I am continually horrified and shocked by the things people do to children.
Recently, a 4-year-old boy was beaten to death by (I believe) his mother’s boyfriend. There were sooo many injuries: strangulation, blunt force trauma (causing laceration of the liver), etc. Then it comes out that the coroner found 0.12 blood alcohol level.
Granted, some alcohol is created by the body when it decomposes, but they say the body wasn’t that decomposed.
Some people shouldn’t ever be allowed near kids. Unfortunately, a lot of times, it takes something horrific happening before people realize who these people are.
We kind of do know (or at least strongly suspect) who these people are: “Children living in households with 1 or more male adults that are not related to them are at increased risk for maltreatment injury death. This risk is not elevated for children living with a single parent, as long as no other adults live in the home.” Excerpted from: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/109/4/615.short
The problem is how to screen households for them without resorting to totalitarian-style house-to-house searches or unconstitutionally invasive investigations. Don’t get me wrong, these stories break my heart, and I wish I could come up with a way to prevent these tragedies. It’s just that I can’t think of a way that would be effective and not be eventually struck down by a court as being a violation of the Fourth (or other) Amendment.
Someone asked my friend, who’s expecting his first child any minute now, if he was nervous. His answer was “Nope! 100% of the people who have had kids before did just fine, so we will too!”
I did not have the heart to tell him that in no way have 100% of parents done just fine
My reaction to the linked article is to wonder if there’s any culpability for the mother. The boy was found inside his home, which the article says was a mobile home. Could the boyfriend really have inflicted that assortment of injuries without her hearing anything? I know not everyone is as light a sleeper as I am, but it bugs me to think she slept through the whole thing…or was passed out.
I shouldn’t read threads about harm coming to children. I’m supposed to be lowering my blood pressure.
Back when I was still young enough to have children, this is the kind of thing I thought of when some well-meaning busybody would tell me “But if you had one you would love it!”. I would reply “Then where do all the abused children come from?”
I don’t think I would have abused a child if I had given birth - but I don’t think any woman thinks “I’ll get pregnant and have a baby so I can beat it to death.”.
Agreed, and I am usually very ambivalent on the death penalty. But anybody who does something like this has demonstrated they need to be permanently removed from the human race. There are no words.
The moms do have culpability. They bring these assholes into their homes and allow them to do this shit.
I have known several women who were sexually abused by stepfathers. In every case, the mother knew and looked the other way. They are accessories.
That’s not meant to be a sweeping statement about stepfathers, though. A lot of guys can step into households and be awesome dads. Of course, those are likely to be cases where the mother isn’t going to bring home scumbags in the first place. It isn’t like there’s some kind of luck of the draw going on. The moms who sacrifice their kids to these animals know exactly what they’re doing.
In most of the cases I read about, the mother was out of the house (running errands, working) and the boyfriend was supposed to be babysitting. Something happens, the child won’t stop crying or soils him/herself or s/he breaks something, and the boyfriend goes off and hits the child to “discipline” him/her. Things escalate until the child is seriously injured.
The boyfriend might take the child to the ER and tell the doctors the child “fell off the sofa”, but usually, he simply puts the child to bed. Upon her return, the mother finds the child unresponsive and takes him/her to the ER. The medical staff suspect foul play, the authorities are called in, the mother is questioned, then the boyfriend. The boyfriend starts by saying the child fell off the sofa, then changes to “I may have spanked him”, then “I may have slapped him”, then “maybe I shoved him, I can’t remember”. Eventually he admits to the cops he beat the $h!t out of the kid.
I wish someone would come up with a program to prevent these tragedies. We’ve identified the risk factors. We’ve identified the at-risk population. How do we reach and then teach mothers to not leave their infants and toddlers in the care of boyfriends who have not been trained in proper childcare techniques?
You do realize that the vast majority of boyfriends do not hurt children? That some of them are dads to kids whose biological fathers aren’t worth a crap?
The majority of parents, biological or otherwise, have never received any kind of training. Most people learn on the job. The problem is not lack of training.
The problem is not mothers’ boyfriends or any other class of people, either.
Yes, the aggregate statistical risk is multiplied for kids in that situation, just as the risk is multiplied for kids in poverty, or having alcoholic mothers (those are among the “maternal and child risk factors” mentioned in the link). But the base risk for kids to be beaten to death is pretty low.
Any response that sees a whole class of people as being responsible for this violence, even as having the potential for killing children, is deeply problematic, to say the least.
Agreed, and allow me to clarify that I did not intend to indict a whole class of people. I was unclear because I get very emotional thinking about these cases.
When I posted, I was thinking about households with these risk factors: mother and boyfriend are in their late teens to early twenties; the mother’s relationship with the boyfriend is a relatively new one; low-income; substance abuse by one or both adults; boyfriend is unemployed or underemployed; adults have only high school education or dropped out of high school. Most of the cases reported by local news media had most of these risk factors present in the household where the injured/deceased child lived.
My apologies for not being clearer; as I said, these cases break my heart and my emotions got in the way of my being more specific about who I think would greatly benefit from attention in order to avoid the scenario I described in my second post.
