The absence of concern for children or ideas for making life safer for Milwaukee’s at risk babies is disturbing.

In the case above, the mother apparently did not smoke, drink heavily, or use drugs. The medical examiners report said the mother’s apartment was clean and well equipped with baby supplies.

The public reaction when a baby dies or is found in a dumpster should be one of sadness and a desire to see that children are safer in their community. Something like, “what can we do to see that this does not happen again?”

As a long time guardian ad-Litem, I have come to know troubled parents and realize that the issues impacting them and their children are often addressable through education, health, and mental health services.

Even in these hard economic times our communities and this nation have the ability to reach out to young families and troubled children to provide education and basic services to provide a safe environment.

We make this choice each time we vote; Day care, early childhood programs, health & mental health services, make for safer and happier families, children, schools, and communities.

Blaming and hating creates only more pain and solves nothing. Be constructive…, do something to help those children that need help.

Vote for child friendly initiatives and the people and programs that support them.

amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com

Milwaukee Health Commissioner Bevan K. Baker vowed Monday to place infant mortality at the top of the city’s health agenda, and Mayor Tom Barrett called for a communitywide effort to reduce the rate at which Milwaukee children die before their first birthday.

The news conference at the Southside Health Center announcing the efforts was a short drive from where a 5-month-old baby died Sunday while sleeping beside her mother in an adult bed.

Near the podium from which Barrett and Baker spoke was a poster used by the city in its Safe Sleep campaign.

It was a life-size photo of an adult bed with a gravestone for a headboard.

Engraved in the stone: “For too many babies last year, this was their final resting place.”

“We will have to change,” Barrett said. “But real change requires real commitment. If we are serious about turning this around, then it is going to take each and every one of us.”

The purpose of the news conference was to release the city’s 2010 Fetal Infant Mortality Report, which examines the 499 infant deaths that occurred in Milwaukee from 2005 to 2008.

A story in Sunday’s Journal Sentinel, titled “Empty Cradles,” used the report and other sources to place Milwaukee’s infant mortality crisis in context.

The story found:

• Babies in Milwaukee die at rate greater than in all but six of the nation’s 53 largest cities.

• Black infants die in Milwaukee at about 2.5 times the white rate.

• In some parts of Milwaukee, the infant mortality rate is higher than in the Gaza Strip.

Barrett noted from the report that complications from prematurity account for more than half of all infant deaths.

Sudden infant death syndrome, including unsafe sleep and accidental suffocation, accounted for nearly one in five deaths.

Barrett said the city would play host to a summit on premature births in May.

Baker called the city’s infant mortality rate a crisis, but one that can be addressed.

“This is something we can do,” he said. “This is something we must do.

“The Health Department will make this our major health issue in the years ahead,” he said.

The baby who died Sunday is the second Milwaukee infant this year to die while sleeping with an adult.

The child’s mother, a nursing student, told investigators that it is her custom to sleep with her daughter to facilitate breast feeding. She had recently begun feeding the girl formula and was beginning to place the child in her own crib, according to a medical examiner’s report.

The mother told investigators that she was playing with her daughter late Saturday and the child fell asleep in the mother’s bed, according to the medical examiner’s report.

The mother covered the baby with three comforters, which she pulled up to the girl’s chest, according to the report.

The mother told investigators that she does not smoke, drink heavily or use drugs.

The medical examiner’s report said the mother’s apartment was clean and well equipped with baby supplies. There were no signs of smoking or alcohol use.

The city Health Department recommends that children sleep alone, in a crib, on their back, without blankets and toys and with a tight fitting sheet.

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When I wrote INVISIBLE CHILDREN in 2005, a 70 year old friend asked me out to lunch. After the meal he explained how he told no one of his abuse at the hands of a priest when he was a twelve year old boy and how finally at 45, after 2 failed marriages and several failed business partnerships, he sought out a therapist.

He was still seeing that therapist 25 years later.

Of the children I’ve worked with as a guardian ad-Litem, a high percentage of them have been sexually abused. I have seen the horror of child sex abuse and how 10 or 25 years later, a troubled being still fighting the darkness every day.

Child sex abuse may be the most under-reported crime in America. It could also be the most under-treated horror in America. As a guardian ad-Litem, my first visit to a hospital suicide ward to visit a four year old girl that had been horribly abused was never made public, or when I worked with the seven year old that had been prostituted, or any of the family members that practiced child sex abuse.

There are successful sex abuse recovery programs, but our local governments and state agencies don’t support them in a large scale, and the under-reporting of abuse means most children do not receive the help they need. As these children age, the damage from abuse does not disappear – it is often magnified and becomes a serious behavioral problem.

The medical people at http://www.avahealth.org/ are working to make the discovery and treatment of child abuse a normal part of medical examinations (support them). This would be a big first step in identifying the scope and scale of the problem and making treatment available to those that need it.

This is the longest and most powerful and articulate suicide note I’ve ever read and it has great meaning to me for its power to relate these two incomprehensible sorrows (abuse & suicide).

I could not read Bill Zeller’s last letter without feeling the terror, physical and mental impediments, and daily reminders of his childhood nightmares, adult confusion and suicide.

From the Huffington Post;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/07/bill-zeller-dead-princeto_n_805689.html

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Bill Zeller, Princeton Grad Student And ‘Brilliant’ Programmer, Dies In Apparent Suicide

First Posted: 01- 7-11 08:40 AM | Updated: 01- 7-11 03:16 PM

Bill Zeller, a Princeton Ph.D candidate and renowned internet programmer, died Wednesday from injuries sustained in a suicide attempt. He was 27.

Zeller stunned the programming community with a 4,000-word suicide note detailing a childhood of physical and sexual abuse, which he had never before disclosed to anyone.

“I’ve never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions,” Zeller wrote. “… I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.”

According to the Daily Princetonian, Zeller posted the note on his website and e-mailed it to friends before taking his own life. The note in full can be seen below.

Zeller was a programming whiz kid, responsible for creating applications such as Graph Your Inbox, which visualizes Gmail use over time, and myTunes, which enables users to download others’ iTunes music. Zeller made the latter program while an undergraduate at Trinity College.

Zeller’s death has prompted an outpouring of grief on the internet, from those who knew him and those who didn’t.

“I’d first encountered Bill online years ago when he made a blog posting app, and then re-meeting him at a Princeton event last year, he’d begun by saying, ‘You probably don’t remember…,’” One user wrote on MetaFilter. “But we immediately reconnected about the cool project he’d done back then. More amazingly, he was doing super, super brilliant work at Princeton, which I found really inspiring and was so excited to see how far this young guy had come from such promising roots.”

Zeller’s note:

I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I’ll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe it’s true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning.

I considered not writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up loose ends and don’t want people to wonder why I did this. Since I’ve never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely draw the wrong conclusions.

My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In kindergarten I couldn’t use the bathroom and would stand petrified whenever I needed to, which started a trend of awkward and unexplained social behavior.

The damage that was done to my body still prevents me from using the bathroom normally, but now it’s less of a physical impediment than a daily reminder of what was done to me.

This darkness followed me as I grew up. I remember spending hours playing with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold, plastic blocks. Just waiting for everything to end. It’s the same thing I do now, but instead of legos it’s surfing the web or reading or listening to a baseball game. Most of my life has been spent feeling dead inside, waiting for my body to catch up.

At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming appealed to me for this reason. I was never particularly fond of computers or mathematically inclined, but the temporary peace it would provide was like a drug.

But the darkness always returned and built up something like a tolerance, because programming has become less and less of a refuge.
The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime is covering me.

I feel like I’m trapped in a contimated body that no amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I feel manic and itchy and can’t concentrate on anything else. It manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or constantly going to the gym. I’m exhausted from feeling like this every hour of every day.

Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It makes me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what feels like hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and furious. I’m reminded every morning of what was done to me and the control it has over my life.

I’ve never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought and then be interrupted by someone saying “Hi” or making small talk, unable to understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around, viewing the outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable to perform normal human niceties.

I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.

Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would always find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to escape and it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were the result of the darkness. Obviously I’m responsible for every decision and action, including this one, but there are reasons why things happen the way they do.

Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven’t touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There’s no future here. The darkness will always be with me.

I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source of my problems instead of something that I’ll never be able to change.

I thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling. I’m not sure why I ever thought that would change anything.

I didn’t realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my first relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness affected me personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be separated and protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as a possible escape from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began to realize how entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it is never going to release me.

Instead of being an escape, relationships and romantic contact with other people only intensified everything about him that I couldn’t stand. I will never be able to have a relationship in which he is not the focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic interactions.

Relationships always started out fine and I’d be able to ignore him for a few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return and every night it’d be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long as we were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something good and kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would envelope her too and take her over and the evil inside me would surround her. I always felt like I was infecting anyone I was with.

Relationships didn’t work. No one I dated was the right match, and I thought that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him. Part of me knew that finding the right person wouldn’t help, so I became interested in girls who obviously had no interest in me. For a while I thought I was gay.

I convinced myself that it wasn’t the darkness at all, but rather my orientation, because this would give me control over why things didn’t feel “right”. The fact that the darkness affected sexual matters most intensely made this idea make some sense and I convinced myself of this for a number of years, starting in college after my first relationship ended. I told people I was gay (at Trinity, not at Princeton), even though I wasn’t attracted to men and kept finding myself interested in girls.

Because if being gay wasn’t the answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my orientation, but I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I’m straight, I will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness will never leave.
Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I’d ever met. Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren’t so fucked up. Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had left behind. But it didn’t matter because I couldn’t be alone with her.

It was never just the two of us, it was always the three of us: her, me and the darkness. The closer we got, the more intensely I’d feel the darkness, like some evil mirror of my emotions. All the closeness we had and I loved was complemented by agony that I couldn’t stand, from him. I realized that I would never be able to give her, or anyone, all of me or only me. She could never have me without the darkness and evil inside me. I could never have just her, without the darkness being a part of all of our interactions.

I will never be able to be at peace or content or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility of the romantic part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have realized this as soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with. It’s likely that things wouldn’t have worked out with her and we would have broken up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of relationships do) even if I didn’t have this problem, since we only dated for a short time. But I will face exactly the same problems with the darkness with anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not enough. Nothing is enough.

There’s no way I can fix this or even push the darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy feasible.
So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn’t last because of the darkness and didn’t want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I’ve ever been able to talk about with anyone.

Losing her was very hard for me as well. Not because of her (I got over our relationship relatively quickly), but because of the realization that I would never have another relationship and because it signified the last true, exclusive personal connection I could ever have. This wasn’t apparent to other people, because I could never talk about the real reasons for my sadness. I was very sad in the summer and fall, but it was not because of her, it was because I will never escape the darkness with anyone.

She was so loving and kind to me and gave me everything I could have asked for under the circumstances. I’ll never forget how much happiness she brought me in those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I had originally planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it. (Parts of this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days before doing this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this were a possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we only dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She’s just one more person in a long list of people I’ve hurt.

I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I’ve had that were ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the darkness. I’ve hurt so many great people because of who I am and my inability to experience what needs to be experienced. All I can say is that I tried to be honest with people about what I thought was true.

I’ve spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time.
I’ve told different people a lot of things, but I’ve never told anyone about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people.

The more harmful the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be betrayed. People don’t care about their word or what they’ve promised, they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone and have it be between just the two of you.

I don’t blame anyone in particular, I guess it’s just how people are. Even if I felt like this is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened to me. At this point I simply don’t care who knows.

I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don’t kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don’t know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I’m capable of.
So I’ve realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated with it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically harming others.

I’m just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me the monster I am and there’s nothing I can do to escape it. I don’t know any other existence. I don’t know what life feels like where I’m apart from any of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel fundamentally broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke up one day in a human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world, living among creatures it doesn’t understand and can’t connect with.

I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling the comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what uncontimated intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with someone, someone who can be the recipient of all the love I have to give.

I will never have children, and I wanted to be a father so badly. I think I would have made a good dad. And even if I had fought through the darkness and married and had children all while being unable to feel intimacy, I could have never done that if suicide were a possibility. I did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget about me quickly.

There’s no point in identifying who molested me, so I’m just going to leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.

You may wonder why I didn’t just talk to a professional about this. I’ve seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I’m positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was.

And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it wouldn’t help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we’d hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through generations.

All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it’s her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the “friends” who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I’d be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am.

And yes, I realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they’re based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.

People say suicide is selfish. I think it’s selfish to ask people to continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won’t feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but it’s also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day.

Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people have it worse than I do, and maybe I’m just not a strong person, but I really did try to deal with this. I’ve tried to deal with this every day for the last 23 years and I just can’t fucking take it anymore.

I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who can feel the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who can experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant misery. I wonder who I’d be if things had been different or if I were a stronger person. It sounds pretty great.

I’m prepared for death. I’m prepared for the pain and I am ready to no longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do. My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.
—
I’d also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they’re dead–one with less hatred and intolerance.
If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.

They live in a black and white reality they’ve constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don’t understand that good and decent people exist all around us, “saved” or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.
A random example:
“I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the Koran, he will be a terrorist.” – George Zeller, August 24, 2010.

If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were “saved” at some point), that’s your choice, but it’s fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him.

Their church was always more important than the members of their family and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy their contrived beliefs about who they should be.

I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is going to Hell because she’s Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation.

I could list hundreds of other examples, but it’s tiring.
Since being kicked out, I’ve interacted with them in relatively normal ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like having people I can talk to about what’s been going on in my life. Whatever the reason, it’s not real and it feels like a sham. I should have never allowed this reconnection to happen.

I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time. At other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly believe the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me very much and tried her best.

One reason I put this off for so long is because I know how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since she found out I wasn’t “saved”, since she believes I’m going to Hell, which is not a sadness for which I am responsible. That was never going to change, and presumably she believes the state of my physical body is much less important than the state of my soul. Still, I cannot intellectually justify this decision, knowing how much it will hurt her. Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how much pain it will cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn’t deserve to live.

All I know is that I can’t deal with this pain any longer and I’m am truly sorry I couldn’t wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this could be done without hurting anyone. For years I’ve wished that I’d be hit by a bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more acceptable, but I was never so lucky.
—
To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with all my shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the person I wanted to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a better person, maybe not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I never got very far.

I’m sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another option. I hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you can’t understand this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me.
Bill Zeller
—
Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don’t want people to wonder why I did this. I disseminated it more widely than I might have otherwise because I’m worried that my family might try to restrict access to it. I don’t mind if this letter is made public. In fact, I’d prefer it be made public to people being unable to read it and drawing their own conclusions.

Feel free to republish this letter, but only if it is reproduced in its entirety.

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Children born into violent dysfunctional homes don’t get the basics and this affects them forever.

