"Dozens gathered to light candles and remember the many victims of child abuse. It was also a night to honor victims who survived like Adam Carbajal."
In the
first installment of this series, we discussed the use of National Child Abuse
Awareness Month as an excuse to hold a fundraiser. While I believe this to be the true reason of
this month long celebration, I think it
is important to build upon this concept and discuss how they actually sucker
these people into giving their money or getting involved. In order to do this, I have created a list of
the most common elements of the hundreds of news stories that will be
published this month, devoted to this
Awareness subject, and will continue to add to this list all month long as new
elements pop up. In creating this list,
I was able to formulate a kind of arm chair behavioral profile of the typical
system suck. So I will begin this
segment with the following question:
What is a
System Suck?
The simple
answer to this question is this: A
system suck is one who profits in one way or another from, or makes their
living from the legal kidnapping of your children. There are two types, although both types can
be present in one person. One does it
for the money, the other does it to make themselves feel important. A sort of self gratification.
The more
complex answer is one who sells their soul to the child protective industry for
money or for self gratification purposes.
In that, these people are very devoted to their cause. In fact, I think that many of them actually
believe the lies that they preach, with the problem being that very few base
their beliefs or understandings of the issues on truth or facts. Most are sold on a line of bullshit, buy it
hook line and sinker and loudly preach that which is totally blown out of
proportion, skewed to the horrific, and reinforces the one size fit's all
nature of the Child Abuse and Neglect labels.
There are
two ways that they do this. The first is
through the presentation of the wrong statistical data, including preaching the
number of calls to the child abuse hotline or the number of reports that were
investigated last year, while failing to tell you that most of these calls or
investigated reports did not result in confirmed findings of abuse or neglect,
and failing to report how many cases actually were confirmed. This is a form of misdirection, lies by
omission, whatever you want to call it.
The other
thing that they don't tell you is that every case is different in both intent
and severity. For example, the mom who
slaps her teenager in the face for telling her to go and f*** herself would be
included on the same list where a sicko beat a newborn to within an inch of
their life because he/she wouldn't stop crying.
So this is by no means an accurate portrayal of the child abuse issue. But it does create a sense of urgency in the
normal people, who believe that thousands upon thousands of kids in their
community are severely abused by monsters among us.
"But
the alarming trend continues across the country, she says costing society
nearly $104 billion a year for health and mental health services and
correctional activities." - and
even more when you take into account Child Abuse Propaganda Month fundraising
activities.
This tends
to make the problem appear worse than it actually is. Then again the smaller numbers don't provide
as much of an impact.
The second
way that they blow things out of proportion is with the gut wrenching horror
story, detailing some horrific case of sickening child abuse, triggering some
emotional response in or painting a picture in the uneducated mind of the
normal human of some extremely rare and severe abuse case, that simply pops
into their heads whenever they hear the words.
Now I'm not saying that these things don't happen, just that they like to present the most extreme cases, thus leading the normal person to think that all cases are as extreme.
"When
he was taken away from his parents, he grabbed just one thing: his Nintendo DS.
Sam
was removed from a home with no running water, no electricity and mold growing
in the refrigerator. He arrived at Calvary Home for Children in Anderson just
days before Thanksgiving."
"After
nearly three years, the little girl’s name still stands out among those who
can’t forget her, the little girl who was a victim of what Chandler police
detectives described as the worse case of fatal child abuse they had ever
seen."
Morgan
County District Attorney Scott Anders talked about prosecuting women who give
birth to children with illegal drugs in their system.
In fact,
the deeper I dig into this particular topic, the more convinced I am that
truest System Sucks are emotion junkies who love sitting around the campfire
telling child abuse stories. I can
attest to this further based on my experience in a couple of these anti child
abuse Facebook groups, where they share and discuss news stories, all
testifying publically to what they would do if that was their kid or what they
would like to see done to the parents.
Both of
these examples, however only tell a part of the story, I'm only stating this now for the sake of
explanation, as it will be further explored later, but... The battle against child abuse has become an epic battle of good against evil. We can't have a good child abuse story without the
tales mighty heroes who ride in on their shiny high horses, preaching all their
self-righteous glory to get involved and help save the children!
"The
volunteers go to court with children that have been removed from
their homes as a result of abuse or neglect, and they present to the court what
is in their best interest," East Texas CASA board president Kristen
Ishihara said.
“To
the world you might be just one person, but to one person you might be the
world.” These words from an unknown source reflect my deepest feelings about
CASA: A Voice for Children.
Now to be
fair, I will state that a few journalists who write theses articles that I am
researching on the topic of Child Abuse Prevention Month, do prefer to use the
correct information, but they really are few and far between. Most do not.
Most are going for the gut reaction as this is how they're going to
capture your attention, warm your heart, play the sympathy card and make you
feel important as if you're doing more for kids than lining the pockets of the
professional system sucks.
