100 Years of Juvenile Justice
At the William Mitchell Law School today, I learned that Minnesota has been a genuine leader in Juvenile Justice in America for one hundred years.
DetailsView allAdoptionCASAChild DeathCrime and CourtsDavid StrandeducationFoster CareGrandparents & KinshipGuardian ad-LitemGunsHealth and Mental HealthInternational Child AbuseInvisible ChildrenKARA EventsKids At Risk Action (KARA)EventsLinks To AudioLinks To Helpful Orgslinks to videomass incarcerationMike Tikkanenmike tikkanen speakingOccasional AuthorsPolitics and FundingPublic PolicyRadio ShowsResourcesThe StatesvideoWonderful People
12 Year Old Wisconsin Girls Charged As Adults (what this says about justice in Wisconsin)
Wisconsin and 28 other states automatically place children in the adult criminal justice system. Nationally, 25% of american youth are charged as adults and over 30% of America’s youth are arrested before their 23rd birthday.
Details14 police calls to foster home led up to near-death
On the 49th call to the home, police removed the children into protective custody (only because the 7 year old was observed trying to kill the 5 year old). As I became involved in the case, the sex abuse of the older girl became apparent. The police were aware of the prostitution taking place on the premises, and it was very likely that the older child had been prostituted.
Details18 Month Old Dies After a Dozen Calls To Child Abuse Hotline
A 6-year-old boy whose battered body was found on the floor of a South Los Angeles home was the subject of roughly a dozen calls to Los Angeles County’s child abuse hotline alleging abuse or neglect, a county official briefed on the case told The Times on Friday.
Details
18 Months Old, Sexually Abused (allegedly) & Beaten To Death In Maplewood
Genisis is the 8th child murdered in the home by a caregiver since Eric Dean’s death in early 2013 and the 57th child to die of maltreatment since 2005.
The only positive is that the media and public attention absent (for decades) children murdered by their caregivers is now making front page news & driving the Governor to speak out and form a task force to study child protection issues.
Let’s hope those recommendations are enacted by the legislature and the Star Tribune (article on 18 month old Genisis Xiong death today) and other news media stay on top of child safety in our state.
Details20% of Western Australia Child Abuse is Sex Abuse
As a long time guardian ad-Litem, it always appeared that sex abuse was minimized or under-reported in the child abuse cases I worked on. Uncomfortable to to talk about and often difficult to prove.
DetailsA #ProtectChildrenToo Movement? (Thank You Safe Passage For Children of MN)
This morning’s ebrief from Safe Passage for Children of MN is spot on. Their legislative efforts to stop the practice of advance notice of child protection visits to perpetrators is crucial in ending child abuse. Putting perpetrators in the room with a child during the interview is traumatizing for the child and has a profound impact on what the child will say. Giving perpetrators prior notice of investigations allows them time to threaten and cohearse a child. As a long time CASA guardian ad Litem, this is all too familiar.
Most children are not aware of how wrong their abuse is – what happens at home is by definition normal. My youngest sexual abuse case was 2 years old.
DetailsA Civil Rights Issue?
The cold water pipe had frozen solid in the Minnesota winter & the landlord had turned the hot water heater to “scalding” to compensate for the absence of cold water.
Details
A Critical Look At Foster Care
There are a lot of injuries, a lot of abuse. The most significant thing is the psychological death of so many of these kids. Kids are being destroyed every day, destroyed by a government-funded system set out to help them.
DetailsA Finished Book
The book is finished. It just arrived from the publisher. Books are always neater and cleaner than the process that makes them. Hundreds of hours, stacks of paper, and dozens of edits. I’m genuinely embarrassed by some of the poorly edited pages that I sent to people to review and comment on what I had been writing.
DetailsA Free & Powerful Mental Health Resource For Minnesota Children
KARA has partnered with a leading mental health company, Praestan Health, to provide at risk youth free access to a digital and coaching mental health and wellbeing services for at-risk youth.
Portages is a powerful new tool for youth struggling with trauma and other mental health issues.
Homeless & LGBTQ youth, foster children, and youth in juvenile justice will be given preference for this project.
DetailsA Great Rally for Children In MN (Thanks Amy)
* Foster children are twice as likely as war veterans to develop PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder);
* 25% of U.S. youth in the Juvenile Justice System are tried as adults;
* 50-75% of U.S. youth in the Juvenile Justice System have a diagnosable mental illness;
* 25% of high school graduates in the United States are illiterate;
* Most states are growing prison spending much faster than higher education spending;
* firearms deaths of children in the U.S. are more than 10 times higher than all the other industrialized nations combined.