Most often mom was abused and suffers from serious mental health issues that will soon become the child’s problem. The sex abuse I’ve witnessed among the fifty children I’ve worked with as a CASA volunteer is frightening to speak (and much to common and underreported).

Children traumatized by violence and neglect have serious developmental disabilities that don’t go away with age. 80% of youth aging out of foster care are leading dysfunctional lives.

Adding to the 3 million children reported to child protection in America each year, are the 3.5 million children on stimulant and anti-psychotic medications. Recent studies indicate that almost half of U.S. youth have mental health issues. About 2/3s of the youth in juvenile justice are diagnosed with mental health problems; half of them have multiple, serious diagnosis.

The following article/interview from Democracy Now, Amy Goodman & Dr. and author Gabor Mate explains in detail what happens to children born into unfortunate circumstances and how we need to wake up and support families and institutions to positively change the child unfriendly environment we are creating in America.
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/149325

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amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com


Trauma: How We’ve Created a Nation Addicted to Shopping, Work, Drugs and Sex
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on December 26, 2010, Printed on January 2, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/story/149325/

AMY GOODMAN: From disease to addiction, parenting to attention deficit disorder, Canadian physician and bestselling author Gabor Maté’s work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness.

While the relationship between emotional stress and disease, and mental and physical health more broadly, is often considered controversial within medical orthodoxy, Dr. Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders, and in their healing.

Dr. Maté is the bestselling author of four books: When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection; Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It; and, with Dr. Gordon Neufeld, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers; his latest is called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.

In our first conversation, Dr. Maté talked about his work as the staff physician at the Portland Hotel in Vancouver, Canada, a residence and harm reduction facility in Downtown Eastside, a neighborhood with one the densest concentrations of drug addicts in North America. The Portland hosts the only legal injection site in North America, a center that’s come under fire from Canada’s Conservative government. I asked Dr. Maté to talk about his patients.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. And the commonality is childhood abuse. In other words, these people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development, they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again.

And that’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

AMY GOODMAN: What does the title of your book mean, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, it’s a Buddhist phrase. In the Buddhists’ psychology, there are a number of realms that human beings cycle through, all of us. One is the human realm, which is our ordinary selves. The hell realm is that of unbearable rage, fear, you know, these emotions that are difficult to handle. The animal realm is our instincts and our id and our passions.

Now, the hungry ghost realm, the creatures in it are depicted as people with large empty bellies, small mouths and scrawny thin necks. They can never get enough satisfaction. They can never fill their bellies. They’re always hungry, always empty, always seeking it from the outside. That speaks to a part of us that I have and everybody in our society has, where we want satisfaction from the outside, where we’re empty, where we want to be soothed by something in the short term, but we can never feel that or fulfill that insatiety from the outside. The addicts are in that realm all the time.

Most of us are in that realm some of the time. And my point really is, is that there’s no clear distinction between the identified addict and the rest of us. There’s just a continuum in which we all may be found. They’re on it, because they’ve suffered a lot more than most of us.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the biology of addiction?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: For sure. You see, if you look at the brain circuits involved in addiction—and that’s true whether it’s a shopping addiction like mine or an addiction to opiates like the heroin addict—we’re looking for endorphins in our brains. Endorphins are the brain’s feel good, reward, pleasure and pain relief chemicals. They also happen to be the love chemicals that connect us to the universe and to one another.

Now, that circuitry in addicts doesn’t function very well, as the circuitry of incentive and motivation, which involves the chemical dopamine, also doesn’t function very well. Stimulant drugs like cocaine and crystal meth, nicotine and caffeine, all elevate dopamine levels in the brain, as does sexual acting out, as does extreme sports, as does workaholism and so on.

Now, the issue is, why do these circuits not work so well in some people, because the drugs in themselves are not surprisingly addictive. And what I mean by that is, is that most people who try most drugs never become addicted to them. And so, there has to be susceptibility there. And the susceptible people are the ones with these impaired brain circuits, and the impairment is caused by early adversity, rather than by genetics.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “early adversity”?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the human brain, unlike any other mammal, for the most part develops under the influence of the environment. And that’s because, from the evolutionary point of view, we developed these large heads, large fore-brains, and to walk on two legs we have a narrow pelvis. That means—large head, narrow pelvis—we have to be born prematurely. Otherwise, we would never get born. The head already is the biggest part of the body. Now, the horse can run on the first day of life. Human beings aren’t that developed for two years.

That means much of our brain development, that in other animals occurs safely in the uterus, for us has to occur out there in the environment. And which circuits develop and which don’t depend very much on environmental input.

When people are mistreated, stressed or abused, their brains don’t develop the way they ought to. It’s that simple. And unfortunately, my profession, the medical profession, puts all the emphasis on genetics rather than on the environment, which, of course, is a simple explanation. It also takes everybody off the hook.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, it takes people off the hook?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, if people’s behaviors and dysfunctions are regulated, controlled and determined by genes, we don’t have to look at child welfare policies, we don’t have to look at the kind of support that we give to pregnant women, we don’t have to look at the kind of non-support that we give to families, so that, you know, most children in North America now have to be away from their parents from an early age on because of economic considerations.

And especially in the States, because of the welfare laws, women are forced to go find low-paying jobs far away from home, often single women, and not see their kids for most of the day. Under those conditions, kids’ brains don’t develop the way they need to.

And so, if it’s all caused by genetics, we don’t have to look at those social policies; we don’t have to look at our politics that disadvantage certain minority groups, so cause them more stress, cause them more pain, in other words, more predisposition for addictions; we don’t have to look at economic inequalities. If it’s all genes, it’s all—we’re all innocent, and society doesn’t have to take a hard look at its own attitudes and policies.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about this whole approach of criminalization versus harm reduction, how you think addicts should be treated, and how they are, in the United States and Canada?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the first point to get there is that if people who become severe addicts, as shown by all the studies, were for the most part abused children, then we realize that the war on drugs is actually waged against people that were abused from the moment they were born, or from an early age on. In other words, we’re punishing people for having been abused. That’s the first point.

The second point is, is that the research clearly shows that the biggest driver of addictive relapse and addictive behavior is actually stress. In North America right now, because of the economic crisis, a lot of people are eating junk food, because junk foods release endorphins and dopamine in the brain. So that stress drives addiction.

Now imagine a situation where we’re trying to figure out how to help addicts. Would we come up with a system that stresses them to the max? Who would design a system that ostracizes, marginalizes, impoverishes and ensures the disease of the addict, and hope, through that system, to rehabilitate large numbers? It can’t be done. In other words, the so-called “war on drugs,” which, as the new drug czar points out, is a war on people, actually entrenches addiction deeply.

Furthermore, it institutionalizes people in facilities where the care is very—there’s no care. We call it a “correctional” system, but it doesn’t correct anything. It’s a punitive system. So people suffer more, and then they come out, and of course they’re more entrenched in their addiction than they were when they went in.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m curious about your own history, Gabor Maté.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You were born in Nazi-occupied Hungary?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, ADD has a lot to do with that. I have attention deficit disorder myself. And again, most people see it as a genetic problem. I don’t.

It actually has to do with those factors of brain development, which in my case occurred as a Jewish infant under Nazi occupation in the ghetto of Budapest. And the day after the pediatrician—sorry, the day after the Nazis marched into Budapest in March of 1944, my mother called the pediatrician and says, “Would you please come and see my son, because he’s crying all the time?” And the pediatrician says, “Of course I’ll come. But I should tell you, all my Jewish babies are crying.”

Now infants don’t know anything about Nazis and genocide or war or Hitler. They’re picking up on the stresses of their parents. And, of course, my mother was an intensely stressed person, her husband being away in forced labor, her parents shortly thereafter being departed and killed in Auschwitz.

Under those conditions, I don’t have the kind of conditions that I need for the proper development of my brain circuits. And particularly, how does an infant deal with that much stress? By tuning it out. That’s the only way the brain can deal with it. And when you do that, that becomes programmed into the brain.

And so, if you look at the preponderance of ADD in North America now and the three millions of kids in the States that are on stimulant medication and the half-a-million who are on anti-psychotics, what they’re really exhibiting is the effects of extreme stress, increasing stress in our society, on the parenting environment. Not bad parenting. Extremely stressed parenting, because of social and economic conditions. And that’s why we’re seeing such a preponderance.

So, in my case, that also set up this sense of never being soothed, of never having enough, because I was a starving infant. And that means, all my life, I have this propensity to soothe myself. How do I do that? Well, one way is to work a lot and to gets lots of admiration and lots of respect and people wanting me.

If you get the impression early in life that the world doesn’t want you, then you’re going to make yourself wanted and indispensable. And people do that through work. I did it through being a medical doctor. I also have this propensity to soothe myself through shopping, especially when I’m stressed, and I happen to shop for classical compact music. But it goes back to this insatiable need of the infant who is not soothed, and they have to develop, or their brain develop, these self-soothing strategies.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you think kids with ADD, with attention deficit disorder, should be treated?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, if we recognize that it’s not a disease and it’s not genetic, but it’s a problem of brain development, and knowing the good news, fortunately—and this is also true for addicts—that the brain, the human brain, can develop new circuits even later on in life—and that’s called neuroplasticity, the capacity of the brain to be molded by new experience later in life—then the question becomes not of how to regulate and control symptoms, but how do you promote development. And that has to do with providing kids with the kind of environment and nurturing that they need so that those circuits can develop later on.

That’s also, by the way, what the addict needs. So instead of a punitive approach, we need to have a much more compassionate, caring approach that would allow these people to develop, because the development is stuck at a very early age.

AMY GOODMAN: You began your talk last night at Columbia, which I went to hear, at the law school, with a quote, and I’d like you to end our conversation with that quote.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Would that be the quote that only in the presence of compassion will people allow themselves—

AMY GOODMAN: Mahfouz.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Oh, oh, no, yeah, Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian writer. He said that “Nothing records the effects of a sad life” so completely as the human body—“so graphically as the human body.” And you see that sad life in the faces and bodies of my patients.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Gabor Maté, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. He’s a bestselling author. He’s a physician in Canada.

In that first interview, we touched briefly on his work on attention deficit disorder, the subject of his book Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It. Well, just about a month ago, we had Dr. Maté back on Democracy Now! to talk more about ADD, as well as parenting, bullying, the education system, and how a litany of stresses on the family environment is leading to what he calls the “destruction of the American childhood.”

DR. GABOR MATÉ: In the United States right now, there are three million children receiving stimulant medications for ADHD.

AMY GOODMAN: ADHD means?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And there are about half-a-million kids in this country receiving heavy-duty anti-psychotic medications, medications such as are usually given to adult schizophrenics to regulate their hallucinations. But in this case, children are getting it to control their behavior. So what we have is a massive social experiment of the chemical control of children’s behavior, with no idea of the long-term consequences of these heavy-duty anti-psychotics on kids.

And I know that Canadians statistics just last week showed that within last five years, 43—there’s been a 43 percent increase in the rate of dispensing of stimulant prescriptions for ADD or ADHD, and most of these are going to boys. In other words, what we’re seeing is an unprecedented burgeoning of the diagnosis. And I should say, really, I’m talking about, more broadly speaking, what I would call the destruction of American childhood, because ADD is just a template, or it’s just an example of what’s going on.

In fact, according to a recent study published in the States, nearly half of American adolescents now meet some criteria or criteria for mental health disorders. So we’re talking about a massive impact on our children of something in our culture that’s just not being recognized.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly what attention deficit disorder is, what attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, specifically ADD is a compound of three categorical set of symptoms. One has to do with poor impulse control. So, these children have difficulty controlling their impulses. When their brain tells them to do something, from the lower brain centers, there’s nothing up here in the cortex, which is where the executive functions are, which is where the functions are that are supposed to tell us what to do and what not to do, those circuits just don’t work. So there’s poor impulse control. They act out. They behave aggressively. They speak out of turn. They say the wrong thing. Adults with ADD will shop compulsively, or impulsively, I should say, and, again, behave in impulsive fashion. So, poor impulse control.

But again, please notice that the impulse control problem is general amongst kids these days. In other words, it’s not just the kids diagnosed with ADD, but a lot of kids. And there’s a whole lot of new diagnoses now. And children are being diagnosed with all kinds of things. ADD is just one example. There’s a new diagnosis called oppositional defiant disorder, which again has to do with behaviors and poor impulse control, so that impulse control now has become a problem amongst children, in general, not just the specific ones diagnosed with ADD.

The second criteria for ADD is physical hyperactivity. So the part of the brain, again, that’s supposed to regulate physical activity and keep you still just, again, doesn’t work.

And then, finally, in the third criteria is poor attention skills—tuning out; not paying attention; mind being somewhere else; absent-mindedness; not being able to focus; beginning to work on something, five minutes later the mind goes somewhere else. So, kind of a mental restlessness and the lack of being still, lack of being focused, lack of being present. These are the three major criteria of ADD.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to this point that you just raised about the destruction of American childhood. What do you mean by that?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the conditions in which children develop have been so corrupted and troubled over the last several decades that the template for normal brain development is no longer present for many, many kids. And Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk, who’s a professor of psychiatry at Boston—University of Boston, he actually says that the neglect or abuse of children is the number one public health concern in the United States. A recent study coming out of Notre Dame by a psychologist there has shown that the conditions for child development that hunter-gatherer societies provided for their children, which are the optimal conditions for development, are no longer present for our kids. And she says, actually, that the way we raise our children today in this country is increasingly depriving them of the practices that lead to well-being in a moral sense.

So what’s really going on here now is that the developmental conditions for healthy childhood psychological and brain development are less and less available, so that the issue of ADD is only a small part of the general issue that children are no longer having the support for the way they need to develop.

As I made the point in my book about addiction, as well, the human brain does not develop on its own, does not develop according to a genetic program, depends very much on the environment. And the essential condition for the physiological development of these brain circuits that regulate human behavior, that give us empathy, that give us a social sense, that give us a connection with other people, that give us a connection with ourselves, that allows us to mature—the essential condition for those circuits, for their physiological development, is the presence of emotionally available, consistently available, non-stressed, attuned parenting caregivers.

Now, what do you have in a country where the average maternity leave is six weeks? These kids don’t have emotional caregivers available to them. What do you have in a country where poor women, nearly 50 percent of them, suffer from postpartum depression? And when a woman has postpartum depression, she can’t be attuned to the child.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about fathers?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the situation with fathers is, is that increasingly—there was a study recently that showed an increasing number of men are having postpartum depression, as well. And the main role of the father, of course, would be to support the mother. But when people are—emotionally, because the cause of postpartum depression in the mother it is not intrinsic to the mother—not intrinsic to the mother.

