Post Memorial Day blog

I have just finished reading about the Harvard study on the relationship between foster children and soldiers suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome.


According to the Harvard study, foster children are twice as likely to suffer from post traumatic stress syndrome as soldiers returning from Iraq are.

As a guardian ad-Litem observing children removed from frightening and toxic birth homes, I understand the correlation between living in a war zone and living in a dangerous home.

Both people live in fear of their lives. Both individuals witness terrible and frightening events (often on a daily basis). Often both have experienced terrific personal pain and suffering.

Each of them must rationalize his or her own existence in an insane situation with no way out.

There are differences;

The soldier goes back home to the remembered Normal world that was left behind. A child removed from an abusive home goes to a strange new existence and does not know what normal is. There was no “before” for an abused child. Sex, drugs, insanity, and violence have become their “normal”.

An abused child acquires behaviors to stay alive in toxic situations that are extremely detrimental to the child outside of the abusive home. Mental health services for abused and neglected children are few and far between.

The soldier suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome qualifies for mental health therapy.

The child will most likely be prescribed psychotropic medications with minimal psychiatric oversight and very little therapy.

About one percent of foster children go on to college. Between fifty and seventy-five percent of children in the Juvenile Justice system have diagnosable mental illnesses.

I do not wish to minimize the seriousness of post traumatic stress syndrome in solders.

I only wish to point out the seriousness of post traumatic stress syndrome in children.

Abused Children and Crime

Unlearning Child Abuse (or go to prison)

Children are not aware of the rightness or wrongness of their own abuse. They do not know that abuse is abnormal, or even that it is wrong. To a five-year-old, no matter how painful and frightening her life is, her life is normal. A sad and lasting fact of child abuse is that children blame themselves for the abuse they receive.

How can sex, drugs, and violence be unlearned by a ten year old child whose entire life has been just that? It takes years of therapy to change a child’s perception of an abusive past. It takes a great deal longer for an abused child to develop a healthy view of the world and a positive self-image. Our child protection systems don't provide much therapy.

There is no book a child can go to, or code they are born with, that explains the abnormality of what is happening to them. Children can’t call their senators, or complain to the authorities (they can’t even tell their parents).

These children are invisible in our community, yet each one of us is directly responsible for their plight. They live under our laws; they go to our schools; they are convicted by our courts; many of them spend lifetimes in our prisons. They have no say in the laws and policies that rule their lives. Just like they had no say in the neglect and abuse that was their childhood.

Neglected and abused children make up a great majority of the crime, drugs, and violence we experience in our communities. Over fifty percent of the children in the juvenile justice system have diagnosable mental illness.


Ninety percent of the juveniles in the Juvenile Justice System have come out of the Child Protection System (Minnesota's Chief Justice, Kathleen Blatz). Over 90 percent of the adults in the Criminal Justice System come out of the Juvenile Justice System. Justice Blatz (and others) call it a prison “feeder” system.

The United States is the only nation in the world to build prisons based on failed third grade reading scores.

Behaviors learned by abused children to stay alive in toxic homes are terribly counter-productive once the child is out of the abusive circumstances and trying to live a normal life. The behaviors developed for staying alive and avoiding pain dominate and thus can become significant detriments to getting along in society. As a matter of fact, for many troubled youth, their explosive responses and pain avoidance behaviors define them as social misfits and send them to prison.

There has got to be a better way to deal with abused and abandoned children in our communities.

Tasers and School Children

Tasers & School Children


Today’s Star Tribune article on St. Paul schools new policy on Taser use, (B2, James Walsh, St. Paul schools OK policy on Taser use, May 18, 2005) draws attention to the growing violence in our public schools. Teaching can be a dangerous profession for educators faced with unmanageable children or chaotic classroom environments.

Prozac, Ritalin, and a host of other psychotropic medications have taken the place of mental health counseling for children as young as six and seven years old. Behavior modification is now often a function of “if they took their meds.”

Conversations with many teachers about the severity of the mental health issues and explosive violence from nine and ten year old children (and high school students) make me wonder how long educators will continue to work in dangerous situations.

Has teaching becoming police work at half the salary?

I know many social workers that feel just as hopeless as teachers with dangerous students in chaotic classrooms do.

There is no safety net for many of the poor neglected and abused children they care for. There is no child psychiatrist for a sexually abused seven-year old, or for the starved and tortured six-year old. Go to school. Get well. Take these pills. We just don’t have a budget for the services you need.

As a Boomer growing up in good schools with cheap college and a straight path to success, I am appalled at the roadblocks set up for poor and abandoned children.

The data is alarmingly negative if you live in a foster home or are born into poverty (my book, Invisible Children, Preteen Mothers & Adolescent Felons and What We Can Do About It, www.invisiblechildren.org)

Who will speak for these children?

Those of us who know what it’s like to work with abused, neglected, and mentally ill children need to inform the people we live with about the reality that has shaped our schools, our jails, and our evermore dangerous city streets.

Being a hardworking quiet person is not working.

Neglect and abandonment appear to apply to educators and social workers as well as to children.

Unhappy Schools

A snapshot of our schools and community:

28% of the class at Minneapolis Roosevelt High school graduated last year. The Minneapolis school system had an overall 53% graduation rate.

