That’s another thing. Most abuse education that I’m aware of warns kids about strangers, or the football coach or something. They don’t talk about Moms and Dads and Aunts and Uncles. I guess because it’s not very PC… but when kids don’t have parents or adults they can trust, they need to know how to deal with that.
Also, in many situations, reporting the abuse could make things waaaaay worse. Sick parents retaliate sometimes.
And it’s not like the foster care system is any better. I took a course on child welfare policy and it was very eye-opening - not only the horrors so many kids endure but how utterly broken our child welfare system is.
I think that kids that are abused know what’ll happen if they tell. And many also know how horrible the foster care system is, so why bother?
This occurred very near my hometown, thankfully, long after I was anywhere near the age where I’d have been sent to foster care had I decided to rat out my parents.
So yeah, with foster parents like this in the system, and stories like this all over the news, what kid would voluntarily take her chances with the broken system?
Kids are not obligated to report that they’re being abused. In fact, you can’t trust them to tell the truth about it at all. The abusers are the ones who have an obligation: they are obligated to refrain from abusing children!
You’re going about this the wrong way, because a smart abuser knows how to manipulate a child into never telling anybody anything. I know because this is *exactly *what happened to me. I would never have told anyone about my abuse, even if asked point-blank by my own mother about it, because my abuser threatened my and my mother’s and sister’s welfare if I ever said anything. I would rather have let him kill me than risk something happening to my sister, so I never breathed a word.
You can’t trust that a kid will be honest with anyone (teacher, family member, cop, etc) about being abused. You just can’t. Nobody picked up on what was happening to me, but if they HAD, I’d still have lied through my teeth about it to protect the people I loved. This is the reality of why so much abuse goes unreported. It’s not because the abused children don’t say anything, it’s because their abusers are manipulative monsters.
When I was an adult and my mom accidentally guessed what had happened to me, she seemed to feel personally wronged by my silence over the years, and asked why I didn’t tell her. I choked out, “BECAUSE I COULDN’T!” In my experience, anyone who has been abused will understand this immediately. Anyone who hasn’t… can’t. Not without a lot of education and empathy, at least.
My judgment about telling was definitely affected by a previous abuse experience. When I was 3, my Mom’s 2nd husband was convicted of abusing me - he is the one who confessed, I really had no clue what was going on. But he went to jail and my Daddy was no more.
As a teen, I knew that the consequences of telling would probably be my family torn apart. Add to that the fact that my mother was seriously mentally ill and I felt in order to prevent her from falling apart I just needed to keep the peace.
Hell yes!
People always assume that a report of abuse will reult in a kid being removed from the home immediately, and that is not always the case. Here in MA at least, kids often remain in their homes while DSS comes out to look around. When I was doing mental health work with families, I had kids that I would have loved to see removed from their homes, but family unification is always the goal.
So, you have a kid in an abusive home, whose parent finds out that s/he has told someone enough to get them investigated. Social worker comes out, looks around, and there is nothing immediately threatening to the life of the child, so they leave the kid there while they go back to the office to see if there’s some parenting class they can sign the parent up for, or whatever.
What do you think happens to the kid now? Do you see the parent getting better?