A Grim Truth About Big Pharma
Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter # 237 Michigan Lawsuit Uncovers Psychiatry’s Dark Secret: Psychiatric Drug-Induced Movement Disorders in Young Children by Ben Hansen – From the Spring 2007 newsletter of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology ( www.icspp.org). Last month the New York Times exposed yet another example of unethical marketing practices…
DetailsA Myth That Will Bring Down America
There is a myth about our public education system that has the potential of bringing down our nation. The myth is that the lack of funds does not plague America’s schools.
DetailsA Program Worth Repeating
Every state releases youth from foster care that are troubled and without the skills or resources to cope in the community. Few states think through the consequences of the importance of youth melding into the community to become healthy and productive citizens. Here’s one great example
DetailsA Rough Day in the News
Eight year old boy shot and killed his father and another man…police have asked that the boy be tried as an adult.
DetailsAbandoned, Abandoned Again Then Tasered – What’s Next For At Risk Youth?
A sheriff’s deputy zapped three children with a stun gun at an Illinois emergency youth shelter, threatening to sodomize one of them before choking a fourth child and throwing her in a closet, according to a federal civil-rights lawsuit.
DetailsAccording To The Numbers, Child Abuse In MN; Safe Passage For Children
The OLA report did confirm that Minnesota screens in only about 32% of reports of maltreatment compared to 62% for other states. We have a correspondingly lower rate for determining whether abuse or neglect did in fact occur. Does Minnesota simply do a better job of screening and investigating, or are we leaving too many abused children in harm’s way?
At the next step in the process, 70% of families screened in statewide are now diverted to a voluntary program called Family Assessment. In Hennepin County a Citizen’s Review Panel found that 75% of these families are not even offered services, and only 17% end up receiving them. So even when children finally get the attention of a child protection worker, they seldom get services. Is this how it works in all counties? We don’t know, because local agencies do not capture consistent information on what happens in Family Assessment cases.
Details
ACE Study, Crime & Ramsey County (reprinted from 2006)
ACE research shows a strong historical pattern of criminality in families of child delinquents. Using Cohen’s estimates, we calculate the multi-generational “multiplier effect” to be between $3.4 and $11.5 million. In these families, criminality is likely to grow exponentially.
DetailsAmerica The Beautiful (unless you’re born an at risk child)
Based on the study’s data, more than 80 percent of juveniles who enter the criminal justice system early in life have at some point belonged to a gang. Seventy percent of men and 40 percent of women have used a firearm. The average age of first gun use is 14. At any given time, 20 percent are incarcerated.
Unemployment is rampant: 71 percent of the men and 59 percent of the women are without jobs as adults. Of the 1,829 youths originally enrolled in the study, 119 have died, most of them violently — a death rate three to five times as high as the one for Cook County men in the same age group over all and four times as high as the one for women. In all, 130 have been shot, shot at, stabbed or otherwise violently attacked. As a group, they show high rates of post-traumatic stress, depression and other psychiatric disorders.
Details
America’s Adoption Issues (300 new stories & articles)
Every state is struggling to find forever homes for traumatized state ward children.
Aging out of foster care is painful (Misha’s video)
Here are 300 recent stories and articles about the fate of America’s state ward children;
All Adults Are The Protectors of All Children
DetailsAmerica’s Child Abuse Problem the worst record in the industrialized world (from Child Help)
*More than five children die every day as a result of child abuse.
Approximately 80% of children that die from abuse are under the age of 4.
It is estimated that between 50-60% of child fatalities due to maltreatment are not recorded as such on death certificates.
America’s Definition of Abuse
Child abuse redefines the way a child thinks and sees the world. Abused children have severely limited learning and coping skills. An abused child’s mental development has been arrested by an anxiety and fear that supercede the learning of other personal and social skills. Without personal and social skills, and a lessening of the anxieties and fears, Abused children fail at school, don’t make friends, and keep a terribly low self image.
DetailsAmerica’s Families (From Grief Speaks)
75% of children/adolescents in chemical dependency hospitals are from single-parent families. (Center for Disease Control, Atlanta, GA)
1 out of 5 children have a learning, emotional, or behavioral problem due to the family system changing. (National Center for Health Statistics)
More than one half of all youths incarcerated for criminal acts lived in one-parent families when they were children. (Children’s Defense Fund)
Nine million American children face risk factors that may hinder their ability to become healthy and productive adults. One in seven children deal with at least four of the risk factors, which include growing up in a single-parent household…The survey also indicated that children confronting several risk factors are more likely to experience problems with concentration, communication, and health. (1999 Kids Count Survey – Annie E. Casey Foundation)