On 11 September 1996, the leading newspaper in Washington, D.C., reported that a 23-month-old girl was picked up by the head and hurled across the room, then gagged with socks and duct tape and tossed into a closet while her father and his girlfriend ate their dinner. This infant had been systematically starved, tied up, burned against a radiator, and beaten.
The story did not make the front page.
Less than a week later, the United States Department of Health and Human Services reported that the national rate of child abuse and neglect had doubled and the rate of serious child injury had quadrupled in the past seven years.
That story didn't make page one, either.
In San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, Óscar Antonio Glores, 14, sniffs glue to ease the pain of ulcers in his throat caused by his work. Óscar earns money as a "flame thrower," spitting out a stream of burning fuel to entertain adults out for the evening. He can earn the equivalent of US$ 6 a night. He takes the money home to his mother and seven siblings. "Home" is under an oxcart. Óscar has been a flame-thrower since he was 10.
The inherent violence in child labor also has ceased to be breaking news.
In May 1996, 15-year-old Michael Velásquez was beaten and kicked in the head by police so that his eyes swelled shut. Michael lives around the Parque Concordia in Guatemala City, where he tries to pick up odd jobs in an area notorious for child prostitution, and sniffs solvents off rags to still his hunger. Michael's picture is on the cover of a report to the United Nations Committee on Torture. Palm Beach County in Florida removed him from foster care and returned him to a father who took him back to Guatemala, but who has since disappeared. The only thing that distinguishes Michael from the estimated 5,000 other street children in Guatemala is that he lived his first nine years in the U. S. and speaks English.
Seeds for an Epidemic
Abuse and violence, whether domestic, economically motivated, or applied as a wanton display of political authority, take their most brutal toll on the most defenseless. In our world, that often means children.
This shows up in the "social cleansing" of street children in Brazil, Guatemala, and Colombia, to name but a few places in the Americas. It shows up in the remorseless physical and sexual abuse of small children in the wealthy industrial countries, particularly the U.S. It shows up in burgeoning child pornography and "sexual tourism," a phenomenon that could not exist unless adults were willing to sell each other children for sexual use.
The emergence of societies that permit and sometimes encourage the brutalization of children is a phenomenon receiving increased global attention.
The World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, held last August in Stockholm, urged governments worldwide to criminalize their citizens' use of children for sex abroad as well as within their own borders. That previous April, in a seminar held in Brasília, some 450 government officials and representatives of international and nongovernmental organizations from the Western Hemisphere committed themselves to combatting the exploitation of children in terms of sexual tourism, pornography, poverty, the drug trade, and trafficking.
In 1993, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) at its annual Directing Council meeting, declared violence as a public health issue and set up a regional plan of action on violence and health in the Western Hemisphere. A year later, PAHO sponsored the Inter-American Conference on Society, Violence, and Health, where for the first time, heads of state, ministers, legislators, mayors, and high-ranking officials from international and nongovernmental organizations met face-to-face with economists, scientists, educators, social scientists, and health professionals to address issues such as the impact of economic and public policies in engendering violence, the cultural patterns that aggravate or moderate violent instincts, and the prospects for promoting tolerance.
In May 1996, the 190 member nations of the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that violence is a worldwide public health problem, not merely a matter of criminal justice or law enforcement.
At the International Conference on Prevention of Violence held in Cartagena, Colombia, in September 1996, PAHO Director Dr. George Alleyne identified poverty and social marginalization as "the basic underlying cause of much domestic violence," noting that ". . . it is not only distributive inequity or injustice in material terms" that breeds violence, but also "the inequity in terms of human-to-human relationships."
Children bear the brunt of this inequity. And increasingly, elected officials as well as private groups of ordinary citizens are turning their attention to the needs of the poorest, most at-risk children.
In Brazil alone, there are over 600 groups working to protect children's rights. In Rio de Janeiro, efforts are being made to establish nurseries for street children aged 6 or under. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso also has initiated an anti-child labor program by paying a monthly stipend to families whose poverty would otherwise force them to send their children to work full time.
The killing of street children is known as "private justice." The respectable citizens and law enforcement officials involved believe they are under assault from violent and dangerous juveniles and that they are acting to protect themselves and society at large.
Yet violence does not end with the commission of a single violent act. It often incites responses in self-defense. And in difficult economic situations, when competition replaces religious faith or family loyalty as the model of human life, those with the lowest prospects of winning often turn to violence and intimidation, which they perceive as competitive advantages.