What we have to understand here is that human beings are not discrete, individual entities, contrary to the free enterprise myth that people are competitive, individualistic, private entities. What people actually are are social creatures, very much dependent on one another and very much programmed to cooperate with one another when the circumstances are right. When that’s not available, if the support is not available for women, that’s when they get depressed. When the fathers are stressed, they’re not supporting the women in that really important, crucial bonding role in the beginning. In fact, they get stressed and depressed themselves.

The child’s brain development depends on the presence of non-stressed, emotionally available parents. In this country, that’s less and less available. Hence, you’ve got burgeoning rates of autism in this country. It’s going up like 20- or 30-fold in the last 30 or 40 years.

AMY GOODMAN: Say what you mean by autism.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, autism is a whole spectrum of disorders, but the essential quality of it is an emotional disconnect. These children are living in a mind of their own. They don’t respond appropriately to emotional cues. They withdraw. They act out in an aggressive and sometimes just unpredictable fashion. They don’t know how to—there’s no sense—there’s no clear sense of a emotional connection and just peace inside them.

And there’s many, many more kids in this country now, several-fold increase, 20-fold increase in the last 30 years. The rates of anxiety amongst children is increasing. The numbers of kids on antidepressant medications has increased tremendously. The number of kids being diagnosed with bipolar disorder has gone up. And then not to mention all the behavioral issues, the bullying that I’ve already mentioned, the precocious sexuality, the teenage pregnancies. There’s now a program, a so-called “reality show,” that just focuses on teenage mothers.

You know, in other words—see, it never used to be that children grew up in a stressed nuclear family. That wasn’t the normal basis for child development. The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. Essentially, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions. People no longer live in communities which are still connected to one another. People don’t work where they live. They don’t shop where they live. The kids don’t go to school, necessarily, where they live. The parents are away most of the day. For the first time in history, children are not spending most of their time around the nurturing adults in their lives. And they’re spending their lives away from the nurturing adults, which is what they need for healthy brain development.

[...]

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how the drugs, Gabor Maté, affect the development of the brain.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: In ADD, there’s an essential brain chemical, which is necessary for incentive and motivation, that seems to be lacking. That’s called dopamine. And dopamine is simply an essential life chemical. Without it, there’s no life. Mice in a laboratory who have no dopamine will starve themselves to death, because they have no incentive to eat. Even though they’re hungry, and even though their life is in danger, they will not eat, because there’s no motivation or incentive. So, partly, one way to look at ADD is a massive problem of motivation, because the dopamine is lacking in the brain. Now, the stimulant medications elevate dopamine levels, and these kids are now more motivated. They can focus and pay attention.

However, the assumption underneath giving these kids medications is that what we’re dealing with here is a genetic disorder, and the only way to deal with it is pharmacologically. And if you actually look at how the dopamine levels in a brain develop, if you look at infant monkeys and you measure their dopamine levels, and they’re normal when they’re with their mothers, and when you separate them from mothers, the dopamine levels go down within two or three days.

So, in other words, what we’re doing is we’re correcting a massive social problem that has to do with disconnection in a society and the loss of nurturing, non-stressed parenting, and we’re replacing that chemically. Now, the drugs—the stimulant drugs do seem to work, and a lot of kids are helped by it. The problem is not so much whether they should be used or not; the problem is that 80 percent of the time a kid is prescribed a medication, that’s all that happens. Nobody talks to the family about the family environment. The school makes no attempt to change the school environment. Nobody connects with these kids emotionally. In other words, it’s seen simply as a medical or a behavioral problem, but not as a problem of development.

AMY GOODMAN: Gabor Maté, you talk about acting out. What does acting out mean?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, it’s a great question. You see, when we hear the phrase “acting out,” we usually mean that a kid is behaving badly, that a child is being obstreperous, oppositional, violent, bullying, rude. That’s because we don’t know how to speak English anymore. The phrase “acting out” means you’re portraying behavior that which you haven’t got the words to say in language. In a game of charades, you have to act out, because you’re not allowed to speak. If you landed in a country where nobody spoke your language and you were hungry, you would have to literally demonstrate your anger—sorry, your hunger, through behavior, pointing to your mouth or to your empty belly, because you don’t have the words.

My point is that, yes, a lot of children are acting out, but it’s not bad behavior. It’s a representation of emotional losses and emotional lacks in their lives. And whether it’s, again, bullying or a whole set of other behaviors, what we’re dealing with here is childhood stunted emotional development—in some cases, stunted pain development. And rather than trying to control these behaviors through punishments, or even just exclusively through medications, we need to help these kids develop.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned you suffered from ADD, attention deficit disorder, yourself—

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN:—and were drugged for it. Explain your own story.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, I was in my early fifties, and I was working in palliative care at the time. I was coordinator of a palliative care unit at a large Canadian hospital. And a social worker in the unit, who had just been diagnosed as an adult, told me about her story. And as a physician, I was like most physicians who know nothing about ADD. Most physicians really don’t know about the condition. But when she told me her story, I realized that was me. And subsequently, I was diagnosed. And—

AMY GOODMAN: And what was that story? What did you realize was you?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Oh, poor impulse control a lot of my life, impulsive behaviors, disorganization, a tendency to tune out a lot, be absentminded, and physical restlessness. I mean, I had trouble sitting still. All the traits, you know, that I saw in the literature on ADD, I recognized in myself, which was kind of an epiphany, in a sense, because you get to understand—at least you get a sense of why you’re behaving the way you’re behaving.

What never made sense to me right from the beginning, though, is the idea of ADD as a genetic disease. And not even after a couple of my kids were diagnosed with it, I still didn’t buy the idea that it’s genetic, because it isn’t.

Again, it has to do with, in my case, very stressed circumstances as an infant, which I talked about on a previous program. In the case of my children, it’s because their father was a workaholic doctor who wasn’t emotionally available to them. And under those circumstances, children are stressed. I mean, if children are stressed when their brains are developing, one way to deal with the stress is to tune out.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about holding on to your kids, why parents need to matter more than peers.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Amy, in 1998, there was a book that was on the New York Times best book of the year and nearly won the Pulitzer Prize, and it was called The Nurture Assumption, in which this researcher argued that parents don’t make any difference anymore, because she looked at the—to the extent that Newsweek actually had a cover article that year entitled “Do Parents Matter?” Now, if you want to get the full stupidity of that question, you have to imagine a veterinarian magazine asking, “Does the mother cat make any difference?” or “Does the mother bear matter?”

But the research showed that children are being more influenced now, in their tastes, in their attitudes, in their behaviors, by peers than by parents. This poor researcher concluded that this is somehow natural. And what she mistook was that what is the norm in North America, she actually thought that was natural and healthy. In fact, it isn’t.

So, our book, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers, is about showing why it is true that children are being more influenced by other kids in these days than by their parents, but just what an aberration that is, and what a distortion it is of normal human development, because normal human development demands, as normal mammalian development demands, the presence of nurturing parents.

You know, even birds—birds don’t develop properly unless the mother and father bird are there. Bears, cats, rats, mice. Although, most of all, human beings, because human beings are the least mature and the most dependent for the longest period of time.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the importance of attachment?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Attachment is the drive to be close to somebody, and attachment is a power force in human relationship—in fact, the most powerful force there is. Even as adults, when attachment relationships that people want to be close to are lost to us or they’re threatened somehow, we get very disoriented, very upset. Now, for children and babies and adolescents, that’s an absolute necessity, because the more immature you are, the more you need your attachments. It’s like a force of gravity that pulls two bodies together.

Now, when the attachment goes in the wrong direction, instead of to the adults, but to the peer group, childhood developments can be distorted, development is stopped in its tracks, and parenting and teaching become extremely difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: You co-wrote this book, and you both found, in your experience, Hold on to Your Kids, that your kids were becoming increasingly secretive and unreachable.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, that’s the thing. You see, now, if your spouse or partner, adult spouse or partner, came home from work and didn’t give you the time of day and got on the phone and talked with other people all the time and spent all their time on email talking to other people, your friends wouldn’t say, “You’ve got a behavioral problem. You should try tough love.” They’d say you’ve got a relationship problem.

But when children act in these ways, we think we have a behavioral problem, we try and control the behaviors. In fact, what they’re showing us is that—my children showed this, as well—is that I had a relationship problem with them. They weren’t connected enough with me and too connected to the peer group. So that’s why they wanted to spend all their time with their peer group. And now we’ve given kids the technology to do that with. So the terrible downside of the internet is that now kids are spending time with each other—

AMY GOODMAN: Not even in the presence of each other.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s exactly the point, because, you see, that’s an attachment dynamic. One of the basic ways that people attach to each other is to want to be with the people that you want to connect with. So when kids spend time with each other, it’s not a behavior problem; it’s a sign that their relationships have been skewed towards the peer group. And that’s why it’s so difficult to peel them off their computers, because their desperation is to connect with the people that they’re trying to attach to. And that’s no longer us, as the adults, as the parents in their life.

AMY GOODMAN: So how do you change this dynamic?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, first we have to recognize its manifestations. And so, we have to recognize that whenever the child doesn’t look adults in the eye anymore, when the child wants to be always on the Skype or the cell phone or twittering or emailing or MSM messengering, you recognize it when the child becomes oppositional to adults. We tend to think that that’s a normal childhood phenomenon. It’s normal only to a certain degree.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, they have to rebel in order to separate later.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: No. They have to separate, but they don’t have to rebel. In other words, separation is a normal human—individuation is a normal human developmental stage. You have to become a separate, individual person.

But it doesn’t mean you have to reject and be hostile to the values of the adults. As a matter of fact, in traditional societies, children would become adults by being initiated into the adult group by elders, like the Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony or the initiation rituals of tribal cultures around the world. Now kids are initiated by other kids. And now you have the gang phenomenon, so that the teenage gang phenomenon is actually a misplaced initiation and orientation ritual, where kids are now rebelling against adult values. But it’s not because they’re bad kids, but because they’ve become disconnected from adults.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Maté, there’s a whole debate about education in the United States right now. How does this fit in?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, you have to ask, how do children learn? How do children learn? And learning is an attachment dynamic, as well. You learn when you want to be like somebody. So you copy them, so you learn from them. You learn when you’re curious. And you learn when you’re willing to try something, and if it doesn’t work, you try something else.

Now, here’s what happens. Caring about something and being curious about something and recognizing that something doesn’t work, you have to have a certain degree of emotional security. You have to be able to be open and vulnerable. Children who become peer-oriented—because the peer world is so dangerous and so fraught with bullying and ostracization and dissing and exclusion and negative talk, how does a child protect himself or herself from all that negativity in the peer world? Because children are not committed to each others’ unconditional loving acceptance.

Even adults have a hard time giving that. Children can’t do it. Those children become very insecure, and emotionally, to protect themselves, they shut down. They become hardened, so they become cool. Nothing matters. Cool is the ethic. You see that in the rock videos. It’s all about cool. It’s all about aggression and cool and no real emotion. Now, when that happens, curiosity goes, because curiosity is vulnerable, because you care about something and you’re admitting that you don’t know. You won’t try anything, because if you fail, again, your vulnerability is exposed. So, you’re not willing to have trial and error.

And in terms of who you’re learning from, as long as kids were attaching to adults, they were looking to the adults to be modeling themselves on, to learn from, and to get their cues from. Now, kids are still learning from the people they’re attached to, but now it’s other kids. So you have whole generations of kids that are looking to other kids now to be their main cue-givers. So teachers have an almost impossible problem on their hands.

And unfortunately, in North America again, education is seen as a question of academic pedagogy, hence these terrible standardized tests. And the very teachers who work with the most difficult kids are the ones who are most penalized.

AMY GOODMAN: Because if they don’t have good test scores, standardized test scores, in their class—

DR. GABOR MATÉ: They’re seen as bad teachers.

AMY GOODMAN:—then they could be fired. They’re seen as bad teachers, which means they’re going to want to kick out any difficult kids.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s exactly it. The difficult kids are kicked out, and teachers will be afraid to go into neighborhoods where, because of troubled family relationships, the kids are having difficulties, the kids are peer-oriented, the kids are not looking to the teachers. And this is seen as a reflection. So, actually, teachers are being slandered right now. Teachers are being slandered now because of the failure of the American society to produce the right environment for childhood development.

AMY GOODMAN: Because of the destruction of American childhood.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s right. What the problem reflects is the loss of the community and the neighborhood. We have to recreate that. So, the schools have to become not just places of pedagogy, but places of emotional connection. The teachers should be in the emotional connection game before they attempt to be in the pedagogy game.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!.

© 2011 Democracy Now! All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149325/

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Ruben’s statistics;

85 percent of all juveniles who come into contact with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate. So are 60 percent of all prison inmates.

Inmates have a 16 percent chance of returning to prison if they receive literacy help, as opposed to 70 percent for those who receive no help. This equates, according to the study, to taxpayer costs of $25,000 per year per inmate and nearly double that amount for juvenile offenders (California & New York spend over $200,000 per year on juveniles in their juvenile justice systems).

Other related information;

Over 50% of the youth in the juvenile justice system suffer from diagnosable mental illness & fully half that number have serious multiple diagnosis. Today’s

Michael Swanson’s Star Tribune headlines drive home the sad and murderous points that 13 year youth with serious criminal records need intervention and therapy not jail time. The Missouri miracle (juvenile justice transformation) makes this argument well.

Over 25% of American juveniles in the justice system are tried as adults,

Almost all youth in the juvenile justice system have passed through child protection services (MN Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz).

Over 70% of the serious and violent crime committed by juveniles in Ramsey County in the year of the ACE study, was perpetrated by youth from less than 4% of the families in the county.

We know who these children are and we have programs that work to make their lives more successful.

Minnesota spent half a billion dollars on its prison system last year. The money would be far better spent on early childhood programs allowing at risk youth a better chance at leading a normal life.

Ruben Rosario: Troubled youths get a message of hope
By Rubén Rosario
Updated: 11/13/2010 09:58:36 PM CST
Pioneer Press

Award-winning writer Jimmy Santiago Baca recently talked to students at Stadium View School in Minneapolis about the importance of personal expression. He is photographed talking to school administrators about the experience with with this kids on November 11. (Pioneer Press: Ashley Halbach)
He came last week to the little-known jail school with the grand view of the Metrodome, not to preach but to connect.

None of the 52 youths — juvenile offenders ranging in age from 10 to 18, knew who Jimmy Santiago Baca was, and probably many didn’t care at first. They figured he was just another adult authority figure about to bore them with empty rhetoric or tell them how screwed up they are.

To help break the ice and gain some trust, Baca told them a story from his childhood.

He did not begin with tales of his abusive father, who died of alcoholism. Nor did he begin with the story of his mother, later murdered by her second husband, or why they abandoned him at an early age. He did not mention his five years in a maximum-security prison in Arizona on a drug-possession conviction or the guy he stabbed in self-defense inside the joint.

