Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans and other major U.S. cities experienced over 600% more carjackings in the last two years.
These are the reported cases. Many car jackings were violent – most of them committed by juveniles.
(State By State + International) KARA’s Free Friday Morning Real Story E Updates KARA SOCIAL MEDIA KARA Signature Video (4 minute) Child Welfare In the News is a collection of child abuse/wellbeing news by the CHILD WELFARE INFORMATION GATEWAY. KARA has compiled these stories for the week of Feb 11-18 2022.
COVID is punishing AT RISK CHILDREN at a rate and severity never seen before. How can we help them? Tracking and reporting issues of violence, trauma, neglect and abuse of children is not transparent or robust – it never has been. Few people are aware of the terrific impact trauma has on children and how…
The American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association have declared a national emergency in children’s mental health, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Religious exemptions = It’s Not A Crime to Abuse Your Child + NY banned child marriage today (7.23.21) but you can still withhold life saving medical care for religious reasons….
COVID restrictions have locked many more students into toxic homes and made it much harder for teachers to have the relationships necessary to have meaningful conversations and provide help to end the abuse.For many children being able to attend school physically is their only reprieve from an abusive home life and only chance to confide in an adult that can provide a path to safety.
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What is central in this discussion is the gravitational pull that abandoned children feel to connect with family and the importance of kinship care in this in the equation for each child placement.
COVID is Hammering Children’s Mental Health
These charts show steadily rising trends over the ten year period before COVID. The data pointing to youth planning suicide in the past year is very serious (2019).
Recent Child Self-Harm & Suicide (state reporting summer 2021)
It should be big news* that Hennepin County Commissioner Jan Callison** stood up for abused and neglected children when she found out County Child Protection service providers did not respond to abused & neglected children on weekends, late nights or holidays.
You could tell Commissioner Callison was upset when a service provider at a Task Force Oversight Committee meeting described the County’s procedure of leaving children in violent and abusive homes for days because public policy favored social workers not working holidays, late nights and weekends over the safety of children in dangerous circumstances.
The good news is that Governor Mark Dayton created a task force to investigate Child Protective Services and that many of the worst failures are being addressed instead of ignored.
The bad news is that four, five and six year old children had to die tortured deaths to attract the media and outrage a public before terrible public policy could be exposed and corrected.
None of the 50 children I worked with in Child Protection ever made the newspaper.