Billions for defense, but only red tape for abused children

We doctors are a cynical bunch. The novelty of the white coat
expires after a short time treating drug addicts, combative
schizophrenics and patients whose idea of "how-do-you-do" is threatening
a lawsuit. This is to say nothing of conducting pelvic exams, bosses
with God complexes and extracting a baseball bat that got stuck up
someone's backside when he "fell on it."Very few things shock us,
but cruelty to children is one of them.Behind closed doors, we
even pontificate on the need for strict contraception laws. "Birth
control should be sprayed into the air," we muse. "If people want
children, they should pass drug tests and home evaluations." Another of
our suggestions is that the government should lace fast food with trace
amounts of contraceptives, so that people who eat it occasionally are
unaffected, but those who exist on it are sterilized.
Bitter? Maybe. Harsh? Absolutely.The inconceivable becomes
plausible, however, after you see a 9-month-old boy test positive for
mommy's crystal meth and Shaken Baby Syndrome render a 6-month-old girl
blind, or after treating the burns on a young girl who was dipped in
boiling oil and the cigarette burns on her sister's back in the shape of
a marijuana leaf. When a 13-year-old boy dies from heat stroke because
he was chained to a tree overnight, "Proposition McSterilization" starts
to make sense.Three million reported cases of child abuse and
neglect result in 2,000 deaths in the U.S. annually, according to the
Department of Health and Human Services. Since 2001, 30,000 American
children have been killed in their own homes, taken their own lives or
been murdered in their own neighborhoods, according to Every Child
Matters, a child advocacy organization.Why does the United States
lead the world's richest democracies in child abuse fatalities, with
death rates that are three times higher than Canada's are and 11 times
higher than Italy's? This doesn't even account for the fact that as much
as 60 percent of child abuse goes unreported.Now the nation's
and the states' financial crises are leading to budget cuts of as much
as $89 billion next year, cutting child services in more than 40 states.
In Hawaii, Every Child Matters reports, funding for a child abuse
reduction program was slashed so much that two years after serving 4,000
families, it can afford to serve only 100. In South Carolina, five
state-run homes for children were closed. Child Protective Services is
severely understaffed, with caseload ratios as high as 60 to one in some
regions.Nearly half of all the Texas children who are killed by
abuse belonged to families that had been investigated by Child
Protective Services. In order to keep families united, CPS attempts to
place children with safe family members. While its motives are
admirable, CPS should put a higher priority on protecting children from
monsters and sexual predators than it does on keeping families together.The
blame doesn't lie with one organization, though. In fact, the single
best predictor of child abuse is poverty. Children raised in families
with annual incomes of less than $15,000 are 22 times more likely to be
abused. One in five American children, more than 14 million, live in
poverty.Budget cuts are taking a toll here, too. California Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed discarding California's
welfare-to-work program to tackle a $19 billion budget deficit,
effectively eliminating aid for roughly a million children. Thousands of
parents in the state would lose access to federally funded subsidized
childcare, forcing them to give up their jobs and be thrust deeper into
destitution.If the most prosperous country in the world can
afford to fight two wars, battle terrorism in far-off lands and bail out
Wall Street by the billions, why can't it offer its most vulnerable and
voiceless citizens anything but bureaucratic red tape? Children are the
only investment with guaranteed dividends. Our refusal to make our
children's wellbeing a priority foreshadows a terrifying future that
perpetuates the miserable cycle of brutality, a future that's almost as
terrifying as a girl dipped in hot oil, a boy tied to a tree or a child
shaken to blindness.

ABOUT THE WRITER
Seema Jilani is a Houston physician who specializes in pediatrics. She's worked in the
Middle East and the Balkans, and is a freelance journalist. Her radio
documentary, "Israel and Palestine: The Human Cost of The Occupation,"
was nominated for a Peabody Award. A version of this commentary was
published in the British newspaper The Guardian.