The 58-year-old ex-felon and award-winning poet and author told them about the time he was caught stealing a man’s glass eye at the rural New Mexico orphanage where his grandparents reluctantly placed him.

“There was a marble contest, and as little kids, they thought the glass eye could see,” Lawrence Lucio, principal of the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center’s Stadium View School, related to me Thursday as we waited for Baca to address a group of schoolteachers and corrections officials.

“So they figured if they could cop the eye, they could use it as a marble,” said Lucio, a lifelong resident of St.

Paul’s West Side.
Baca, caught red-handed, swallowed the eye and then humorously recounted what nature yielded a few days later.

“And then he transitions from that to having the kids write about experiences they recalled — good, bad or indifferent — in their lives,” Lucio added. “Getting kids to write about what’s inside — it’s a great tool for kids to release stress and frustrations.”

The ability to write. The ability to read. It’s a power, a freedom most of us take for granted or don’t ponder much. Not Baca, a former illiterate who spent 25 years in some form of confinement — from an orphanage to juvie halls to the big house.

THE PRICE OF ILLITERACY

A quarter-century later, the former runaway and street tough is an in-demand speaker, educator, poet and documentary filmmaker. He once held the Wallace Stevens Endowed Chair at Yale University.

“The bad thing about not being able to read and write is that you are not a part of it, of life,” he told the small group of educators and jail officials. “And that’s the horrible thing about it. When you do get the grasp of language and look back behind you, the horror of being manipulated and used by people who were supposed to love you is so overwhelming.

“That’s why I work with people who can’t read or write,” he said.

There’s a strong connection between illiteracy and incarceration.

A recent national study found that 85 percent of all juveniles who come into contact with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate. So are 60 percent of all prison inmates.

Another study concluded that inmates have a 16 percent chance of returning to prison if they receive literacy help, as opposed to 70 percent for those who receive no help. This equates, according to the study, to taxpayer costs of $25,000 per year per inmate and nearly double that amount for juvenile offenders.

Other research suggests that 75 percent of inmates are illiterate at the 12th-grade level and 19 percent are completely illiterate.

Most of the juvenile offenders at Stadium View School are three to five years behind their peers in reading and writing levels. Lucio has seen his share of illiterate kids walk through the door.

“I’ve had 18-year-olds in here who are basically nonreaders,” he said. Many of the detained youths are awaiting disposition of their cases. Some will return home or be sent to the juvenile facility in Red Wing. Quite a few will be certified as adults and, if convicted, head to the state prisons in St. Cloud and Stillwater.

FINDING THE WRITTEN WORD

Prison life seemed like just another inevitable stop in Baca’s life.

As he writes in his 2001 memoir, “A Place To Stand”: “I had visited it a thousand times in the screams of my father and my drunken uncles, in the tight-lipped scolding of my mother; in all the finger-pointing of the nuns at Saint Anthony’s orphanage; in all the finger-pointing adults who told me I didn’t belong. I didn’t fit in, I was a deviant. … By the time I arrived, a part of me felt I belonged there.”

But somehow, he knew there had to be a way out. He artfully navigated the prison culture of gangs. He carved the respect he needed to be left alone. A letter from “Harry,” a World War II veteran and Christian mission volunteer in a wheelchair, triggered a feverish plunge into poetry and prose. He devoured Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman and other poets. He began writing poems about his life and times. Mother Jones published three in 1979, the year he was released from prison.

He found the way out. He has won numerous national and international poetry awards. He made it. But he resigned the Yale chair. The ivory tower perch in the Ivy League was quite an accomplishment. But it wasn’t where Baca felt he was needed.

No, it was places like the barrios of Northern Mexico, the kids in the public school in Newark, N.J., with the barbed wire or inside this little jail school in Minneapolis. He has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries and universities throughout the country.

In 2005 he created Cedar Tree Inc., a nonprofit foundation that “transforms lives through reading and writing.”

Fame has its rewards. But one of his biggest paychecks came the day he received an honorary doctorate from the University of New Mexico. There, in the stands, were roughly 9,000 young men and women.

“Those are all the people you helped to read and write,” a university official told him.

It brought him to tears.

ON A MISSION

Five years later, he’s in Minneapolis, trying to light the fire inside educators about youths who some of us don’t care about or have given up on. He believes deep in his heart that youths still have choices to make, no matter how dire their situations appear to be. But they need care and guidance.

“The first day (of a workshop) you have to be prepared to come in and you have to be prepared to go back when you were 18 years old and you believed the world was an open heart and all you had to do was sing and the angels would hear it,” he told them. “You have to believe that; if a teacher is not prepared to go do that, you have no business in that room.”

He tells me about a momentous event in his life. It was the same year he left prison, where he taught himself to read and write.

He attended night school in North Carolina in search of his high school equivalency diploma. His teacher pointed to a book and asked him if he knew the word printed on it.

“I looked and I saw a picture of this monarch butterfly on the biology page and then the caterpillar on the other page,” he recalled. “I had seen that on the farm, that these things change into those things, but I didn’t know there was a word for it.

He asked the teacher what the word was. “Metamorphosis” was the reply.

“And I’m that,” he recalled telling himself. “I better metamorphosis or I’ll die. And I did.”

Rubén Rosario can be reached at 651-228-5454 or rrosario@pioneerpress.com.

“For every child who is in conflict with society the right to be dealt with intelligently as society’s charge, not society’s outcast; with the home, the school, the church, the court and the institution when needed, shaped to return him whenever possible to the normal stream of life.” — Inscription on a plaque at the Juvenile Detention Center in downtown Minneapolis, from “The Children’s Charter,” 1930

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He was a veteran who found it very hard to kill when he was in Vietnam. His letters to me from his military tour were tortured and distressed. He never wanted to hurt anyone.

He needed help but never got it. Mental health help was not a military option offered to vets post Vietnam.

My friend’s family had no idea that he would kill himself – he was such a happy and gentle man. The pain and suffering has spread to the family now and it will last forever.

My primary experience with suicide comes from the children I’ve worked with in child protection as a guardian ad-Litem and the Topamax that was proscribed to me for terrible migraine headaches.

I had become very familiar with the language on the packaging of psychotropic medications concerning depression and suicidal thoughts but was absolutely dumbstruck when I experienced depression and full blown suicidal ideation after 12 months of Topamax.

It is impossible to convey to you what that last sentence means in a manner that will impact you as it impacted me. Words will never do justice to thoughts of suicide.

I’m a mature adult that has studied and written about this terrible thing and it was absolutely overwhelming at the time. I found help and stopped the drug and got better.

I’ve come to know many children in child protection taking psychotropic medications. The data on children in child protection on these drugs is also overwhelming (and a well kept secret). Four and seven year olds behaving in extremely dangerous ways and trying to kill themselves should be extremely rare in any civil society.

I did not find it rare among the children in my caseload in child protection.

America is way behind other advanced societies in dealing with mental health issues and it is killing poor vulnerable children and way too many veterans.

Goodbye Tom, you were dear & wonderful person and a great friend; I will miss you.

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amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com

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As a guardian ad-Litem, one of my first hospital visits was to a four year old in a suicide ward.

Judge Heidi Schellhas shared with me the Prozac, Ritalin, and other psychotropic medications being taken by 6, 7, and 8 year old children in her Child Protection courtroom (mostly with sporadic or non existent mental health therapies).

Other children I cared for tried to kill themselves through extremely dangerous behaviors. I’ve written about the seven children in one school district that took their own lives and the seven year old foster child who hung himself and left a note.

Misha Zubarev’s video on aging out of foster care had a great impact on me; http://www.invisiblechildren.org/2009/12/10/aging-out-of-foster-care/

Most of us would agree that caring for vulnerable children is a worthwhile endeavor.

What can we do to make suicide less of an option for abused and neglected children?

Files Released On Foster Teen Who Committed Suicide

Former Foster Teen Died In September

HONOLULU — In a rare move, on Thursday the state Department of Human Services publicly released confidential documents about a young man who went through the state’s foster care system and later committed suicide at age 19.

The files were released by the Department of Human Services to ensure transparency and accountability but really to dispute claims that the state’s foster care program failed this young man who had aged out of the system.

Erwin Celes, whose friends nicknamed him “Smiling Star,” committed suicide in September.

His difficult life is revealed in the state’s files: how Celes didn’t start school until he was 6 years old; how he and his siblings were split up at an early age because they were being neglected by a mother addicted to crystal methamphetamine; how he was bounced around to several foster homes.

But Child Protective Services administrator John Walters said what he couldn’t find in the documents is a lack of support from the state’s child welfare system — something friends of Celes said is what led to him taking his life.

“I didn’t see when I went through (the files), anything that would lead me to look for a catastrophic event like what happened,” said Walters. “I don’t think the state failed him. I think the state backed him up every step of the way and tried to help him realize his dream.”

At the time of his death, Celes was in an independent living program, was enrolled in Youth Challenge and was planning on going into the military.

The state said currently there’s an average of 1,350 children in foster care statewide. About 54 are about to turn 18.

Foster care advocates have said more needs to be done to help youth about to age out of the system.

“I think the community needs to know that these kids are in crisis and that they exist,” said David Louis, the director of Heart Gallery Hawaii and a former foster child himself.

“Every time we add another sponsor, another layer of support, they thrive and that’s kind of what Erwin needed,” said Louis.

Human services officials said they know the child welfare system isn’t perfect, but in Celes’ case, they may never know how they could have helped him more.

“If we learn something from this, and I hope we do, that we can change or we can improve, we’ll do it,” said Walters. “We’ll do it in a heartbeat.”

A legislative briefing is being held Friday at the state Capitol to discuss Celes’ case.

This is only the third time in the last five years the state has released it’s confidential case files.

A link to Celes’ files www.hawaii.gov/dhs

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Most of the articles written (like this one http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news/News_Releases/2010/09/child-ptsd-early-intervention/ ) would lead one to believe that these traumas are isolated incidents in the life of an at risk child.

This was not what I saw. Instead, children generally spend years in dangerous environments and are only rarely removed from the harshest circumstances and then into an underfunded and overworked system of foster/group homes that provide a minimum degree of the services desperately needed by the child.

This study shows us what needs to be done. The good news is that we know what to do to save abused and neglected (traumatized) children.

The bad news is that only rarely, do these children receive help in a timely manner. It has been my experience, that only after they act out and get into trouble, do we really pay attention to them.

We can do better.

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amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com
First Preventative Approach to Improve Outcomes in Traumatized Children

PHILADELPHIA – After experiencing a potentially traumatic event – a car accident, a physical or sexual assault, a sports injury, witnessing violence – as many as 1 in 5 children will develop Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

A new approach that helps improve communication between child and caregiver, such as recognizing and managing traumatic stress symptoms and teach coping skills, was able to prevent chronic and sub-clinical PTSD in 73 percent of children. The intervention, called the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention (CFTSI) also reduced PTSD symptoms in children – which can include reliving a traumatic experience, sleep disturbances, emotional numbness, angry outbursts or difficulties concentrating – and promoted recovery more quickly than a comparison intervention.

“This is the first preventative intervention to improve outcomes in children who have experienced a potentially traumatic event, and the first to reduce the onset of PTSD in kids,” said lead study author Steven Berkowitz, MD, associate professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and director of the Penn Center for Youth and Family Trauma Response and Recovery.

“If this study is replicated and validated in future studies, this intervention could be used nationally to help children successfully recover from a traumatic event without progressing to PTSD.” The study now appears online in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

In the study, 106 children ranging from 7 to 17 years in age and a caregiver were randomly assigned to receive the four-session Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention or a four-session supportive comparison intervention, both provided within 30 days following exposure to a traumatic event. Children were referred by police, a forensic sexual abuse program, or the local pediatric emergency department in an urban city in Connecticut. The CFTSI intervention began with an initial baseline assessment to measure the child’s trauma history and a preliminary visit with the caregiver, focusing on their essential role in the process.

Within the sessions, there is a focus on improving communication between the child and caregiver, as well as other supportive measures.

At the end of the next two sessions, the clinician, caregiver and child, decide on a homework assignment to practice certain coping skills. The behavioral skill components provide techniques to recognize and manage traumatic stress symptoms.

Future studies will need to validate the effectiveness of this intervention, but researchers hope that brief and effective interventions like CFTSI can be applied early to prevent the development of PTSD.

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GLBT issues underly most of the suicide the Bishop writes about. The idea that life can be made so unbearable for children so young is incomprehensible unless you have been near someone living the nightmare.

A gay 14 year old boy in my guardian ad-Litem caseload was physically restrained for the better part of his five week stay in a Christian group home that had promised to deal objectively with his sexual orientation. There was nothing rational about the treatment he received at this group home.

He was suicidal when he was seven & put on Ritalin with minimal mental health therapy. He has HIV AIDS today at 20.

As a result of the terrible treatment he received from his family & the lack of organized resources available to him through the child protection system, his entire life has seems to have been dangerous behaviors & a death wish.

I’ve followed the terrible stories of very young children committing suicide and experienced several first hand suicide attempts as a guardian ad-Litem.

The good news is that we have the treatment protocol to save these children.

Let’s support those programs (yes, with our tax dollars – and no, there is not a religion in the world that abandons children)

An increasingly popular bumper sticker reads, “Guns Don’t Kill People — RELIGION Kills People!” In light of recent events I would add religion kills young people: gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender young people.

Perhaps not directly, though. And religion is certainly not the only source of anti-gay sentiment in the culture. But it’s hard to deny that religious voices denouncing LGBT people contribute to the atmosphere in which violence against LGBT people and bullying of LGBT youth can flourish.

The news is filled with the tragedies of teenaged boys who were gay and decided to end their living hell by committing suicide. Maybe they weren’t even gay, but merely perceived to be by their peers, who harassed, taunted, and threatened them unmercifully.

These were real kids with real names. Asher Brown, an eighth grader in Texas, shot himself in the head after endless bullying by classmates and despite attempts by his parents to get school authorities to take his harassment seriously. Seth Walsh hung himself from a tree in his California backyard after relentless bullying by classmates. Asher and Seth were 13-years-old.

Billy Lucas, a 15-year-old high school freshman from Indiana, was only perceived to be gay. But the unrelenting bullying ended with him taking his own life. Seven students in one Minnesota school district have taken their own lives, including three teens.

With the exception of Brown in Texas these suicides are not happening in Bible Belt regions of the country, where we might predict a greater-than-usual regard for religious thought. Instead, they are occurring in states perceived to be more liberal on LGBT issues: California, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.

The case of Tyler Clementi is especially instructive about how far we have to go in accepting our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender children. Clementi was an 18-year-old freshman at Rutgers University whose roommate secretly filmed a sexual encounter he had with another male student and then posted it on the internet.