Social critic Christopher Lasch observed a few years ago that modern conditions in the U.S. "have stabilized capitalism without solving any of its underlying problemsÑthe gap between wealth and poverty, the failure of purchasing power to keep pace with productivity, economic stagnation. [It] has kept social tensions from assuming political form, but it has not removed their source . . . those tensions increasingly find expression in crime and random violence . . . ."
Perhaps when societies were more strongly influenced by religiously derived prohibitions against the maltreatment of the weak, children were safer. Violence against children were relatively rare and reaped massive community reprisals. Today, public opinion does not always reflect the protection of children as a paramount value.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, decades of political killings have weakened the sense of outrage over criminal homicides, such as the "social cleansing" of street children, and people have become inured to the idea that crimes can be committed with impunity. In the wealthier countries of the Western Hemisphere, child abuse often is viewed as a social pathology of the inner cities, not as a priority concern affecting the entire nation.
This pervasive "disingenuousness of denial," says PAHO Director Dr. George Alleyne, defeats its own purpose. Instead of protecting our societies, it will make eventual confrontation with social violence even more inevitable.
Official statistics do not exist, but estimates by private groups indicate that there may be as many as 40 million street children in the Americas. The U.S. government estimates that there may be 300,000 child prostitutes in its population. A 1996 study done in Colombia revealed the existence of 1.5 million abused children in a population of 36 million.
To compound the problem, many pediatricians and physicians are reluctant to intervene in cases of domestic violence. The National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect estimated in 1993 that as many as one-third of all cases of abuse in the U.S. go unreported and undetected, even when health care professionals are involved in treating the physical trauma.
Turning the Tide
Yet there is hope. It is to be found in modest but effective interventions that can reshape the
world in which at-risk children and their parents live.
In the U.S., studies by the Yale Child Welfare Research Program, the Family Development Program in Syracuse, New York, and the Ounce of Prevention programs in Illinois have all demonstrated that intensive early childhood care for highly at-risk children changes their future lives. Parents are taught skills to defuse the frustration that can lead to physical abuse. Happier babies elicit more positive care from their parents, and children in these programs cost their communities much less than those who have to go through court, probation, supervision, and detention.
Interventions by the mother during pregnancy also can cut the vicious circle of abuse by helping to produce healthier babies. Infants born in less than optimal health--low birthweight, drug exposure in the womb, poor nourishment by the mother--experience more behavioral and health problems. In turn, infant behavior affects maternal care; irritable, difficult babies are more prone to abuse or neglect, or both.
In Great Britain and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, studies have shown that improved maternal nutrition and prenatal care throughout pregnancy not only increase birth weight, but have potentially long-lasting health outcomes for the infant, ranging from reduced susceptibility to hypertension and heart disease to less likelihood of diabetes.
But early intervention programs all too often remain the exception, not the rule.
Prenatal care and early post-natal visitation are cost-effective. The conundrum facing nations today is how to allocate the needed re-sources when there are so many competing contemporaneous demands on them. It is a battle between present needs and future savings.
And it is a battle with high stakes. Today's generation of abused and maltreated children, according to experts, can and probably will become the kind of violent adults who pose one of the most comprehensive threats to safety and health tomorrow.
At the 1994 PAHO violence conference, Peter Edelman, advisor to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, emphasized that finding a cure to violence "is far more complex than discovering a vaccine." Participants agreed that the work of prevention, as well as contributions from all sectors of society, are crucial.
Facing the issues of equity and social integration is the starting point. The conference identified inequality and
social injustice as "undermining democracy and society's well-being, generating frustration, marginalizing populations, and perpetuating conflict."
Violence, according to the conference's formal declaration ". . . creates fear, destroys family structure, curtails the autonomy of individuals, restrains freedom of action, and discourages interpersonal solidarity." Participants agreed that the burgeoning culture of violence prevalent today throughout the Americas will only be transcended by the development of strong civic societies.
One of the most fundamental features of any strong civic society is the protection it extends to its weakest and most vulnerable members. Children--particularly children at risk of physical abuse--are surely among the most weak and vulnerable.
Economic growth and prosperity are obviously not enough to reduce violence against children. If the occurrence of child abuse and neglect can double in seven years in a wealthy nation like the U.S., other countries are coming to realize that economic achievement alone will not make their societies safe places to live. What is needed is much more, according to experts: a rebirth of the sense of caring, a refocusing of the glorification of violence in movies and the media, improved education, stiffer penalties for violent acts, and a sustained scientific research effort into the causes of violence and the best methods to prevent it.
Anita Jensen is a freelance writer who lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She was a speechwriter and legislative assistant to former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell.
