As with many of our nation’s most maddening and perplexing social problems, one hardly knows how to fathom the egregious wrongs that occur when a child is abused. Physically, mentally, sexually, neglectfully. Beaten, demeaned, raped, deprived.
So pervasive is the problem of child abuse, so multi-pronged are its causes and effects, that the first tendencies are to declare it unsolvable, to deny its existence and to turn our heads. Even after decades of raised awareness about what use to be an unspoken-of crime, our society too often takes the easiest way out.
Fortunately, as our Lisa Trigg reported to you in last Sunday’s Tribune-Star, local police and local workers in the Indiana Department of Child Services — commonly known as DCS — show every evidence that they are working together with mutual professional respect in our community to help the victims of abuse and curb the occurrence of this crime against humanity. As Terre Haute Police Detective Rick Decker said: “What’s nice about working with DCS,” he said of its director, Pamela Connelly, and her staff, “is I can work on the criminal end of it, and know that DCS will take care of the other end of it. We have an excellent working relationship with DCS.”
That approach would seem to deal with the crime and punishment, but also the personal damage to both victim and victimizer.
Child abuse seems often to be generational: Parents who were abused as children themselves can become abusers. A goal, we are sure, is to break the cycle — to keep the victim from becoming an abuser and, if possible, to keep the perpetrator from repeating the crime, to punish and reform the offender and re-orient the victim to see that a life of abuse is abnormal and avoidable. And that there is recovery.
That, we are sure, is very hard work at both the police and social agency levels. The work must be discouraging in its daily recurrence that would shock the rest of us if we encountered it just once in lifetime. Yet, Decker said the reason he doesn’t get burned out is “that these kids are true victims.”
Our community is well-served by police and social agencies that are so attuned to child abuse and that are working hard to reduce its effects.
It also is well-served by several nonprofit agencies that deal with the child abuse issue, preventatively, as a specialist in the topic addresses in a letter in today’s Readers’ Forum.
April was Child Abuse Prevention Month, but it is a problem every month — weekends, holidays and vacations. It demands our community’s continued attention, awareness and action.
And action is a legal requirement — yes, requirement. Any Indiana resident who knows or suspects that a child is being abused must report it to police or to a hotline: 1-800-800-5556.
No matter the causes that lead to child abuse — drug use, alcoholism, lack of parenting skills, poor examples, unemployment, depression — none can be seen as justifiable excuses.
These are valuable young lives that are being damaged, or worse, wasted.
We can’t turn our heads.
Opinion
EDITORIAL: Fight against child abuse demands ongoing attention
Collaboration best way to help victims
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