KARA reports on the issues of child abuse.

This article submitted by CASA volunteer Mike Tikkanen

All Adults Are the Protectors of All Children

Teachers, social workers, law enforcement and foster/adoptive parents dealing with State Ward children are often the last chance that a child has to grow up to lead a normal life.

America’s existing punishment model generally responds to troubled children by expelling from school, placing them in juvenile and criminal justice centers, tasers, beatings and until recently, isolation units in lockdown facilities. None of this helps heal the child. Instead, we are solidifying a reality that this child is different than the rest of us and needs more punishment because of it.

Children removed from their birth homes because of the violence, rape and traumas inflicted on them by their caregivers come into our lives with few of the coping skills and too many behavior problems most adults are unable to manage and punishment is our only answer at a time when the child needs healing and a path to skills and mental health.

The vast majority of foster children in the U.S. become State Ward children because of rape and other repeated violence or life-threatening traumas they have suffered at the hands of their caregivers.
Childhood trauma’s results in biological brain changes (below) and determines how children see and react to the world. This explains the violence, school failure and community chaos we the people are living through now.
Violence and abuse are normal to them. Their violent, sexual or otherwise inappropriate behaviors are hardwired in.
Children from abusive homes often behave in ways that are harmful to themselves and others – making it painful for the people around them.

About one third of State Ward children are forced onto psychotropic medications to control their behaviors (in 2014, 20,000 one and two year old’s were forced onto these drugs – that same year, the drug firm Johnson & Johnson was fined billions of dollars for illegally selling those drugs to pediatricians for use on young children).

Teachers, foster parents & other figures of authority that need to discipline State Ward children can find it dangerous if not impossible as these kids hate authority because of the traumatic punishments they have already endured from the most important authority figures in their lives.

By the numbers;

* 37% of America’s children are reported to Child Protective Services by their 18^th birthday (almost 30 million children overall) unless they are from African American families (44%).

*America’s nine year recidivism rate has reached 90% with six million offenders in prison or on parole today.

*over 30% of children are arrested by their 28^th birthday and the math gets much worse if we calculate the cost in dollars, public health, public safety or public education.

*Statistically, we have 5 to 10 times the murders and other violent crimes, rates of incarceration and recidivism than other industrialized nations.

*America leads the industrialized world in crime and incarceration and trails in public health, safety and education and other quality of life matters.

Decades of uninterrupted generational child abuse has created a giant and growing population of families parented by moms with drug problems, no coping or parenting skills and violent boyfriends.

Today, Child abuse is a Public Health Crisis.

Things would be very different in America if we the people had adopted the healing models used by the rest of the industrialized world.

Instead, we live in a nation based on A centuries old punishment model.

Three strikes you’re out, hang em high and throw away the key…

The rest of the industrialized world developed healing models for their societies after the second world war. Their leaders recognized that help families through the hard times after the war was the only way to rebuild a society destroyed by war.

This has served them well.

Instead of caring for at risk children and young families, we the people have always and continue to build prisons and police forces, kick children out of elementary and high school and brutalize children unlucky enough to be born into abusive homes. Those children will almost certainly go onto introduce their own next generation of abused children.

The punishment model has always hurt black children and families more than white children and families and this goes a long way towards explaining the hatred, fear and violence exploding in our streets today.

Policing a traumatized people with tasers, guns, tear gas, and prisons has never worked.

It is not working in a very big way today.

America continues to build communities that heal no one and cannot be controlled by anyone. Until this changes, life will remain hard for a great many of us – children and adults alike.

There is nothing easy about being a police officer in these times just like there is nothing easy about being a teacher, foster parent or social worker. Turnover in these fields is high and results are low.

Either we the people* fight for and vote for people that understand the concept of daycare, crisis nurseries, community policing and healing at risk children and their families or we will live with this violence and chaos forever.

*We the people: (the adults that fight and vote for or against the people, policies and programs that rule the lives of abused and neglected children).

All Adults Are The Protectors Of All Children.

The ACE study below

These are the children that will become the 8% of adolescents who commit up to 70% of all serious and violent juvenile crime. ACE research indicates that serious and violent delinquency may be concentrated in just 2-4% of families. This points to the importance of early identification through the ACE Program. We know who these children are, where they live and what they need. We have the resources to help them lead normal lives, succeed in school and become contributing members of the community.

It’s exponentially more expensive to ignore them than it is to help them. ACE research shows a strong historical pattern of criminality in families of child delinquents. Using Cohen’s estimates, we calculate the multi-generational “multiplier effect” to be between $3.4 and $11.5 million. In these families, criminality is likely to grow exponentially.

All adults are the protectors of all children.

RAMSEY COUNTY ACE study:
OVERVIEW OF A COMPREHENSIVE INTERVENTION

Hope Melton
Director
Ramsey County (MN) ACE

The ACE target population – high-risk, high-impact Child delinquents. These invisible children age 12 and under who commit chargeable offenses, are an especially high-risk population with a disproportionate impact on society.

Justice Department research shows that child delinquents are substantially more likely to be recidivists and serious, violent and chronic offenders (SVJ). This research also shows that 3 out of 5 chronic serious and violent adult offenders began their careers before age 12.

Just one of my volunteer CASA guardian ad Litem case boys cost our state over three million dollars by the time he aged out of foster care and that did not count the teacher he beat up, people he stabbed or terrible things he did to so many during the time I worked with him.

Mark Cohen, in a 1998 article titled “The Monetary Value of Saving a High-Risk Youth,” estimated that the cost to taxpayers of a single lifetime serious, violent and chronic offender is between $1.7 and $2.3 million. This cost include criminal justice, victim, drug abuse, and lost productivity costs.

ACE research shows a strong historical pattern of criminality in families of child delinquents. Using Cohen’s estimates, we calculate the multi-generational “multiplier effect” to be between $3.4 and $11.5 million. In these families, criminality is likely to grow exponentially.

KARA reports on the issues of child abuse.

This article submitted by CASA volunteer Mike Tikkanen

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