My Thoughts on Child Maltreatment

In looking at statistics and information on child maltreatment in the home, it is obvious to see that child abuse is an issue in which has gotten worse in the last five to ten years. While looking at the first graph on the page that I posted off of childhelp.org it shows the amount of youth death due to neglect and abuse over the past twelve years. It shows the graph going up more than two million children in the last twelve years. This, in my opinion is jaw dropping. One would assume that in time these instances would lessen. But it seems that even though these situations are being talked about, nothing is being done to stop them.

I believe a large reasoning for this is the lack of respect and well-paid jobs for helping professions. Children are our future, as cheesy as that sounds, and to have so many caught in the middle of violent relationships and living in unsafe environments we are simply setting the next generation up for failure. As Albert Bandura showed through modeling, it is hard to break habits that were learned at a young age in your home life, and if a child can make it through poor treatment, it does not mean that they will not continue the pattern and possibly abuse or neglect their children when they grow up. In my opinion the only way to break the cycle is to stop child abuse at the source. And that is why I believe those in the helping professions should be valued and placed in a higher standing than they are at this time.

Another part of the information I posted from childhelp.org is a graph of different types of abuse. The majority of this abuse is neglect, which takes up almost eighty percent of the diagram. Neglect can mean a number of things, whether it be psychical neglect such as not feeding your child or having them get a good amount of sleep, or emotionally neglecting a child which can be just as damaging. The rest of the graph is filled with abuse, physical, sexual and emotional. Each, again, is extremely damaging to the child and can result in serious and long-term issues.

I feel as though seeing these statistics should shock our country into action, but it hasn’t seemed to. In my opinion stopping the mistreatment of children should be a top priority in our government. 
-Jordan Crawford