KARA has been reporting and speaking on critical issues impacting abused and neglected children for many years.
This article submitted by long time CASA guardian ad Litem Mike Tikkanen
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Today, Jerry Lee Curry is going to prison after proving that he could torture children in a wealthy progressive city for a decade right under our noses.
A combination of about 100 police calls and child abuse reports were made to his home where his 3 young girls were beaten, raped, impregnated and tortured not far from where I live.
Their meth head father will spend years in prison but the girls have suffered and will continue to suffer far worse pain for decades to come. Trauma is real and it lasts forever.
It’s as pointless and wrong to blame the neighbors, police, social workers and other people involved as it is to expect that the years long rape and torturing of children won’t happen again or isn’t happening here right now in many other homes (remember Eric Dean, Kendrea Johnson & Dennis Jergens).
After all, neighbors said things, the police and social workers came again and again. Nothing changed for the poor brutally beaten and raped girls.
Blame lays with us. We are (and should acknowledge) a community that supports the care and safety of other people’s children only so much. There is a limit to our largesse and that we ignore, understate and obfuscate issues painful to us. These girls lived in a meth house where their bodies were sold for drugs when they were children.
As a long time CASA guardian ad Litem, I have seen years long rape, starvation and torturing of children and know that the only time the community becomes aware is when the child dies horrifically or escapes to tell the story.
Only a handful of people know the stories of the fifty children I helped remove from homes like Jerry Lee Curry’s home.
No one knows the life stories of those children or where they are today. We do know that 80% of children aging out of foster care lead dysfunctional lives, that 37% of American children are reported to child protective services by their 18th birthday and that daycare, foster care, adoptive families, mental health services and many other child friendly initiatives need study, support and resources.
There is no escaping the broken homes, broken children, failing schools, unsafe communities and untold suffering we continue to
hide and hide from until we begin to care more about other people’s children.
“What we do to our children they will do to our society” Pliny the Elder 2000 years ago