Hurricane Katrina caused great suffering for thousands of innocent people. Katrina’s adult victims have lost everything but with help, they can still have hope for a return to normal. In five, or ten years the majority of Katrina’s adult victims will have started new lives and Katrina will only be a painful memory.
Ignoring well-known and completely understood dangers creates harm that lingers for years and innocent people will struggle to recover their broken lives. Children removed from a birth-home because of abuse and neglect, have also lost everything. But abused children do not have the benefit of having lived a normal life to which they can return.
A key difference between Katrina’s adults and abused and abandoned children stuck in Child Protection systems is that adjusting and returning to normal is just not possible for most children.
Abandoned children are unable to even envision just what “normal” is.
They see it around them, they want it, but they can’t achieve it. They weren’t taught “normal” in their birth homes. These children learned chaotic and insane behaviors at a young age. Instead of learning how to interact with peers they learned about violence and alcohol, sex and drugs.
Children raised with sex, drugs, violence, and insanity develop differently than normal kids. Abandoned children do not have the skills of socialization.
Abused children have adapted their behaviors to survive in impossible environments. Most of their adapted behaviors are asocial and personally destructive outside of their toxic home environment.
Generally they fail at school, with peers, and with authority figures. The consequences of these deficiencies are ruining the lives of At Risk Children and our society.
Failing schools, preteen pregnancy rates, and burgeoning prison populations point to the severe and lasting impact abused and abandoned children are having on our communities.
About 90% of the children in juvenile justice systems have come out of child protection systems (MN Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz). About 90% of the adults in the criminal justice system have come out of the juvenile justice system. We have created a Prison Feeder system.
Child abuse is to children, what Katrina was to the tens of thousands of Louisiana’s suffering adults. A catastrophic disruption in the normal process of life on earth.
Three million children a year are referred into child protection systems in the U.S. Almost one million children are removed from their birth families. It’s eerie that 600,000 felons are released from American prisons every year.
Had the Army Corp of Engineers been allowed to make the necessary upgrades to Louisiana’s locks and levies the huge expense of rebuilding an entire city could have been avoided. The catastrophic death and suffering of tens of thousands of Louisiana residents could have been avoided also.
If America was to practice a proactive approach to our abused and neglected children, we could avoid the huge expenses of crime, prisons, failing schools, and preteen pregnancies.
Our schools would work and fewer fourteen and fifteen year old girls would have babies that they cannot care for.
We have the resources.
We know what the problem is.
We must quit wasting money on prisons and punishment of children that have been punished all their lives.
Vote for early childhood programs and support mental health initiatives.
Support programs for At Risk Youth. Start a KARA group in your community
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