Sensationalizing child deaths through the court process does little to help end child abuse

Sensationalizing child deaths through the court process does little to help end child abuse

This article was written by a system suck. I agree with the headline.

The Casey Anthony trial has captivated our nation like so many high profile cases in the past, but at the end of the day these types of trials seem to do more harm than good for the efforts of child abuse prevention across America.

Agreed.

Despite intense public and media scrutiny of cases such as Susan Smith in 1994, JonBenet Ramsey in 1996, Andrea Yates in 2001 and Baby Gabriel in 2009, the numbers of child deaths from abuse keep rising. According to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), more than 3.3 million reports of child abuse are made every year, or about one every 10 seconds. The 2009 Child Maltreatment report from HHS estimates that 1,770 child abuse deaths occurred in 2009, or five per day. This number has been increasing for the past five years. Child abuse occurs at every socioeconomic level, across ethnic and cultural lines, within all religions and at all levels of education. Child abuse is an epidemic and brutal deaths happen every day.

Now the above paragraph, if you hadn't noticed, is where they go all system-sucky on us. And you thought it was going to be a good article too.

Lets examine the stated facts. The article claims that there were 3.3 million reports of child abuse. Fine. But that doesn't mean that there were 3.3 million substantiated cases of child abuse then goes off to make a big deal about some other bullshit. But I know where this author got these numbers too. In fact, according to the statistics provided to us by the US Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families...

How many allegations of maltreatment were reported and received an investigation or assessment for abuse and neglect?

During Federal fiscal year 2009, an estimated 3.3 million referrals, involving the alleged maltreatment of approximately 6.0 million children, were received by CPS agencies. Of these referrals, 61.9 percent were screened in for a response by CPS agencies.

■ One-quarter of the CPS responses determined at least one child who was found to be a victim of abuse and neglect with the following report dispositions: 22.1 percent substantiated, 1.3 percent indicated, and 0.5 percent alternative response victim.

■ Three-quarters of the CPS responses determined that the child was not a victim of maltreatment with the following dispositions: 64.3 percent unsubstantiated, 8.7 percent alternative response nonvictim, 1.6 percent closed with no finding, 1.3 percent “other,” 0.1 percent intentionally false, and 0.2 percent unknown.

Child Maltreatment 2009

Summary vii

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cm09/cm09.pdf

So as you can see, only a fraction of the 3.3 million said reports were substantiated. And approximately 38.1% of these 33 million reports didn't even get an investigation, and of the ones that did get investigated only 22.1% of them were substantiated.

Do the math.

Therefore what we have here is either some armchair expert on child abuse trying to pretend to be knowledgeable and save the world in the midst of the Casey Anthony Trial, (which I couldn't care less about FYI), or a blatant attempt to fluff the numbers in the minds of the sheeple so that the problem of child abuse appears much worse than it actually is and using an extreme case that the whole world has been obsessed with for the last 33 days as an example of the norm.