Child Abuse Awareness

April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. One objective is to raise awareness of child abuse issues. Certainly this includes instilling fear in children to promote one’s ego or enforce one’s authority. But doesn’t instilling fear in a child to promote one’s political agenda have the same detrimental effect?

Take for example the incident a few weeks ago when a number of young children were driven to Dianne Feinstein office to persuade her to vote in favor of the Green New Deal. Most of the media attention was on the Senator trying to dodge the questions with little notice to the state of the children. They were afraid and panicky – and they didn’t get that way on their own. It likely came from parents more concerned about the environment than children’s immediate mental health and wellbeing.

One young girl says, “We have come to a point where our earth is dying!” Isn’t planting an idea like that in a child’s mind and encouraging it to grow also a form of abuse?

 A similar situation arises from pictures of polar bears. The Weather Channel headline reads: “Heartbreaking Photos Show Stranded Polar Bears Floating on Ice.” A quote from an Italian photographer (not a scientist) follows: “I believe the survival of this species on high arctic islands is strictly related to sea ice," although he “actually found more bears than he expected.”

The fact is that polar bears are at home in and around water. “Polar bears are pretty strong swimmers – probably the strongest of all the land-based predators. They will spend much of their time in swimming and thus they are sometimes referred to as marine mammals.” Most such pictures show them on one of many ice floes looking stranded, but they are able to swim 60 to 70 miles in open water. “The longest distance covered by any polar bear in swimming is about 427 miles…. She swam for up to 9 days continuously through the Beaufort Sea...” Stranded, indeed!

Another source questions the fuss about them being endangered when the “polar bear populations have been increasing overall since the 1970s.” The fuss, of course, is that polar bears are an example of charismatic macro-fauna. They look sweet and cuddly (from a distance) and, like orphan children in those charity solicitations, easily tug at our hearts, encouraging us to turn off our critical thinking. This effect is strong on children who can put pressure on their parents to support various causes. Isn’t such manipulation also abuse?

Finally, school shootings are a terrible blight on the country, but does that justify the number of children who are scared to go to school? The LA Times refers to the “prevalence of school shootings,” as schools lock doors, arm teachers, conduct drills and come up with all kinds of countermeasures to what is really a fairly rare event – despite anxious news coverage. Meanwhile politicians play on the fear to renew calls for additional gun restrictions.

There are over 132,000 schools in the US with about 55 million students.

The average number of school shootings per year since 2000 (including last year, a statistical anomaly) has been 36.6 resulting in about 20.2 deaths per year (not all students) according to the CDC. They add that among youth aged 5-18, “between 1% and 2% of [homicide] deaths happen on school grounds or on the way to or from school.”

The full CDC report (Table 6: Number of deaths from selected causes, by age: United States, 2016) gives more information. The age breaks in the table are different, stopping at 14 rather than 18, but it allows for a reasonable estimate of deaths from other causes to compare to the 20.2 shown above: Flu, 356; Motor Vehicle Accidents, 1455; Accidental discharge of firearms, 74; Accidental drowning and submersion, 708.

The chance of a child being killed in any other situation is 50 to 100 times greater than by a firearm in school, at a school activity or traveling to or from school. Many other threats are also greater. Yet this is what we scare our kids about. Maybe it’s time to start ignoring the theatrics of the news media and teach our children to exercise some critical thinking and perspective.

Maybe also it’s time to extend the definition of child abuse to include terrifying children, intentionally or unintentionally, with unreasonable fear in order to push political agendas.