Victims of child abuse require advocation to protect innocence

October 19, 2009 • Skye Watson  
Filed under Opinion

A tiny girl, never before seen, was found peering out a small, shattered window in Florida. The neighbors knew about a mother with two adult children, but no child. Police showed up at the house two years later, the home was leaking feces, cockroaches and rotting bodies among a little girl laying on the floor with her bones sticking out and wearing only a decaying diaper.

This little girl was named Danielle. At the age of seven, she weighed 46 pounds and was not able to speak or eat. She is just one of the thousands of American children who are abused every year at the hands of deranged parents.

Some children are fortunate; they are taken into foster care while still very young. However, many more children should be brought into care at a younger age to prevent them from being damaged beyond repair.

Experts have been questioning whether removing children from questionable parents shortly after birth would actually help them physically or emotionally.

Recent studies show that most children who are arrested for crimes such as shoplifting were consistently abused. Two brothers, aged ten and eleven, well known for theft were found to have been constantly abused by their mother and her boyfriend. Social workers should have had taken them away before they became involved in crime. Instead, these boys are now in a juvenile detention center.

Studies also show that when more infants are taken from abusive parents, juvenile crime decreases as a whole.

Many people believe that they should give the parents another chance, although it is not best for the child. They are trying to fix families that are beyond repair and are broken.

These children do not deserve to be tortured by monsters they call parents who destroy their lives by making them feel useless and unconfident. Many children have even been sent back to homes that are unfit for them.

The best option for these children is permanent adoptive families, which often only occurs when children are very young. Older children who have been put into adoptive homes have had difficulty adapting. Some children have lived in 50 or more different homes because they felt they did not fit in. Perhaps if they had been adopted as infants, they would have grown up in a stable, secure family and would have adapted more easily.

Recently, there was an increase in infants taken into care after a baby was killed by its abusive parents because they refused to take him to the hospital when he became sick. With the increase in the amount of infants in the foster system, came a decrease in the number of children being abused by their parents, although, unfortunately, this was only temporary. 

Child abuse continues to be a colossal problem in the United States. Every year thousands of children, who could have been protected, are abused.

If children were removed from their parents as soon as there was evidence of abuse this would be prevented. Abusive parents have no right to keep their children, because they are jeopardizing their children’s lives.

Some believe that parents have the right to raise their kids however they feel is right, but the line should be drawn before abuse. Preventing child abuse should be high on politicians’ lists of problems to be addressed.