Unfortunately, part of our daily reality is that sometimes parents, relatives, guardians, and other legal custodians perpetrate tremendously offensive acts against children in the form of child abuse. The child abuse can range from physical abuse of children (including sexual abuse of children) to creating environments that are unhealthful or downright dangerous for children to live within.
The following list of child abuse situations is not all-inclusive but represents some of the most common circumstances that bring normal people to be sad, angry, frustrated, and the like all at once:
- Physical abuse – to include physical injuries like bruises, burns, cuts, broken bones or other injuries which typically occur repeatedly.
- Sexual abuse – to include sexual contact or more significant sexual conduct with a child. It may include child pornography, prostitution, or others forms of sexual abuse.
- Malnourishment – to include a failure of a parent or parents to appropriate feed and provide nourishment for the children to allow them to functional normally physically, mentally, emotionally or any combination thereof. It is also referred to as neglect.
- Neglect – to include situations where the parents or guardians place the children in situations where there is substantial risk of harm. Examples would include lack of appropriate food, clothing, shelter, medical treatment, appropriate supervision for age, among many others.
- Emotional abuse – to include an ongoing pattern of parental behavior against a child which causes them to suffer from severe depression, anxiety, underdeveloped behaviors for age, and other types of significant emotional disturbances or lack of emotional or mental development.
Sadly, we see stories every single day where children are left in vehicles while some parent goes to work, gamble, or use drugs. We see stories of children and families left living in hazardous or otherwise unhealthful conditions. We see stories of children used to steal, panhandle, as drug couriers, and so much worse. We see stories of children who are systematically beaten or sexually assaulted.
Situations like these require the involvement of the police, child protection services (CPS), and often other agencies to be addressed effectively and remove the children from these caretakers. They will be placed with another loving parent or other loving guardian who can, hopefully, get this children on the path of normalcy. Those tasks aren’t always easy for these authorities, particularly when false allegations of such conduct detailed above are too often part of a divorce or custody process. Every second wasted investing a false allegation against an innocent parent is a second not spent helping a child who is truly in need of intervention.
