WHOSE FUTURE?

Wake up America! There is no national future except in the children you are raising right now. They are the future. Great to protect Homeland Security. Terrific to preserve the planet. Wonderful to fix Social Security and health care. But America only has future life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness through its children…. all our children…. and serious attention to their most vulnerable members has been almost non-existent.

They don’t vote. They don’t have the very constitutional rights that would help keep them safe. They don’t have money. They don’t have lobbyists on K Street. They are short. In olden times the theory was they were imperfect adults. But they grow up on our watch, and if we screw up their childhood, we screw up America’s future for generations to come.

But, you ask, abused and neglected children are somebody else’s problem, right? Your children are fine. You love them. You keep them safe. You educate them well. They know right from wrong. You lead by example, right? Wrong. The burden of abuse and neglect is yours too…. If we want to live here, we need to own the problem that envelops us, lest we bequeath a plague of social awfulness onto our own children: a curse that otherwise rolls on to be their problem and ours in the future. We pay attention now to the cancer within or we see it blight our own next generations: a rolling, growing, evil tide of misery, helplessness, criminality and despair that rolls on for ever, a cursed tide of evil that is monstrous and malevolent. And unnecessary. It is time to wake up and fix the curse just about every other first world nation has already sorted out much better than us.

Witness our American calamity:
· 5.5 million children involved in reports of abuse or neglect each year.
· 1,200 children killed each year by their abusers: four each day.
· 1.2 million American children currently in foster homes, institutionalized or homeless.
· An average 1,690 children determined by investigation to have been raped each week.
· Over 32% of convicted killers in the U.S. were sexually abused as children.
· 60% of teens who become pregnant were sexually abused as children.
· 95% of teen prostitutes were sexually abused.· The U.S Department of Justice states that rape and sexual abuse of children in the United States costs the victims $1.5 billion in medical expenses and $21.5 billion in indirect costs per year.
· A 2001 study shows annual Direct Costs of child abuse and neglect total $24 billon and Indirect Costs $70 billion, for a total societal cost in the U.S. of $94 billion per year.
· The annual incident rate of child abuse and neglect in the U.S. (40 children per 1,000) is 10 times that for all forms of cancer (3.9 individuals per 1,000), yet U.S. government funding devotes only 5 cents of every $100 for child maltreatment research compared to $2 for cancer research.

Why, you ask? Why, in this richest nation on the face of the earth have we permitted this curse to self-replicate in our midst?
· States Rights: Terrific for freedom; lousy for protecting children: every scintilla of best practice was worked out years ago and has been successfully implemented somewhere among the 2,200 independent jurisdictions that have self-invented methods for dealing with abuse and neglect. But at least 80% of the country has never heard or learned those lessons…. Over three quarters of the country leaves their children in a Dark Ages of inept, broken, shambling bureaucratic ineptitude.
· Over half American children who appear in official dependency hearings where their interests are at stake have no lawyer.
· Most official consideration of American children’s best interests in Abuse, Neglect and Dependency determinations takes place without the child being heard, without the necessary resources and without the trained, qualified investigation and deliberation that would best serve the child.
· The presumption of governmental secrecy in 36 of the 50 States, whether or not it is necessary to protect the child, and frequently after the child’s death, allows patterns of ineptitude and bureaucratic misfeasance to roll on for ever without the light of day holding them to press and public account. In the 14 States with open hearings and guidelines to protect he child’s identity, errors are corrected because Americans, once they know, demand no less.
· Unlike all adult Americans, American children harmed by State decisions and actions have no right to seek redress or damages. As a result, agencies mandated to protect children are not required to protect them and face no legal consequences for their repetitive failures, even if they come to light.
· We mostly do not adequately train the grown-ups through whose hands pass the abused and neglected children: in the State of Texas, the number of weeks of training required to become a State-certified manicurist exceeds the number of weeks of training required to become a State-certified investigating social worker.

Why here, in America?
· Children are offered specific protection by the constitutions of over 80 sovereign nations, including under the new Iraqi Constitution, but not by that of the United States of America.
· 193 nations, including two non-party nations, have ratified the United Nations Convention on The Rights Of The Child. Only two have not: Somalia and the United States of America.

What is it about America that only lets us fix things after they are broken, that inhibits our willingness to prevent them from breaking in the first place, when the total cost is much, much less? How can a nation of can-do high achievers not wish to loosen this clearly-delineated vice of awfulness and to change systems that permit generations of abused and neglected children from carrying their life-long curses into adulthoods of unhappiness and oftentimes socially-damaging behavior? Why do we tolerate vicious circles and not reverse them into virtuous ones with already clearly-known better practices?

It is time to get angry. It is time to get mad as hell and not to take this any more. It is time to realize this rolling curse is not inevitable and exists through failures of leadership at State, Federal and local levels. Time to realize that best practices thrive happily in a few places among us…. Time to insist they be delivered to the other 80% of the nation’s children in dire circumstances. Time to stand up for the kids!

A Man Never Stands So Tall As When He Stoops To Hold The Hand Of A Child In Need. Neither does a nation.

_____________________________________________________________
Peter Samuelson (petersam@who.net) is a Motion Picture producer, executive and founder of three non-profit philanthropies: The Starlight-Starbright Childrens Foundation (www.starlight.org), the First Star Public Policy Initiative (www.firststar.org) and EDAR ("Everyone Deserves A Roof"). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Saryl and four children.