Think about it. If Tyler had been heterosexual and instead filmed having sex with his girlfriend, it would still be an inappropriate invasion of his privacy and tasteless to post the video online. And it certainly would have been embarrassing for Tyler and the girl. But chances are he would have been the recipient of some congratulatory remarks from friends about what a stud he was. And if he was straight he likely wouldn’t have contemplated — not to mention successfully accomplished — his own suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge.

No, Tyler was a victim — not of an inner disturbance of depression or mental illness–but of an external and in part religiously inspired disdain and hatred of gay people.

Despite the progress we’re making on achieving equality under the law and acceptance in society for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, why this rash of bullying, paired with self-loathing, ending in suicide? With humility and heartfelt repentance I assert that religion — and its general rejection of homosexuality — plays a crucial role in this crisis.

On the one hand, Religious Right hatemongers and crazies are spewing all sorts of venom and condemnation, all in the name of a loving God. The second-highest-ranking Mormon leader, Boyd K. Packer, recently called same-sex attraction “impure and unnatural” in an act of unspeakable insensitivity at the height of this rash of teen suicides. He declared that it can be cured, and that same-sex unions are morally repugnant and “against God’s law and nature.”

Just as many gay kids grow up in these conservative denominations as any other. They are told day in and day out that they are an abomination before God. Just consider the sheer numbers of LGBT kids growing up right now in Roman Catholic, Mormon, and other conservative religious households. The pain and self-loathing caused by such a distortion of God’s will is undeniable and tragic, causing scars and indescribable self-alienation in these young victims.

You don’t have to grow up in a religious household, though, to absorb these religious messages. Not long ago I had a conversation with six gay teens, not one of whom had ever had any formal religious training or influence. Every one of them knew the word “abomination,” and every one of them thought that was what God thought of them. They couldn’t have located the Book of Leviticus in the Bible if their lives depended on it yet they had absorbed this message from the antigay air they breathe every day.

Add to that the Minnesota Family Council’s Tom Prichard recently saying that the real cause of the suicides is “homosexual indoctrination,” not antigay bullying, and that the students died because they adopted an “unhealthy lifestyle.”

Susan Russell from All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, points out how ludicrous these statements are in her “An Inch at a Time” blog:

Thirteen and fifteen year olds are not ‘adopting a lifestyle,’ they’re trying to have a life! They’re trying to figure out who they are, who God created them to be and what on earth to do with this confusing bunch of sexual feelings that they’re trying to get a handle on. They need role models for healthy relationships — not judgment and the message that they’re condemned to a life of loneliness, isolation and despair.
On the other hand, what’s the role of more mainline, more progressive denominations such as mainstream Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in these recent tragedies? Mostly silence. And just like in the days of the AIDS organization Act Up, “silence equals death.”

It is not enough for good people — religious or otherwise — to simply be feeling more positive toward gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Tolerance and a live-and-let-live attitude beats discrimination and abuse by a mile. But it’s not enough. Tolerant people, especially tolerant religious people, need to get over their squeamishness about being vocal advocates and unapologetic supporters of LGBT people. It really is a matter of life and death, as we’ve seen.

I learned this in my dealing with racism. It’s not enough to be tolerant of other races. I benefit from a racist society just by being white. I don’t ever have to use the “n” word, treat any person of color with discourtesy, or even think ill of anyone. But as long as I am not working to dismantle the systemic racism that benefits me, a white man, at the expense of people of color, I am a racist. And my faith calls me to become an anti-racist — pro-active, vocal, and committed.

Some progressive religious groups — the United Church of Christ, Unitarians, Metropolitan Community Church — have long been advocates for LGBT people. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America has recently made great strides in welcoming gay clergy. And my own Episcopal Church has put itself at great risk on behalf of full inclusion of LGBT people in electing two openly gay priests to be bishops.

Still, even in these progressive churches, there is much to be done.

Cody J. Sanders, a Baptist minister and Ph.D. student in pastoral theology and counseling at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas, recently wrote on the Religion Dispatches website about how important it is for churches to act:

Ministers who remain in comfortable silence on sexuality must speak out. Churches that have silently embraced gay and lesbian members for years must publicly hang the welcome banner. How long will we continue to limit and qualify our messages of acceptance, inclusion and embrace for the most vulnerable in order to maintain the comfort of those in our communities of faith who are well served by the status quo? In the current climate, equivocating messages of affirmation are overpowered by the religious rhetoric of hatred. Silence only serves to support the toleration of bullying, violence and exclusion. In the face of what has already become the common occurrence of LGBT teen suicide, how long can we wait to respond?

As good Christians and Jews we must work to change the religious thinking, rhetoric, and practice that communicates to our LGBT children that they are despised by their Creator. We must learn to object to anti-gay jokes the way we learned to tell our friends that we would not tolerate racist jokes. We must demand that our schools not only have antibullying policies, but that they follow through on stopping the practice of bullying. We need to lobby our congressional representatives for the Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA, H.R. 4530, S. 3390). And we must proclaim openly, loudly, and often that we love our children unconditionally in the way that God does — always wanting the best and most healthy lives for them.

These bullying behaviors would not exist without the undergirding and the patina of respect provided by religious fervor against LGBT people. It’s time for “tolerant” religious people to acknowledge the straight line between the official anti-gay theologies of their denominations and the deaths of these young people. Nothing short of changing our theology of human sexuality will save these young and precious lives.

The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson is the Ninth Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire and a visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Washington, D.C.

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My article was written from the perspective of a CASA volunteer working with very troubled children that were not adopted. They needed a consistent adult in their life and we must help provide that.

Some of my CASA children had been in over ten foster homes and treatment centers and would age out of foster care very alone and uncertain.

I failed to clarify that in yesterday’s article. This counterpoint helps to clarify the serious issues that must always be considered in our struggle to provide the very best services to abused and neglected children. Please submit your own ideas and comments to this discussion.

Michael,
I am emailing you this privately and will leave it to your discretion as to whether you want to post this on your site as a mode of discussion. I know you support CASA and they do a lot of good for some kids, but the program has developed major faults over time.

It was never intended that CASA become a substitute parent or become personally involved with the children at all. They are supposed to be objective, getting FACTS from everyone involved, making recommendations to the judge based up those facts. Their own rules caution them against becoming too personally involved causing loss of objectivity.

They are not supposed to take the child shopping, buy them gifts, or celebrate milestones. This is the role of the parental figure in the child’s life. What if the parent doesn’t step up? The CASA can recommend that the child be assigned a person who can serve that role. It is not the CASA responsibility to fill it.

The CASA guidelines describe this role as “passive observer, information gatherer.” Passive is not active. They may not actively do anything. Gathering information does not equal obtaining or performing services. Obtaining services is the duty of the caseworker.

The CASA may recommend to the judge that services be obtained, but is not allowed to perform them himself.

This is where CASA goes awry causing blurred boundaries with the other parties involved in the case, especially, the parents. CASA can overstep to the point that they push the parent out of the picture completely, and this is a grand travesty to the child.

Additionally, CASAs receive their 40 hours of training in neglect and abuse cases, yet they are also assigned to dependency cases. Sometimes, “no fault dependency” cases.

As a result of ASFA, when the federal government gave money to states for the purpose of increasing adoptions, large numbers of kids did get good homes. Thirteen years later, hoards of those kids are re-entering the system because they came to parents with severe mental and emotional scars as a result of infant and child trauma, neglect, and abuse.

States refuse to help in any way with the astronomical mental health fees, such as $150,000 per year for residential care. Health insurance, Medicaid, and adopt subsidies pay nothing towards this care, not $1. Adoptive families are being forced to relinquish children back to the states to access astronomically expensive mental health care.

It defaults to child protective services and Juvenile Court, neither of which understand mental health and trauma. These cases are being treated just like abuse and neglect, when they are really clinical matters. What training does CASA have for cases like these? ZERO. NONE. They treat parents like they are abusive too. They are taking over the parental role, which is the last thing a child with bonding and attachment issues needs.

These children need assistance staying close to the only parents they’ve ever known. They don’t need to be separated from them. They don’t need to suffer guilt from watching their parents be charged with neglect and having CASA and caseworkers run all over their parents.

This happened to us. The CASA on our case bribed our son with over $1000 in gifts. Books, clothes, electronic games, rollerblades, skateboard, bicycle, health club membership complete with personal trainer, and on, and on, and on. This worker’s supervisor ridiculed me in court while the judge and attorneys were in chambers because I dared bring it to their attention that they were breaking all their own rules.

My son was calling her twice weekly asking her to buy him things, which only served to feed his OCD, causing setbacks in his therapy. He spoke to her husband on the phone. On her final visit, she sat in front of him at the residential treatment facility and cried tears in front of him, because I was trying to get her dismissed. I was, and rightly so.

She gave legal advice. She told the school I needed a court order to get his school records which was not true. She tried to paint to everyone that we were bad parents. Then she lied repeatedly in an effort to cover up her own discrepancies. She wound herself up in such a web of lies the judge dismissed her.

The only issue with our family is that our son has PTSD and OCD due to pre-adoptive trauma and severe infant neglect that happened two years before he came to live in our home. The state baled on us for any and every kind of mental health funding.

Unfortunately, after she was gone, our son figured out the truth. He no longer trusts them and neither do we. Kids with PTSD do not trust adults and it has taken us many years to develop a level of trust with him.

That CASA magnified his trust issues even more. The new one has been less involved, but still insists on overstepping the parental role. He keeps advising us on what he thinks would be best. We are good parents. We’ve raised 3 other kids, all of whom are community servants and upstanding citizens, nursing, police work, military.

Just because parents can’t cure PTSD does not make them unfit. It does not mean they don’t want a relationship with their child. It does not give CASA or anyone else the right to take their place.

We have another parent in our state in the same situation. The states attorney is seeking to terminate her parental rights because he does not feel that a single mom can raise a child with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Shame on the states for giving children permanency and then taking it away after failing to provide the mental health services the child needs. Shame on CASA for taking advantage of children and parents in this unjust situation.

It is my opinion that CASA should not be assigned to these cases at all, and that the parents be allowed to speak for the child’s “best interests.” If the CASA organization truly wanted to help this population of children, they should boycott these types of cases all together, sending a clear message to the government that these cases do not belong in court at all. Parents are entitled to the same rights as those who have children with physical illnesses, CUSTODY AND TREATMENT. Preserve adoptions.

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As a guardian ad Litem in the U.S., I often found medical professionals unresponsive to the violence and dysfunction responsible for the condition of the child before them.

In the U.S. there is an organization trying to change that; The Academy on Violence and Abuse, www.avahealth.org is working diligently to better educate the medical profession about the signs of abuse and how to respond effectively.

Visit the Academy’s website and watch their videos, it is compelling.

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amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com

ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2008) — Better guidance is urgently needed for doctors in child protection cases to prevent them from being deterred from acting to protect children, says an editorial on the British Medical Journal website.

Writing in response to recent high profile cases such as that of Sir Roy Meadow, which have highlighted “the crisis of confidence” developing between the General Medical Council (GMC) and paediatricians, David Foreman and Juliet Williams call for better guidance to prevent doctors from being deterred from raising concerns about child abuse and to restore confidence in child protection processes.

They point out that the number of complaints against paediatricians related to child abuse work increased by more than 500% between 1995 and 2003.

In addition, since 2003, registrations of children for emotional and sexual abuse have increased while those for physical and sexual abuse have declined. This, they say, suggests that doctors may be avoiding work related to abuse for which more detailed physical examinations are needed.

According to the authors, part of the problem is that there is a basic confusion in doctors’ duties regarding child protection. Medical law still states that doctors have a duty of care to both the parent and the child, but current paediatric professional guidance incorrectly applies the Children Act principle that the welfare of the child must be placed over all other considerations. In fact, this only applies to the courts, when they make a decision governed by that Act.

Therefore, in child protection cases, doctors have conflicting duties both to the child and to the parents who may not feel that doctors are acting in their best interests, particularly if they are suspects and if retrospectively no abuse is detected. This situation worsens if the doctor is later required to act as an expert witness in court.

Recent hostile media campaigns have added to the pressure on doctors by making it less likely that the GMC will dismiss high profile cases because its duty is to protect the public and also the reputation of medicine while maintaining public confidence in the profession, say the authors.

So what can be done to reinstate confidence in child protection processes and prevent a reduction in child protection?

The authors call on the GMC and other professional bodies to issue more specific guidance for doctors on how to manage these conflicting duties of care in child protection cases.

They also suggest that complaints against professionals in child protection cases should be subject to independent scrutiny before they are referred to their professional bodies.

To avoid unwarranted public criticism the public also need to be better educated about child protection work, so that the dual role of doctors in these cases is better understood, they conclude.

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by BMJ-British Medical Journal, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

BMJ-British Medical Journal (2008, September 4). Better Guidance Urgently Needed For Doctors In Child Protection Cases, Say Experts. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 26, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/09/080904215617.htm

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amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com

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We learn slow as a nation, but we do learn. This story needs to be repeated (pass it on).

Almost nothing is known about the rivers of psychotropic medications that are poured into the millions five, seven, and nine year old children that pass through child protection systems in America without sufficient mental health services.

Judge Heidi Schellhas shared with me the quantity of Prozac, *Ritalin, and other mind altering psychotropic medications poured into the very young children that passed through her court room each year. The amounts were staggering.

One of my first cases as a volunteer guardian ad-Litem took me to a four year old girl at the suicide ward at a Minneapolis hospital. Many of my cases of very young children were taking powerful psychotropic medications and not receiving access to mental health professionals. There was almost no coordination of services for these children, one provider had no idea what another provider was doing or how they might work together in the interests of the very troubled child.

There is no doubt that traumatized children and veterans need better access to mental health services. Veterans are fortunate in that their traumas are readily understood, discussed, and addressed.

Not so with abused and neglected children. The Media and the Public fail to see that child do not end up in child protection services unless they have been traumatized.

It is America’s “Imminent Harm Doctrine” that rules child protection law, and it only allows children to be removed from a home if their lives are endangered. In my experience over twelve years as a guardian ad-Litem, all children removed from their homes have been endangered and severely traumatized. Many children that were not removed from their homes were traumatized also. They need help too.

It would serve us well as a nation to help them. Our schools, communities, families, and children would benefit.

*Ritalin was banned in Sweden in 1968 because of a huge increase in suicides in the nation attributed to its use.

Kids At Risk Action needs your support for its successful launch of televised public service announcements building awareness to the issues surrounding child abuse. In collaboration with award winning Salo of Finland, KARA is working to create and place ads on national TV. These ads will reach millions and create interest and understanding of this important and often misunderstood subject.
Please contact us with your questions, referrals, and donations.The KARA team.

