OUR CHILDREN’S SAFETY

This is not a posting about race (!) I know that seems strange, but there are many ways in which people are oppressed outside of the context of race. From my work I know that much of what we deal with in criminal justice is a result of the violence that women and children experience in their homes or at the hands of family, loved ones and other intimates. There were two stories in the news recently which caused me to loose some sleep. Both were horrific.

The first story came out of California upon the arrest of a school teacher for sexual abuse of his students (some of whome were about ten years old).  Evidently, this teacher was reading pornography and recreating the images he saw with his students! They found photos of little girls bound and blind folded for example. many of the other details were just too gross to include here. The teacher had been at the school for years. Shortly after his arrest, another teacher at the same school was fired for inappropriately touching students. How did this go on for as long as it did? Maybe it was because the children came from a poor Latino community (oh wait! did race just pop in?), or maybe it was just that they were poor or maybe its just because they were children that no one cared. Its hard to put your finger on that. The school board ended up taking all teachers and staff out of the school, probably a good decision, but that in itself caused massive disruption. Ultimately though, what is going to happen to the scores of children these men abused over the years. And even the ones we know of..how do you  give a child her innocence back. You cannot. Will we be just as interested in helping those children become whole as we will be in penalizing the offenders? Not too much reason to be hopeful there as we are woefully underfunded when it comes to helping children of abuse. No doubt we’ll be seeing many of those children in the years to come when they start matriculating through the criminal justice system. Perhaps if we paid our teachers a decent salary and hired people who actually could teach that would also help.

The other story was the death of the Powell boys at the hands of their homicidal father. Bad’ enough he killed the mom; perhaps if he had been treated as a suspicious black dad the kids would still be alive. Ooops did race slip in again?! Suspicious black dads have to come to the courthouse or child protective services and see their kids under the watchful eye of some social worker. But, unfortunately for the Powell kids, the father who was suspected of killing their mother, the father who lived in a home where child pornography had been found, this father was allowed to see his kids in his own home. The 911 tapes are even more heartbreaking as the police kept telling the social worker what she was reporting was not serious enough to get  priority attention. Ten minutes later that homicidal father blew himself and his kids up.

We are one of the most developed nations in the world. And yet abuse, physical, sexual and emotional, or our children continues at unprecedented levels. All children, ours as well as the ones throughout the world, deserve to be able to run and play and live free  and secure against abuse.  When will we develop to the place this can happen? When we start raising boys to understand that touching and hitting is not acceptable; when we start holding men accountable for violence; when we start taking the lives of girls, women and all children seriously, that’s when it will start to happen.

… just something I was thinking about …