Blaming teachers for failing schools is wrong. Teachers teach because they love learning and children. It is a political vote getter to blame educators for our larger institutional failures. The system needs to make learning possible. Politicians are missing the core issues. Public policy needs to change, not teachers.

129 African American men from Hennepin County enrolled in the University of Minnesota’s three largest colleges between 1994 to 1997 (African-American Men Project.)

About 15% of Minnesota students were threatened or injured with a weapon on school property last year. Nationally, in 2002, there were 659,000 violent crimes involving students at school, and 720,000 violent crimes away from school.

Almost 20% of Minnesota students carried a weapon on school property in 1995.

About 15% of Minnesota female students become pregnant before they are 18.

Almost 10% of Minnesota students attempted suicide in 1995.

Minnesota prisons have grown by over 10% per year for the last two years with signs of even greater growth next year.

Ratio of adult inmates in Minnesota State Prisons to corrections officers in 2004: 4.5 to 1.

Ranking of the United States staff to student ratio internationally this year:
we are 91st among the 189 UN member nations (there are only twenty other industrialized nations.)

Most of the 14 million people jailed each year are parents who leave children behind.

Most women in jail have two or more children and are often single parents. The women’s correction facility at Shakopee used to have a recidivism rate of 23% when public policy was on rehabilitation not retribution. Today Shakopee’s recidivism rate is the same as the rest of the nation (66%.)

In 2001, 8776 Minnesota juveniles were arrested for violent crimes. Wisconsin arrested 134 juveniles for murder in 2001.

Most jailed juveniles are following a father or brother into the criminal justice system. Once in the criminal justice system, juveniles learn from the tough hardened criminals what the rest of their lives are going to be like. Almost 20% of juveniles are tried as adults in the U.S. today.

Over 50% of the juveniles in the Juvenile Justice System have diagnosable mental illnesses. This figure probably holds true for children who pass through the Child Protection System.

The average middle class child starts school with a vocabulary of 2100 words. The average poor child starts school with a vocabulary of 600 words. As a guardian ad-Litem, I have come to know many children in the child protection system that can barely communicate at six or seven years old.

Educational and mental health services work to keep kids off the streets and out of jail. Productive member of our community always cost us less than criminals or child mothers.

Investing in early childhood programs and mental health services could actually save us money, and certainly make our streets safer, and our communities more pleasant to live in.

It’s not so much about money-- Minnesota’s 2001 GDP (gross domestic product) ranks greater than Austria, Saudi Arabia, Poland, Hong Kong, Denmark, and a hundred other nations.

So if it’s not money, what is it?

www.invisiblechildren.org

What we do to our children

What we do to our children they will do to society
Pliny the Elder

I met with State Senator Mee Moua recently. I am a guardian ad-Litem concerned with the twice-abused children I know through County Child Protection.

Senator Moua is the first State legislator to speak to me with a genuine interest in creating a public dialogue around Children’s mental health issues (especially for the millions of children reported to Child Protection Services each year.)


We agree that a significant part of the problem with failing schools is the big numbers of traumatized children being warehoused in classrooms.
Teachers are in the terrible position of being responsible for educating students and managing traumatized children at the same time.

Because it is a complicated issue with no simple answers, legislators avoid the topic and don’t provide useful solutions.

The public is quick to blame parents, immigrants, and teachers for school failure, but unable to grasp the seriousness of a million new cases of abused and neglected children entering American classrooms each year. Blaming mentally ill or drug addicted abusive parents is useless. Blaming children or immigrants is wrong.

Until we can get our minds wrapped around the inter-relatedness of child abuse, mental illness, education, crime and pregnancy, we will continue to be a nation of teenage pregnancies and young criminals.

By federal statute, children removed from their homes by Child Protection Services have suffered the trauma of having their lives in danger of imminent harm (or they are left in the home.) That is the law under which children are removed from their home (the Imminent Harm doctrine.)

In my guardian ad-Litem cases, most children removed from their homes by the county need counseling very badly and they do not receive it.

The terrible behaviors abused children develop to stay alive in the toxic environment of beatings, drugs, sex, and neglect, make them social outcasts and define them as mentally ill in their new life settings.

Children that have suffered severe or prolonged abuse need a counseling regimen that will be part of their life for a long time to overcome the trauma and asocial behaviors learned in their early years. How do we unteach violence, sexual behaviors, or illegal drug use taught to a seven-year-old?

Short term counseling for severely damaged children is just one more abandonment.
Can prescriptions of psychotropic drugs like Ritalin, Prozac, without commensurate mental health services take the place of professional mental health counseling and the teaching of life skills for a disturbed seven year old?

Too large a percentage of children in the Child Protection System are receiving serious doses of psychotropic medication and not nearly enough mental health services. This is not saving our communities any money. We pay for the institutionalization of these children for many years.

What can we as parents, citizens, educators, and spiritual people do to create awareness of the seriously troubled children are being “managed” with psychotropic medications and expected to “become normal” without the help of therapy?

At the very least, tell your legislator you are tired of full prisons, dangerous streets, and failing schools. Tell them that you support mental health services for children.


www.invisiblechildren.org