Healing eludes veterans at unit for broken warriors

Some soldiers sent to recover in a Warrior Transition Battalion say medication is too easy to get, while care is hard to come by.

By JAMES DAO and DAN FROSCH, New York Times

COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.

A year ago, Specialist Michael Crawford wanted nothing more than to get into Fort Carson’s Warrior Transition Battalion, a unit created to provide closely managed care for soldiers with physical wounds and severe psychological trauma.

A strapping Army sniper who once brimmed with confidence, he had returned emotionally broken from Iraq, where he suffered two concussions from roadside bombs and watched several platoon mates burn to death. The transition unit at Fort Carson, outside Colorado Springs, seemed the surest way to keep suicidal thoughts at bay, his mother thought.

It didn’t work. He was prescribed a laundry list of medications for anxiety, nightmares, depression and headaches that made him feel listless and disoriented. His once-a-week session with a nurse case manager seemed grossly inadequate to him. And noncommissioned officers — soldiers supervising the unit — harangued or disciplined him when he arrived late to formation or violated rules.

Last August, Crawford attempted suicide with a bottle of whiskey and painkillers. By the end of last year, he was begging to get out of the unit.

“It is just a dark place,” said the soldier, who is waiting to be medically discharged from the Army. “Being in the WTU is worse than being in Iraq.”

Created in the wake of the scandal in 2007 over serious shortcomings at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Warrior Transition Units were intended to be sheltering way stations where injured soldiers could recuperate and return to duty or gently process out of the Army. There are currently about 7,200 soldiers at 32 transition units across the Army, with about 465 soldiers at Fort Carson’s unit.

But interviews with more than a dozen soldiers and health care professionals from Fort Carson’s transition unit, along with reports from other posts, suggest that the units are far from being restful sanctuaries. For many soldiers, they have become warehouses of despair where damaged men and women are kept out of sight, fed a diet of powerful prescription pills and treated harshly by noncommissioned officers. Because of their wounds, soldiers in Warrior Transition Units are particularly vulnerable to depression and addiction, but many soldiers from Fort Carson’s unit say their treatment there has made their suffering worse.

‘You’re just floating’

Some soldiers in the unit, and their families, described long hours alone in their rooms, or in homes off the base, aimlessly drinking or playing video games.

“In combat, you rely on people and you come out of it feeling good about everything,” said a specialist in the unit. “Here, you’re just floating. You’re not doing much. You feel worthless.”

At Fort Carson, many soldiers complained that doctors prescribed drugs too readily. As a result, some soldiers have become addicted to their medications. Medications are so abundant that some soldiers in the unit openly deal, buy or swap prescription pills.

Heavy use of psychotropic drugs and narcotics makes it difficult to exercise, wake for morning formation and attend classes, soldiers and health care professionals said. Yet noncommissioned officers discipline soldiers who fail to complete those tasks, sometimes over the objections of nurse case managers and doctors.

At least four soldiers in the Fort Carson unit have committed suicide since 2007, the most of any transition unit as of February, according to the Army.

Senior officers in the Army’s Warrior Transition Command declined to discuss specific soldiers. But they said Army surveys showed that most soldiers treated in transition units since 2007, more than 50,000 people, had liked the care.

Those senior officers acknowledged that addiction to medications was a problem, but they denied that Army doctors relied too heavily on drugs. And they defended disciplining wounded soldiers when they violated rules.

“These guys are still soldiers, and we want to treat them like soldiers,” said Lt. Col. Andrew Grantham, commander of the Warrior Transition Battalion at Fort Carson.

The colonel offered another explanation for complaints about the unit. Many soldiers, he said, struggle in transition units because they would rather be with regular, deployable units. In some cases, he said, they feel ashamed of needing treatment.

“Some come to us with an identity crisis,” he said. “They don’t want to be seen as part of the WTU. But we want them to identify with a purpose and give them a mission.”

A changed man

Sgt. John Conant, a 15-year veteran of the Army, returned from his second tour of Iraq in 2007 a changed man, according to his wife, Delphina. Angry and sullen, he reported to the transition unit at Fort Carson, where he was prescribed at least six medications a day for sleeping disorders, pain and anxiety.

The medications disoriented him, Delphina Conant said, and he would often wander the house late at night before curling up on the floor and falling asleep. Then in April 2008, after taking morphine and Ambien, the sleeping pill, he died in his sleep. A coroner ruled that his death was from natural causes. He was 36.

Delphina Conant said she felt her husband never received meaningful therapy at the transition unit. “They didn’t want to do anything but give him medication,” she said.

Other soldiers and health care workers at Fort Carson offered similar complaints.

“These kids change their medication like they change their underwear,” said a psychotherapist who works with Fort Carson soldiers and asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the transition unit. “They can’t even remember which pills they’re taking.”

More problems

Michael Crawford has been waiting more than a year for his medical discharge. As his anxiety and depression have worsened, so have his problems in the unit. His rank was recently reduced to private in punishment for overstaying leave and using marijuana.

But things are looking up, his mother believes: He will be able to stay with her in Michigan while awaiting his discharge. His mother, Sally Darrow, has already seen one son commit suicide. She believes that Michael would become the second if he had to return to Fort Carson and the transition unit.

“At home, with family and schoolmates, he’s dealing with things better,” Darrow said. “He’s not safe there.”

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In collaboration with award winning Salo of San Ramon CA, & the Academy on Violence and Abuse www.avahealth.org KARA is working to create and place public service ads that bring attention to child abuse on national TV.

These ads will reach millions and create interest and understanding of the children impacted by abuse.

Contact KARA with your questions and support. Please contact us with your questions, referrals, and donations.

The KARA team.

ps… pass this on to those you think might appreciate the opportunity;

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In Red Lake and other communities that have suffered such mayhem, much money has been spent after a tragedy to put in place services that should stop the next Virginia Tech, Red Lake, Columbine.

Mental health is the cornerstone of a healthy life. We all have our ups and downs. Some of us start lower than others and sink lower than others. Throw in alcohol or drugs (proscribed or not) & bad things begin to happen.

Programs that help youth understand these issues and how to cope with them are one of the best investments that we can make in our youth and our community.

Not having programs is expensive. Just ask the people that lost family and friends in Red Lake, Columbine, & at Virginia Tech.

The following articles are an expansion on the topic of money and teen substance abuse (thanks Jamie);

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

A new report finds that more kids say they are using alcohol and other drugs, but many parents are unable or unwilling to deal with the issue — a bad combination when declining support for prevention and cultural apathy about the issue leave parents as the last and sometimes only line of defense against adolescent drug use.
http://www.jointogether.org/news/features/2010/new-survey-again-raises-alarm.html

Cuts of substance will hurt teen drug, alcohol programs
BY PHILIP FEROLITO
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

http://www.yakima-herald.com/stories/2010/03/01/cuts-of-substance-will-hurt-teen-drug-alcohol-programs

Latest Youth Substance Abuse Research Encourages Parents to Take Action Early

Mar 16, 2010 by Kim Manlove | Categories Addiction, Alcohol, Ecstasy, Teenagers, intervene
The recent release of the Partnership/MetLife Foundation Attitude Tracking Study (PATS) of teen drug use, and parent and teen attitudes toward substance use, shows both encouraging and alarming trends. The data point to notable increases in teen use of alcohol, marijuana and Ecstasy, marking an end to a decade of long declines in drug and alcohol use among young people. This coupled with the decline in “perceptions of harm,” among both teens and parents is a strong indication that American society may be in for a perfect storm of increased adolescent drug and alcohol abuse not experienced in the United States since the 1990s.

This storm is fed by a growing climate of parental denial, which sees teens agreeing that “being high feels good” and parents of teens who have drug and alcohol problems either waiting to act or taking no action at all to address the problem…….
http://decoder.drugfree.org/2010/03/16/latest-youth-substance-abuse-research-encourages-parents-to-take-action-early/

Reclaiming lives;

http://blog.reclaimingfutures.org/?q=adolescent-substance-abuse-treatment-SAMHSA-CASPAR

Plain talk on gang intervention;
http://www.washoe.k12.nv.us/schools/safe-and-drug-free-schools/gang-resistance-intervention-program

Many good real world articles;

http://www.addiction-intervention.com/

A new national survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration report finds that 12-year-olds are using inhalants more than marijuana, hallucinogens, and cocaine combined.;

http://www.addiction-intervention.com/addiction/inhalant-abuse-increasing-among-12-year-olds/

The Growing Problem of Prescription Drug Abuse;

http://www.addiction-intervention.com/addiction/prescriptiondrugabuse/prescription-drug-abuse-still-a-growing-problem/

Trends of Alcohols and Drugs Abuse 1997 to 2007;

http://www.addiction-intervention.com/addiction/addiction-research/comparing-trends-for-co-abuse-of-alcohol-and-drugs-from-1997-to-2007/

Breaking addiction; feeling the pinch
http://www.coshoctontribune.com/article/20100321/NEWS01/3210304/Drug-addiction-on-the-rise-funding-for-treatment-declining

Safety first: Parents, Teens and Drugs;http://drugpolicy.org/safetyfirst/

Drug policy state by state; http://drugpolicy.org/statebystate/

Drugs, Police & the Law; http://drugpolicy.org/law/
Affected Communities; http://drugpolicy.org/communities/

Reducing Harm; http://drugpolicy.org/reducingharm/

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Support KARA buy our book or donate

amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com

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This is perhaps a more technical/professional piece than is usually found here, but I think it is important and might serve as reference to people you know in the social service or medical fields.

It explains how to distinguish between accidental burns and deliberate burns. I found it to be a complete and important investigation of this serious and not often discussed type of abuse.

One of my first cases was a baby in a very dysfunctional home that had been terribly scalded in a bathtub. The skin on the bottom half of her body had suffered third degree burns in a bathtub of 161 degree water. A very painful experience for the baby that would be with her for her life (her legs and bottom would be scarred forever).

The only positive was in this sad case was a firm that specialized in burns that recovered substantial damages for the child against the landlord that had ignored frozen cold water pipes and turned the hot water heater to a scalding temperature.

Link to the complete Worksheet;

http://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/91190.txt

Title: Burn Injuries in Child Abuse

Series: Portable Guide

Contributing Authors: Phylip J. Peltier, Gary Purdue,

and Jack R. Shepherd

Published: May 1997; June 2001
Subject: Missing and Exploited Children
27 pages
37,000 bytes
——————-

Figures, charts, forms, and tables are not included

in this ASCII plain-text file. To view this document

in its entirety, download the Adobe Acrobat graphic

file available from this Web site or order a print

copy from NCJRS at 800-638-8736.
——————–
Foreword
Our most defenseless children are the most likely to

be burned intentionally. Child abuse burn victims are

almost always under the age of 10 with the majority

under the age of 2. Immediate identification of

intentional burn victims by those individuals first

responding to the call for assistance is crucial

because most of the victims are unable to speak for

themselves. It is also important that responsible

caretakers not be unjustly accused.

In this guide you will find information that will

assist you to distinguish intentional burns from

accidental contact with hot objects. Burn Injuries in

Child Abuse provides both guidance on determining the

veracity of a caretaker’s report by re-creating the

incident and a burn evidence worksheet for use at the

scene of an investigation. Information regarding the

distinctions between immersion and contact burns is

also included.

It is our hope that information in this guide will be

of use to law enforcement as we all work to protect

our children.

Original Printing May 1997

Second Printing June 2001

NCJ 162424
——————-
Although general awareness of the magnitude of child

abuse is increasing, deliberate injury by burning is

often unrecognized. Burn injuries make up about 10

percent of all child abuse cases, and about 10

percent of hospital admissions of children to burn

units are the result of child abuse. In comparison

with accidentally burned children, abused children

are significantly younger and have longer hospital

stays and higher mortality rates. The child burn

victim is almost always under the age of 10, with the

majority under the age of 2.

Children are burned for different reasons. Immersion

burns may occur during toilet training, with the

perpetrator immersing the child in scalding water for

cleaning or punishment. Hands may be immersed in pots

of water for playing near the stove. A person may

place a child in an oven for punishment or with

homicidal intentions.

Inflicted burns often leave characteristic patterns

of injury that, fortunately, cannot be concealed.

Along with the history of the burn incident, these

patterns are primary indicators of inflicted burns

versus accidental ones. Findings in response to the

following questions can raise or lower the index of

suspicion, helping to determine whether a burn was

deliberately inflicted:

o Is the explanation of what happened consistent with

the injury? Are there contradictory or varying

accounts of the method or time of the “accident” or

other discrepancies in the witnesses’ descriptions of

what happened?

o Does the injury have a clean line of demarcation,

parts within or immediately around the injured area

that are not burned, a burn pattern inconsistent with

the injury account, or any other of the typical

characteristics of an inflicted burn? Are the burns

located on the buttocks, the area between the child’s

legs, or on the ankles, wrists, palms, or soles?

o Are other injuries present such as fractures,

healed burns, or bruises?

o Are the child’s age and level of development

compatible with the caretaker’s and witnesses’

accounts of the injury?

o Was there a delay in seeking medical attention?

Smaller burns may have been treated at home.

o Does the caretaker insist there were no witnesses,

including the caretaker, to the injury incident?

o Do those who were present seem to be angry or

resentful toward the child or each other?

A detailed history, including previous trauma,

presence of recent illnesses, immunization status,

and the status of routine medical care, is critical,

as is careful documentation of the scene of the

injury, including photographs and drawings. To

investigate a burn injury:

o Stay focused on the facts in front of you and

proceed slowly and methodically.

o Ask questions, be objective, and reenact the incident.

o Treat each case individually.

The incidence of further injury and death is so high

in deliberate burn cases that it is critical for all

concerned persons to be aware of the indicators of

this form of child abuse.

The following descriptions provide information about

the various types of accidental and nonaccidental

burns children may incur.

o Scald burns are the most common type. They may be

caused by any hot liquid–hot tap water, boiling

water, water-like liquids such as tea or coffee, and

thicker liquids such as soup and grease. Scald burns

may be either a spill/splash type of burn or an

immersion burn, the most common of the liquid burn

injuries. Most deliberate burns are caused by tap

water.

o Contact burns are usually of the branding type and

will mirror the object used to cause the injury–

curling iron, steam iron, cigarette lighter,

fireplace or hibachi grill, and heated kitchen tool

or other implement.

Young children have thinner skin than adults;

therefore, a child’s skin will be destroyed more

rapidly and by less heat. Thicker skinned areas of

the body include the palms, soles, back, scalp, and

the back of the neck. Thinner skinned areas are the

front of the trunk, inner thighs, bottom of forearms,

and the inner arm area.

