many teen moms become pregnant a second and third time while using drugs and not having acquired safe parenting skills. Their children suffer immensely. As a community, we could wrap services around the child but that is not who we are as a people.
Should the U.S. government ratify
the UNITED NATIONS RIGHTS OF THE CHILD TREATY of 1989?
We are the only nation ON THE PLANET not to have signed.
This is likely because Southern states refuse to quit sending 12 year old’s to military school and the treaty forbids militarizing children.
Do religious parents have the right to kill their children by withholding lifesaving medical care? 27 states presently allow the practice of withholding medical care for their children and children do die as a result.
From 2001 to 2018, the number of unvaccinated children grew by a factor of 4
what does this mean for COVID era babies and children?
Average number of Americans that died from the flu;
from 2010 to 2017: 36,714
In 2018: 79,400
In 2021, the number of completely unvaccinated children increased by 5 million since 2019. Overview.
Does a child have any right to health and safety?
This study of children who died in Minnesota because of maltreatment was undertaken to
identify opportunities for constructive changes to the philosophy, policy, practices and
management of Minnesota’s public child protection and foster care programs, known together
as child welfare.
The project collected data and reviewed documents from Minnesota counties and courts related
to 88 children who were killed between October 2014 and May 2022. The analysis by the
authors was augmented by case reviews performed by fifteen Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in
six fields that regularly interface with county child protection programs. The report is presented
in two sections, one focusing primarily on state and county child protection agencies, the other
on the court system.
An average of two children per month were killed in Minnesota by their caregivers during the
report period. Our analysis demonstrates that many of these deaths were preventable and were
due to a child welfare philosophy which gave such high priority to the interests of parents and
other adults in households, as well as to the goals of family preservation and reunification, that
child safety and well-being were regularly compromised.
The findings from this study include:
• Fifteen cases included signs of child torture and five unambiguously met the definition of
torture across three different national and state standards.
• Nearly half of children (48%) died due to actions of someone other than a biological
parent, including particularly domestic partners and kinship foster parents.
• The quantitative data and case narratives we assembled raise questions for further
study of whether counties may have left Black children in high risk settings more
frequently and for longer periods of time than children of other races and ethnicities.
• Seven children were killed in foster care including six in kinship placements.
• Both nationally and in Minnesota over 70% of child fatalities are children under three, but
a higher percentage of these children were previously known to child protection in
Minnesota compared with other states.
By most standards, children in the U.S. have the same rights as chattel, pets or women prior to 1918 (when they achieved full person status). Is it right to punish children for behaviors learned and practiced in their birth homes?
About 200,000 youth are tried in adult courts each year and most teen prostitutes are criminalized. The U.S. only recently ended executing youth and those who committed crimes as youth (Texas has ignored the federal mandate).
Should we expect children to change behaviors because we have removed them from the toxic home they were born to? Behaviors learned at home as a child are normal to the child – it can be no other way (there were no other examples of how to live).
Sex and drug use practiced in the home at 5, 6 and 7 years of age can make life in a foster or adoptive home dangerous and a constant crisis for the caring family trying to help and lead to dozens of placements for a troubled State Ward child.
Normalized sex and drugs are child habits not easily discarded. Habit and addiction are real. Not knowing effective ways of dealing with these behaviors serves no one and further demonizes the child.
Should law enforcement punish child prostitutes and drug users who are victims of caregiver rape and parent drug addicts?
Most of these information and better questions come from Jack Westman’s powerful new book;
DEALING WITH CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT AS PUBLIC HEALTH PROBLEMS.
POSTSCRIPT;
In Minnesota it has been easier to find;
1 billion dollars for a new Stadium
1 billion dollars for transportation
&
1 billion dollars to rebuild a bridge that fell in the river
Than it has been to find dollars for mental health and other services for children suffering from the traumas of neglect and abuse.
Healthy children become productive citizens producing
1.4 M in adulthood earning and taxes and other social good/volunteerism etc.
KARA reports on the issues of child abuse.
This article submitted by CASA volunteer Mike Tikkanen
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