The CPS System Vs Parents and Their Dog Cages
Children may be susceptible to abuse by an array of people but the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System stats say children are overwhelmingly abused by their parents, with over seventy percent of abuse victims falling prey to their parents in 2015, the last year for which statistics are known. The majority of child abuse cases stem from the abuse of alcohol, drugs, or domestic violence by the parents. Even more surprisingly is that in over seventy percent of the cases it's actually the mother as the abuser.
Specialist who have studied parents who abuse their kids say these cases usually arise out of a mental disorder, or a past history of abuse themselves as children. In some cases parents go to the extreme of feeling compelled to try protect their children from the ills of society, as you may find in some parents who tend to lock their children away and keep them hidden, others it could just be a means of control. Still in others it may represent their way with dealing with their own stress and anxieties by minimizing the amount of time they allow themselves to be exposed to their children. Regardless of the reasons these hideous and sadistic cases seem to be on the rise or could that just be what we are telling ourselves?
When we look back at the first public exposure of a child kept restrained it was cast across the nation as the worst case of child abuse in US history, the year was 1970 when her partially blind mother walked into the wrong room while seeking services for the blind with her daughter in tow.
Starved, tortured, forgotten: Genie, the feral child who left a mark on researchers
She hobbled into a Los Angeles county welfare office in October 1970, a stooped, withered waif with a curious way of holding up her hands, like a rabbit. She looked about six or seven. Her mother, stricken with cataracts, was seeking an office with services for the blind and had entered the wrong room.
But the girl transfixed welfare officers.
At first they assumed autism. Then they discovered she could not talk. She was incontinent and salivated and spat. She had two nearly complete sets of teeth - extra teeth in such cases are known as supernumeraries, a rare dental condition. She could barely chew or swallow, and could not fully focus her eyes or extend her limbs. She weighed just 59lb (26kg). And she was, it turned out, 13 years old.
Her name – the name given to protect her identity – was Genie. Her deranged father had strapped her into a handmade straitjacket and tied her to a chair in a silent room of a suburban house since she was a toddler. He had forbidden her to cry, speak or make noise and had beaten and growled at her, like a dog.
It would be a case that stunned a nation. On the nightly news Walter Cronkite quipped "How, asked Walter Cronkite, could a quiet residential street, Golden West Avenue, in Temple City, a sleepy Californian town, produce a feral child – a child so bereft of human touch she evoked cases like the wolf child of Hesse in the 14th century, the bear child of Lithuania in 1661 and Victor of Aveyron, a boy reared in the forests of revolutionary France?"
With yet another case upon us of parents who locked their kids in cages could the story of Genie had just been one isolated case hidden in the darkness of societal ills? I think there are and always has been those "quiet" residential streets, those "sleepy" little towns where neighbors don't notice anything amiss. Though they had recently just moved there a neighbor in the interview said he had never seen any toys outside or kids running around. When you look at another high profile case it really makes you wonder how anyone could keep thirteen kids a secret That is a tremendous endeavor to contain and keep from public view thirteen children in a residential neighborhood. A relative said she had visited them six years prior and they were one big happy family, just as in the current case the family said they had seen them the week prior and the kids were fine. How complacent have we become as a society that that which doesn't look normal becomes normal? I can just see these people saying to themselves, "Well, just because I wouldn't raise my kids like that doesn't mean it's wrong for someone else to." What about these two sick twisted parents who didn't get any jail time for locking their kids in a room because the children were fed adequately by the parents slipping food under the door to them? Though they lost custody of the kids but the state's mandate for neglect wasn't meant. The sad part is there is nothing stopping this couple from moving out of state and producing more children. More children hidden from view or lost among a system of people who look the other way or don't insist upon seeing the children, as was this case from Detroit a few years ago. Where a mother killed two of her children and kept them frozen in a freezer in the house. Yet the father never insisted upon seeing the kids after a year of being told they just weren't around at the time, other relatives just figured she was mad at them and the school system just took her word she was home schooling now. In another case a five year old was found eating at her flesh for nourishment while her deceased sibling was buried next to a shed in the backyard. They would have never been caught if the mother hadn't done a breaking and entering of the neighbors home. The police got a warrant to search the house and found the five year old in a makeshift cage.
When I look at the number of these cases I am convinced this isn't a new phenomenon of society. I believe that the current rate of travel by the news media brings more focus upon parents who are capable of horrendous abuse. When I hear stories like these my mind often wonders back to a story one of my clients told me once about her daughter. She had two children and one died. She said she had a daughter who died of crib death, she was sort of a sickly child she woke up one morning and found her dead in her crib. Then looking off in her own bewilderment, maybe denial of a truth she said her husband's reaction was they didn't need another mouth to feed. I replied that was a strange way for him to react and she told me she didn't want to talk about it anymore. You could see the question lingering in her eyes that she had lived her life always wondering about that. An expressed emotion of hurt at the slightest notion of probability, the ruthlessness if true not only in regards to the act itself but the fact she lived in a era where you just didn't question your husband and how selfish it was to make her live with a probability like that. Back then who could have even proved it to be not true. Today we are more equipped to distinguish the real truths. I look back upon what she said and see how easily it could have been to play it off like a illness, or as in the case of my own dad who took off from home at the age of nine and never returned, nobody cared, nobody noticed, nobody went out looking for him, there were never safety nets put in place regarding kids back then, the truth be known kids were probably much easier dispensed of back then they are today.
We have a system in place to protect kids, people who will go out and check on the welfare of children. Everyday on this site I see continual bashing of all the wrong perpetrated by this evil government bureaucracy out to kidnap people kids. A system so overburdened by the drug crisis they can't handle the amount of kids they have now let alone feel a compulsion to kidnap more. The common theme of the evil wrong doers versus the I didn't do nuthin' wrong parents, well, at least, if the article comes with a name you can fact check and find out exactly what that parent did do wrong, which ironically always gets downplayed or left out entirely. It's really sad, really really sad to see a system which produces more good then harm being smeared that way especially when statistics clearly prove more harm comes to children at the expense of their own parents then the system could even imagine doling out. No system is ever going to be perfect, there, in like most anything in life will have it's pitfalls but it's nowhere near the level of pitfalls faced at the perils of their parents. It's a pure shame that people can just make up any unsubstantiated story, find a story and cherry pick it or blatantly apply hateful rhetoric toward a system that helps so many kids especially during a time when it's becoming increasingly apparent that we need more people to be aware of the potential hidden abuses by parents.