It is important to work with the emergency medical

personnel, who were probably the first persons to see

the child’s injuries, hospital personnel, and social

services investigators.

Classification of Burns

The preferred classification of burns used by most

physicians is “partial” or “full thickness.” Only an

experienced medical practitioner can make a

determination of how deep a burn is, but there are

some features of partial and full thickness burns

that can be observed immediately after the incident.

o Patches of reddened skin that blanch with fingertip

pressure and refill are shallow partial thickness

burns. Blisters usually indicate deeper partial

thickness burning, especially if the blisters

increase in size just after the burn occurs.

o A leathery or dry surface with a color of white,

tan, brown, red, or black represents a full thickness

burn. The child feels no pain because the nerve

endings have been destroyed. Small blisters may be

present but will not increase in size.

Spill/Splash Injuries

These injuries occur when a hot liquid falls from a

height onto the victim. The burn pattern is

characterized by irregular margins and nonuniform

depth. A key indicator to look for is where the

scalding liquid first came into contact with the

victim. Water travels downward and cools as it moves

away from the initial contact point. When a pan of

water is spilled or thrown on a person’s chest, the

initial contact point shows a splash pattern. The

area below this point tapers down, creating what is

called an “arrow down” pattern. This pattern is more

commonly seen in assaults on adults than in assaults

on children.

If the child was wearing clothing at the time of the

injury, the pattern may be altered. This is why it is

important to determine whether clothing was worn and,

if possible, to retain the actual clothing. Depending

on the material, the water may have been against the

skin longer, which would result in a deeper injury

and pattern. A fleece sleeper, for instance, will

change the course of the water and hold the

temperature longer in one area as opposed to a thin,

cotton T-shirt.

Questions to ask in a scalding injury investigation

include the following:

o Where were the caretakers at the time of the

accident?

o How many persons were home at the time?

o How tall is the child? How far can he or she reach?

o Can the child walk and are the child’s coordination

and development consistent with his or her age?

o How much water was in the pan and how much does it

weigh?

o What is the height to the handle of the pan when it

is sitting on the stove (or counter, or table)?

o Was the oven on at the time (thus unlikely that the

child could have climbed onto the stove)?

o Does the child habitually play in the kitchen? near

the stove? climb on the cabinets or table?

o Has the child been scolded for playing in the

kitchen? for touching the stove?

It is unusual for a child to incur a scald burn on

his or her back accidentally, but it has happened. As

in all burn investigations, factors other than

location of the burn must be considered before

concluding the injury was nonaccidental. Deliberate

burning by throwing a hot liquid on a child is

usually done either as punishment for playing near a

hot object or in anger. However, the child may have

been caught in the crossfire between two fighting

adults and then been accused of having spilled the

liquid accidentally.

Immersion Burns

Immersion burns result from the child falling or

being placed into a tub or other container of hot

liquid. In a deliberate immersion burn, the depth of

the burn is uniform. The wound borders are very

distinct, sharply defined “waterlines” with little

tapering of depth at the edges. There is little

evidence that the child thrashed about during the

immersion, indicating that the child was held in

place, and occasionally there may be bruising of the

soft tissue to indicate that this is what happened.

Only children with deliberate immersion burns sustain

deep burns of the buttocks and/or the area between

the anus and the genitals. Many of these injuries

involve toilet training or the soiling of clothing.

There may be dirty diapers or clothing in the

bathroom. The water in the bathtub may be deeper than

what is normal for bathing an infant or child and may

be so hot that the first responding adult at the

scene is unable to immerse his or her own hand in it.

Several key variables must be observed in

investigating immersion burns:

o The temperature of the water. Variables that must

be taken into account include the temperature of the

water heater, the ease with which it can be reset,

and recent prior usage of water.

o The time of exposure, an unknown that can sometimes

be estimated from the burn pattern and its depth.

o The depth of the burn. Several days may need to

pass before the true depth of the burn can be

determined.

o The occurrence of “sparing” (areas within or

immediately around the burn site that were spared).

An adult will experience a significant injury of the

skin after 1 minute of exposure to water at 127

degrees, 30 seconds of exposure at 130 degrees, and 2

seconds of exposure at 150 degrees. A child, however,

will suffer a significant burn in less time than an adult.

When a child’s hand is forced into hot water, the

child will make a fist, thus “sparing” the palm and

discounting the statement that the child reached into

the pan of hot water for something. A child whose

body is immersed in hot water will attempt to fold

up, and there will be sparing in creases in the

abdomen. Curling up the toes when the foot is forced

into a hot liquid will spare part of the soles of the

feet or the area between the toes. The area where the

child was held by the perpetrator will also be

spared. These flexing actions prevent burning within

the body’s creases, causing a striped configuration

of burned and unburned zones, or a “zebra” pattern.

Deliberate immersion burns can often be recognized by

one of the following characteristic patterns:

o Doughnut pattern in the buttocks. When a child

falls or steps into a hot liquid, the immediate

reaction is to thrash about, try to get out, and jump

up and down. When a child is held in scalding hot

bathwater, the buttocks are pressed against the

bottom of the tub so forcibly that the water will not

come into contact with the center of the buttocks,

sparing this part of the buttocks and causing the

burn injury to have a doughnut pattern.

o Sparing of the soles of the feet. Another instance

of sparing occurs in a child whose buttocks and feet

are burned but whose soles have been spared. If a

caretaker’s account is that the child was left in the

bathroom and told not to get into the tub, and that

the caretaker then heard screaming and returned to

find the child jumping up and down in the water, the

absence of burns on the soles of the child’s feet is

evidence that the account is not true. A child cannot

jump up and down in hot water and not burn the

bottoms of the feet.

o Stocking or glove pattern burns. Stocking and glove

patterns are seen when feet or hands are held in the

water. The line of demarcation is possible evidence

that the injury was not accidental.

o Waterlines. A sharp line on the lower back would

indicate the child was held still in the water. A

child falling into the water would show splash and

irregular line patterns. The waterline on the child’s

torso indicates how deep the water was.

An Evidence Worksheet for Immersion Burns and

instructions for filling it out are part of this guide. The

worksheet was developed to record data to help the

doctor determine accidental or intentional injury.

The information recorded on the worksheet is also

helpful to the prosecutor in preparing the case and

defeating potential defenses that may arise later in

the investigation and trial. Developed with the assistance

of a department of social services and several law enforcement

child abuse investigative teams, the worksheet is a

guideline and can be modified to suit particular

investigative needs.

Contact Burns

Contact burns may be caused by flames or hot solid

objects. Flame burns are a much less common cause of

deliberate injury. When they do occur, they are

characterized by extreme depth and are relatively

well defined when compared with accidental flame

burns.

When a child accidentally touches a hot object or the

object falls on the child, there is usually a lack

of pattern in the burn injury, since the child

quickly moves away from the object. However, even

brief accidental contact can cause a second-degree

burn with the pattern of the object, for example,

falling against a hot radiator or grate.

Distinguishing Nonaccidental from

Accidental Contact Burns

Nonaccidental burns caused by a hot solid object are

the most difficult to distinguish from accidental

injuries. Cigarette and iron burns are the most

frequent types of these injuries. Cigarette burns on

a child’s back or buttocks are unlikely to have been

caused by walking into a lighted cigarette, and

therefore are more suspect than burns about the face

and eyes, which can occur accidentally if the child

walks or runs into the adult’s lighted cigarette held

at waist height. Accidental burns are usually more

shallow, irregular, and less well defined than

deliberate burns. Multiple cigarette burns are

distinctively characteristic of child abuse.

Purposely inflicted “branding” injuries usually

mirror the objects that caused the burn (such as

cigarette lighters and curling irons), and are much

deeper than the superficial and random burns caused

by accidentally touching these objects. Most

accidental injuries with hot steam or curling irons

occur when the hot item is grasped or falls. These

are usually second-degree injuries and randomly

placed, as might happen when a hot iron strikes the

skin in multiple places as it falls. It is important

to know where the iron was–for example, on an

ironing board or on a coffee table at the child’s

height?

Another source of accidental burns is contact with

items that have been exposed for prolonged periods to

hot sun. Pavement in hot sun, which can reach a

temperature of 176 degrees, can burn a child’s bare

feet; however, these are not likely to be deep burns.

A child placed in a carseat that has been in a car in

the sun can receive second- and even third-degree

burns. Full thickness burns have also resulted from

contact with a hot seatbelt buckle.

Key questions in this area are:

o Where is the burn injury and could the child reach

the area unassisted?

o Does the child normally have access to the item

(such as a cigarette lighter) that caused the injury?

o How heavy is the item and how strong is the child?

For instance, is the steam iron a small travel-size

one that a small child could lift or a full-size home

model that might be too heavy?

o Is there any sparing that would be significant to

the injury?

o How was the item heated and how long did it take to

heat it to cause the injury?

o Is the injury clean and crisp, with a distinctive

pattern of the object, or is it shallow or irregular,

as from a glancing blow? Several cleanly defined

injuries, especially on an older child, could

indicate that the child was held motionless by a

second perpetrator while the first perpetrator

carefully branded the child.

o Are there multiple burns or other healed burns?

o Has the child been punished before for playing with

or being too close to the hot object?

Skin Conditions That May Simulate Abuse

Investigators should be aware that it is sometimes

difficult to distinguish between burns caused by

abuse and certain diseases or medical conditions:

o Cutaneous (skin) infections. Some infections have

patterns that may mimic deliberate injuries.

Impetigo, severe diaper rash, and early scalded skin

syndrome sometimes resemble a scald injury.

A careful history, microbiological tests, and

observation of the lesions over a 2- to 3-week period

usually determine whether or not these are deliberate

burn injuries or just infections.

o Hypersensitivity reactions. A substance in citrus

fruits such as limes, when in contact with the skin

and exposed to sunlight, can produce a form of

photodermatitis with a pattern that resembles

a splash burn. An allergic reaction causing a severe

local skin irritation may be mistaken for a burn.

Skin preparations such as topical antiseptics can

cause a similar burn appearance. Again, the exposure

history will allow differentiation of these reactions

from burns.

o Marks left by folk remedies. Moxibustion is an

Asian folk remedy that entails placement of a hot

substance, often burning yarn, on the skin of the

abdomen or back, causing circular lesions that can be

mistaken for other types of burn injuries. The

practice of cupping, which is the placement in a cup

or glass of a small amount of flammable substance

that is ignited and placed on the skin, may cause a

burn lesion. Note: Even when the cause of a burn

injury is determined to be a folk remedy,

investigators should exercise caution and carefully

evaluate all circumstances surrounding the incident

to determine whether the injury should be further

investigated.

Helpful Investigative Techniques

The following investigative steps and techniques will

help you and other professionals determine if burns

have been purposely inflicted.

Medical Examination

The physical examination of all burned children

includes careful evaluation of the entire skin

surface for the presence of other signs of abuse such

as:

o Healed burns.

o Multiple simultaneous burns.

o Bruises, slaps, and bite or whip marks.

o Evidence of sexual abuse.

Evaluation and documentation of the burn pattern

should be precise. Multiple burns of varying ages and

types that obviously could not have occurred from the

same accident (for example, cigarette and scald burns

or different types of scald burns) are strong

indicators of child abuse. However, the absence of

other injuries does not rule out child abuse, since

80 percent of deliberately inflicted burns are not

associated with other trauma.

Long bone, chest, and a skull radiographic (x-ray)

series (commonly called a “babygram”) need to be

performed on all burned children with suspected

abuse. Unfortunately, there are no specific

laboratory studies that will help distinguish

deliberate from accidental burn injury.

———————

Investigator’s Checklist for Use in Suspected

Cases of Deliberate Burn Injuries of Children

o Have you contacted the emergency response team?

o Have you contacted the child protective services

team?

o Have you reviewed the medical findings with the

appropriate medical staff?

o Have you carefully considered the suspicion index

findings?

o Where was the primary care provider at the time of

the incident?

o Where is the burn injury located on the child’s

body?

o How serious is the burn?

o Is the burn a wet contact burn or a dry contact

burn?

o If the burn appears to have been caused by a dry

source of heat, what is the shape of the burn and

what object does it resemble?

o Have you completed the Evidence Worksheet for

Immersion Burns?

o If the burn was produced by a hot liquid, was the

child dipped or fully immersed?

o What does the line of demarcation look like?

o Are there any splash burns present?

o How symmetrical are the lines of immersion if

stocking or glove patterns are present?

o Is toilet training, soiling, or wetting an issue?

o Have you recorded information concerning the

child’s age, height, degree of development and

coordination; location of fixtures; temperature and

depth of water; weight of burn object, etc.?

o Have you compared the burn injury with the area of

sparing?

o Was the child in a state of flexion (tensing of the

body parts in reaction to what was happening)

indicating resistance? Examples of flexion on a

child’s body include:

o Folds in the stomach.

o Calf against back of thigh.

o Arms tightened and held firmly against body or

folded against body.

o Thighs against abdomen.

o Head against shoulder.

o Legs crossed, held tightly together.

———————

Reenactment of the Incident

Objectivity is without a doubt the most important

quality you should possess as an investigator.

Reenacting the incident as given to you by the

witness is a good way to obtain objective information

and to answer any questions you may have. Using

yourself or another adult, but never the child, you

can reenact the incident at the scene, at your home

or office, and, ultimately, in court as demonstrative

evidence. The following are examples of useful

reenactment of the incident:

o When investigating wet contact injuries, use water

with blue dye to re-create the incident and then

photograph the results, which often clearly show that

the child’s burn injury pattern is not consistent

with the pattern that would have resulted from the

described incident.

o The fact that the time of exposure, temperature of

the water, and degree of the burn are all related

will test the accuracy of the caretaker’s reenactment

of the incident.

o If the suspect re-creates the incident using cooler

water, thinking that if hot water is used it will

look incriminating, you can point out that if the

water had been at that temperature, the child would

have to have been held still for a long time in order

to receive the degree of injury sustained.

Another example is a burn that a witness claims

happened because the child was playing with a

disposable cigarette lighter. Cigarette lighters

cause a specific injury pattern. Take an inkpad,

re-create the top of the lighter on a piece of paper,

and note the pattern. Next, using the inkpad,

re-create the pattern on different parts of your

body. You will see that it is difficult to make an

impression without distorting the pattern and that

the pattern is different on soft tissue as opposed to

hard, bony parts.

Moreover, if the lighter has a safety switch, as most

disposable lighters now do, could the injured child

have released the safety switch, lit the lighter,

kept the flame lit, and burned the area of the body

that was injured without burning his or her own hand,

especially the thumb closest to the flame?

