Child Abuse and Neglect Essay

Almost one in every hundred children gets abused in the United States, and it happens every day. Child abuse is when a child is physically, sexually, emotionally, and mentally abused. Sexual exploitation, neglect, abandonment, and maltreatment are also forms of abuse. Physical abuse includes but not limited to, throwing kicking, burning, or cutting a child. Striking them with a closed fist; shaking them when they are under the age of three, interfering with their breathing, threatening them with a deadly weapon, or doing any other act that is likely to give the child bodily harm and other minor to major injuries to their health, welfare, and safety. Sexual abuse is committing or allowing to be committed to any sexual offense against a child as defined in the criminal code and sexual exploitations when a child is prostituted, being filming in pornographic acts, or being a part of a live action of pornographic acts. Neglect and maltreatment is when the child is not provided with an ade quate amount of food, shelter, clothing, supervision, or healthcare. Abandonment is when a child is deserted by their guardian, left without food, water, shelter, clothing, hygiene, and medical healthcare, or when the guardian is just not doing things they are supposed to do for a child, they relieve themselves from their duties. We are all mandatory reporters. Meaning that any citizen that sees anything suspicious should report, or if you know of a child being abused and don’t report, you are just as guilty. Almost five children die every day as a result of child abuse. Child abuse is no doubt a hidden epidemic in our society today. Ninety percent of child sexual abuse victims know the perpetrators in some way; sixty-eight percent are abused by family members. Child abuse also happens no matter how rich or poor you are, doesn’t matter what color you are, and it doesn’t matter how smart or dumb you are. Thirty percent of women in prison were abused as children, and sixty percent of people in drug rehabilitation centers report being abused or neglected as a child, and are 3.8 times more likely to develop drug addictions. About thirty percent of  abused and neglected as children will continue the cycle with their children as well. Eighty percent of twenty-one year olds that were abused as children met at least one criteria for a psychological disorder. Also abused children are twenty-five percent more likely to experience teen pregnancy. I think child abuse is inclining locally because drugs are becoming more known in younger generations, and their also experimenting sexually earlier, and not being safe about which leads to more teen pregnancies. Some of the reasons child abuse occurs in the first place is because of young parents and drugs/alcohol. So if the rate at which those things or more rapidly happening, and at a younger age, the child abuse rate is bound to incline. It doesn’t help that we are a bad drug city and we have one of the highest count of child abuse cases in our city. One way to help stop and prevent child abuse is to recognize it, look for the signs and report it. Make your children aware of sexual abuse, teach them the proper names, and tell them that if anyone tries to engage with them in a way that their private parts are involved, to tell their â€Å"support person†. Teach young parents how to take care of their children before they leave the hospital. Never discipline children when your anger is out of control, ever leave your children unattended. Listen and believe them. If you see child abuse happening, stop it, don’t let it happen. To help end abuse, first you should learn how to recognize it in the first place. Child abuse will never truly come to an end, but there are ways to make sure it happens less. CPS needs to better investigate into cases. If you’ve ever read â€Å"the child called it† then you would know that if they go to the house and everything checks out, they believe it. I think they should go deeper into the investigation, if that means surveillance outside their house for a week then so be it. CPS also needs to better background check their own foster parents. I saw on the news a while back that CPS supervisor was abusing the kids she was fostering. CPS is supposed to be a safe haven for kids to go, yet they go to further get abused. I myself was in foster care, and my â€Å"parents† weren’t the nicest. It’s hard to honestly say anything about improving â€Å"families† considering we aren’t in there every day life, and we may not even know them. How we can best help families is to  make child abuse awareness more public and known, and if we come across a family that has this problem, then intervene. I couldn’t find much on factors of abuse being â€Å"heredity†, but what I could find is that it is not heredity. What generally happens is the child grows up with the type of abuse they know, and because that’s all they know, that’s how they express their â€Å"love† to their child. Not all abused grow up to do the same to their children, I assume the ones most mentally scarred and got psychological problems from it, grow up to do the same. I don’t think that our society is necessarily feeding the abuse to anybody. I don’t really know who would, that’s a touchy subject in the first place. Although I can infer that all of the drug, drinking, partying, and sexual innuendo that is seen everywhere is what is feeding to a worse environment for our society. Drugs, alcohol, and partying is such a huge and wide topic everywhere you go in our society, because of that, it’s more common. Although no one can honestly end child abuse, it is something that we can make more known so that all the poor children that are dying and suffering everyday can also be loved and saved. Learn the signs, report anything unusual.