Documentation

The following elements are important in diagramming

and photographing the scene:

o When diagramming, be sure to include all items in

the room where the incident occurred. Children often

climb when they are exploring. You may think the sink

is too high for access by the child, but a determined child

may have climbed from a step stool, to the toilet seat, to

a hamper, and then the sink.

o Accurate measurements of the items involved in the

incident–tub, basin, stove height, height to object, etc.–

are essential. Photographs of these items should document

the size and shape of the item and should contain a measure

scale.

o Always use color 35mm film for photographs. It

will give you maximum clarity and detail and is best

suited for making enlargements for court evidence.

Instant cameras are acceptable but do not give the

same clarity and produce photographs less suitable

for enlargements.

All body parts should be photographed. Photographs

should include a standard front, standard back,

standard left, and standard right. The significantly

burned areas should be particularly well

photographed. Reliable testimony, however, should not

be based solely on photographs or drawings. Testimony

from the treating physician or medical personnel who

conducted a hands-on evaluation of the child is

critical and more effective.

Working With Other Agencies

Fire and rescue teams are usually the first

responders to a 911 call for a burn victim.

Their observations of the scene and their

communication tapes verifying the response

time provide valuable information.

Another important agency is the Department of Social

Services. It is advisable to work closely with the

child protection services team, for their cooperation

can result in evidence and information law

enforcement may not be aware of. In fact,

joint training sessions of social services, medical,

emergency response, and prosecutorial personnel

can benefit everyone–victim and investigators.

———————-

Contributing Authors

Phylip J. Peltier

Criminal Investigator

Butte County District Attorney’s Office

Special Victims Unit

25 County Center Drive

Oroville, CA 95965

530-538-5224

Gary Purdue, M.D.

Professor, Department of Surgery

The University of Texas

Southwestern Medical Center

5323 Harry Hines Boulevard

Dallas, TX 75390-9158

214-648-2041

Captain Jack R. Shepherd

Commander, Executive Division

Office of the Director

Michigan State Police

714 South Harrison Road

East Lansing, MI 48823

517-336-6552

——————-

Supplemental Reading

Besharov DJ. Combating Child Abuse: Guidelines for

Cooperation Between Law Enforcement and Child

Protective Agencies. Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1990.

Butler KD, Chadwick DL. Child abuse. In Warner CG

(ed): Emergency Care: Assessment and Intervention. 2d

ed. St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1978.

Deitch EA, Staats M. Child abuse through burning.

Journal of Burn Care and Rehabilitation 3:89-94, 1982.

DePanfilis D, Salus MK. A Coordinated Response to

Child Abuse and Neglect: A Basic Manual (The User Manual

Series). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health

and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth

and Families, National Center on Child Abuse and

Neglect, 1992.

Fowler J. Child maltreatment by burning. Burns 5:83-

85, 1978.

Gary FP, Hunt JL, Prescott PR. Child abuse by

burning–An index of suspicion. Journal of Trauma 28(2):221-

224, 1988.

Gil DG. Violence Against Children: Physical Child

Abuse in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1970.

Helfer RE, Kempe RS (eds). The Battered Child. 4th

ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Hight DW, Bakalar HR, Lloyd JR. Inflicted burns in

children: Recognition and treatment. Journal of the

American Medical Association 242:517-520, 1979.

Lenoski EF, Hunter KA. Specific patterns of inflicted

burn injuries. Journal of Trauma 17:842-846, 1977.

MacMillan BG, Freiberg DL. Special problems of the

pediatric burn patient. In Hummel RP (ed): Clinical

Burn Therapy. Boston (MA), Bristol, and London: John

Wright/PSG Inc., 1982.

Moritz AR, Henriques FC. Studies of thermal injury:

II. The relative importance of time and surface

temperature in the causation of cutaneous burns.

American Journal of Pathology 23:695-720, 1947.

Pence D, Wilson C. The Role of Law Enforcement in the

Response to Child Abuse and Neglect (The User Manual Series).

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human

Services, Administration on Children, Youth and

Families, National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect,

1992.

Purdue GF, Hunt JL. Child abuse by burning. In Ludwig

S, Kornberg A (eds): Child Abuse: A Medical

Reference. New York, NY: Churchill Livingstone, 1992,

pp. 105-116.

Schanberger JE. Inflicted burns in children. Topics

in Emergency Medicine 3:85-92, 1981.

Shepherd JR, Dworin B, Farley RH, Russ BJ, Tressler

PW, National Center for Missing and Exploited

Children. Child Abuse and Exploitation: Investigative

Techniques. 2d ed. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile

Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1995.

Stone NH, Rinaldo L, Humphrey CR, et al. Child abuse

by burning. Surgical Clinics of North America

50:1419-1424, 1974.

Whitcomb D. When the Victim Is a Child. 2d ed.

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of

Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice,

1992.

———————

Organizations

American Burn Association

800-548-2876

Fox Valley Technical College

Criminal Justice Department

Law Enforcement Training Programs

P.O. Box 2277

1825 North Bluemound Drive

Appleton, WI 54914-2277

800-648-4966

920-735-4757 (fax)

http://www.foxvalley.tec.wi.us/ojjdp

Participants are trained in child abuse and

exploitation investigative techniques, covering the

following areas: recognition of signs of abuse,

collection and preservation of evidence, preparation

of cases for prosecution, techniques for interviewing

victims and offenders, and liability issues.

Fox Valley also offers an intensive special training

for local child investigative teams. Teams must

include representatives from law enforcement,

prosecution, social services, and (optionally) the

medical field. Participants take part in hands-on

team activity involving:

o Development of interagency processes and protocols

for enhanced enforcement, prevention, and

intervention in child abuse cases.

o Case preparation and prosecution.

o Development of the team’s own interagency

implementation plan for improved investigation of

child abuse.

National Burn Victim Foundation

246A Madisonville Road

Basking Ridge, NJ 07920

800-803-5879

908-953-9091

908-953-9099 (fax)

The Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors, Inc.

2153 Wealthy Street SE., Suite 215

East Grand Rapids, MI 49506

616-458-2773

Burn survivor toll-free line: 800-888-BURN

Burn camps in the United States and abroad: 800-888-BURN

http://www.phoenix-society.org

Shriners Hospital Referral Line

2900 Rocky Point Drive

Tampa, FL 33607

800-237-5055

Shriners Burn Institutes

Boston Unit

51 Blossom Street

Boston, MA 02114

617-722-3000

Cincinnati Unit

3229 Burnet Avenue

Cincinnati, OH 45229

513-872-6000

Galveston Unit

815 Market Street

Galveston, TX 77550

409-770-6600

Sacramento Unit

2425 Stockton Boulevard

Sacramento, CA 95817

916-453-2000

Trauma Burn Center

University of Michigan Medical Center

1500 East Medical Center Drive

Ann Arbor, MI 48109-0033

734-936-9666

In addition, many communities have their own burn

centers, which can be identified through local

hospitals.

———————–

Instructions for Evidence Worksheet for Immersion Burns

Section A

The location should include the address and

room in which the burn occurred.

Section B

Two investigators are required to gather the information

on the worksheet. You will need an immersion thermometer,

a 35 mm camera, a measuring device, and a watch with a

second hand.

Photograph the scene with a 35 mm camera. Use a ruler,

yardstick, or tape measure in all photographs.

Sketch the scene including all objects in the area.

Be sure to include the distance from the basin or tub

in relation to nearby objects and the dimensions of

furniture, fixtures, etc.

Section C

One investigator holds the thermometer so that the

water from the faucet is hitting at the immersion

line on the thermometer. That person notes the

starting temperature, which is recorded by the other

investigator, who is also holding the watch. The

first investigator calls out the time and the second

investigator calls out the temperature in response,

recording it at 5-second intervals (or when the

temperature remains constant for 15 seconds). Note:

The person holding the thermometer should not be

wearing glasses since the steam will fog them up.

When recording the hot and cold water temperature

together, turn the faucets on full and record when

the temperature remains constant for 15 seconds.

Section D

After the tub or basin is filled, you can hold a

low-key interview with the caretaker and/or witnesses

while checking the temperature at 5-minute intervals.

Section E

Have the suspect show you how he or she ran the water

when the burn occurred. If the suspect wants to run

the water deeper than 5 inches, allow this and note

it on the worksheet.

——————-

Other Titles in This Series

Currently there are 12 other Portable Guides to

Investigating Child Abuse. Additional guides in this

series may be developed at a later date. To obtain a

copy of any of the guides listed below (in order of

publication), contact the Office of Juvenile Justice

and Delinquency Prevention’s Juvenile Justice

Clearinghouse by telephone at 800-638-8736 or e-mail

at puborder@ncjrs.org.

Recognizing When a Child’s Injury or Illness Is

Caused by Abuse, NCJ 160938

Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Child Sexual Abuse,

NCJ 160940

Photodocumentation in the Investigation of Child

Abuse, NCJ 160939

Diagnostic Imaging of Child Abuse, NCJ 161235

Battered Child Syndrome: Investigating Physical Abuse

and Homicide, NCJ 161406

Interviewing Child Witnesses and Victims of Sexual

Abuse, NCJ 161623

Child Neglect and Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy,

NCJ 161841

Criminal Investigation of Child Sexual Abuse,

NCJ 162426

Law Enforcement Response to Child Abuse, NCJ 162425

Understanding and Investigating Child Sexual

Exploitation, NCJ 162427

Forming a Multidisciplinary Team To Investigate Child

Abuse, NCJ 170020

Use of Computers in the Sexual Exploitation of

Children, NCJ 170021

———————

Additional Resources

American Bar Association

(ABA)

Center on Children and

the Law

Washington, DC

202-662-1720

202-662-1755 (fax)

American Humane Association

Englewood, Colorado

800-227-4645

303-792-9900

303-792-5333 (fax)

American Medical Association

(AMA)

Department of Mental Health

Chicago, Illinois

312-464-5000

(AMA main number)

312-464-4184 (fax)

American Professional Society

on the Abuse of Children

(APSAC)

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

405-271-8202

405-271-2931 (fax)

Federal Bureau of Investigation

(FBI)

National Center for the

Analysis of Violent Crime

Quantico, Virginia

703-632-4333

Fox Valley Technical College

Criminal Justice Department

Appleton, Wisconsin

800-648-4966

920-735-4757 (fax)

Juvenile Justice Clearinghouse

(JJC)

Rockville, Maryland

800-638-8736

301-519-5600 (fax)

Kempe Children’s Center

Denver, Colorado

303-864-5252

303-864-5302 (fax)

National Association of Medical

Examiners

St. Louis, Missouri

314-577-8298

314-268-5124 (fax)

National Center for Missing

and Exploited Children

(NCMEC)

Alexandria, Virginia

703-274-3900

703-274-2220 (fax)

National Center for the

Prosecution of Child Abuse

Alexandria, Virginia

703-549-4253

703-549-6259 (fax)

National Children’s Alliance

Washington, DC

800-239-9950

202-639-0597

202-639-0511 (fax)

National Clearinghouse on

Child Abuse and Neglect

Information

Washington, DC

800-FYI-3366

703-385-7565

703-385-3206 (fax)

National SIDS Resource

Center

Vienna, Virginia

703-821-8955, ext. 249

703-821-2098 (fax)

Prevent Child Abuse America

Chicago, Illinois

800-835-2671

312-663-3520

312-939-8962 (fax)

————————

U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs

Office of Juvenile Justice and

Delinquency Prevention

Washington, D.C. 20531

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amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com

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The vast majority of the children we will be tying up & confining come from very troubled homes. Or, as former MN Supreme court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz has stated, about 90% of the youth in juvenile justice have come through child protection services.

Before a child can become removed from a home through child protection services, they have lived for a long time in an abusive or neglectful home and have been tortured as defined by the World Health Organization.

It’s not the happy children that we will be restraining - it’s the three million children that are reported to child protection in America each year.

In my experience, the WHO’s definition of torture fits the life experience of a child that has been removed from an abusive home; “extended exposure to violence and deprivation” has been their life. The U.S. has no other child protection policy than the IMMINENT HARM DOCTRINE.

The link between an abused child’s past tortured life and future troubled life is clear to most of us that have lived with or worked with these damaged children long enough. It causes me great pain to see my guardian ad-Litem kids handled like mad animals (tasered, confined, beat up by under-trained staff in under-resourced detention centers)

These are the children that develop behavior problems in school, get into trouble with delinquency, juvenile justice & the court system. Without appropriate services, they are on a one way path to criminal justice, poverty, preteen pregnancy & dysfunctional lifestyles (and that is often forever).

Our schools, jails, and courts are filled with abused and neglected children.

Thirteen million prison and jail releases in the U.S. last year, & America has more crime and criminals per capita than any other nation in the world. All because we can’t stop punishing abused and neglected children.

States that have discovered restorative justice and a therapeutic approach for youth are saving money and getting terrific results. States that continue to punish and incarcerate are feeling the burden of failure of public policy.

Children with serious behavioral problems need help getting to normal.

Most children with serious behavioral problems that don’t get help end up leading dysfunctional lives. It is far less costly to help a child get to normal than to let the child develop into a dysfunctional adult.

A good number of the children I have worked with in child protection have never had a nice day in their life, have a great need for mental health services, and do not respond well to threats or punishment.

The need for early childhood programs and mental health help is tremendous. Most states are using way to many psychotropics along with brute force and punishment against children that have already endured horrifically tortured home lives.

The A.C.E. study in Ramsey County demonstrated that about 70% of the serious and violent crime committed by youth in the county was committed by youth from under four % of the families in the county.

Our current policies of punishment instead of treating the behavior problems of children has failed and will continue to fail.

If our policies are to be measured by what they produce, it must be said that America’s politics of punishing abused and neglected children (restraint, confinement, imprisonment, lack of a humane approach to children), are producing juvenile delinquents, preteen mothers, overcrowded prisons and unsafe cities. Internationally, we are no longer a leader in the quality of life indices that we lead in for so long.

Minneapolis Minnesota has a mental health model in its school system that could work for the nation. Missouri went from 90% recidivism in its juvenile justice system to almost 90% success in just a few years with a therapeutic and caring approach to youth.

The economics of saving children through these models is proven and our mandate to care for the weakest and most vulnerable among us has been with us since time began, yet we continue to charge eleven year old children in adult criminal court & legislate to heap more punishment on abused and neglected children.

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Add to that the serious growing issues of diabetes that conservatively predicts that fifty percent of American’s children will be obese within three years, & that three times as many American children are proscribed psychotropic medications as are European children, is a strong indication that our public policies are not child friendly.

We are all too familiar with the sad fact that the U.S. tries 150,000 juveniles as adults each year, and that most juvenile justice cases have been child protection cases, paints an even darker picture for poor inner city children.

New York Times article on Rising Rates of Chronic Health Problems for Children;

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Support KARA buy our book or donate

Become part of KARA’s email network by sending a request to join to; amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com

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