This is a notion that has been written
about largely in academic presses. A recent book by the English
academic, Nigel Parton, who has written extensively on child protection issues
in the UK has raised the subject again. The book is worth a read, but in
particular is the final chapter which brings together how government policies
can, in and of themselves, act as forms of child abuse - or at least as the social determinant of maltreatment.
Parton and others have noted that, as
economies worsen, so do the rates of child maltreatment. The pressures on the
poorer populations, those facing greater levels of marginal and challenging
existence, will face extraordinary pressures that connect to maltreatment.
Thus, government policies that make social security weaker, access to health
care more difficult, reduce access to reasonably paying jobs are instigators of
the social determinants of child abuse. Yet, in this world of renewed political
conservatism, the answer is found in the belief that these people need to take
responsibility for themselves and manage their lives better.
As the economic gap between the advantaged
and the disadvantaged grows, the ability of the lower economic groups of people
to just survive is a world of strain. As people like the Koch brothers pressure for policies that increase their advantage, there are direct costs to society at the other end.
There are other government policies that
also are forms of child abuse. Consider policies that place parents in jail for
a variety of minor crimes that are associated with economic survival. Consider
three strike laws. Consider the utter failure of the war on drugs and the large
numbers of low level dealers and users incarcerated. Consider minimum mandatory
sentences that keep parents and economic family supporters in jail longer. Also
consider the new law in Tennessee which jails a women who has used substances
in a pregnancy.
The governments who drive these policies
are done so by ideology, not science. It is known that increased rates of
incarceration and longer sentences do not make neighborhoods safer. Yet,
playing to ideology leads to ignoring science and doing it anyway. As Parton
notes, when economic policy punishes the poorer classes through unemployment
and restricted social service benefits, it is their neighborhoods that get more
dangerous.
Child protection is mainly an activity that
has the poorer or economically challenged populations at their doors more so
than other groups. Most forms of child maltreatment are not from the more
economically advantaged sectors, with the exception of sexual abuse which is
more spread through the population.
Parton and others also note that child
maltreatment is not just at the hands of family and that many others can
threaten a child – such as institutional abuse as seen through the Catholic
Church, the Boy Scouts and cases where the image of the abuser has caused a
blindness to the behavior (such as Rolph Harris and Jimmy Savile).
This should cause us to think about the
role that our institutions play in child maltreatment – government through its
social policies and other institutions through their policies as well as the blind
eyes to the behaviors of the
powerful. The highly influential and very
rich who press government to engage in policies that are very much to their
benefit, and at the cost of the lower classes, should also be thought of as
child maltreaters through their approaches that create direct harm. When a
company believes that its profits should not be reduced for a higher minimum
wage, it creates further pressures in lower classes which is a further social
determinant of child maltreatment.
This is not a polemic against profit and
corporations. To the contrary, vibrant economies do reduce rates of
maltreatment. It is a case against the “greed” that believes the income gap
growing is justified regardless of the costs to others and the costs to
children. This is not a socialist manifesto but rather a democratic one where
the rights of all really do matter.
It is also worth noting from Parton’s book
that the majority of cases of maltreatment are not known to child protection
services. Child maltreatment may be a much more common form of parenting than
we are prepared to acknowledge. As he
states on p. 182 of the book, referring to UK data:
“…only a small
proportion of abuse ever becomes known to official agencies and is therefore
included in official statistics. The research also established that in 22.9% of
cases where a young person aged 11-17 was physically hurt by a parent or
guardian, nobody else knew about it, as with 34% of cases of sexual assault by
an adult and 82.7% of cases of sexual assault by a peer.”
Of course, this also tells us that there
are risks for children that are very real outside of the family which says
something about the real behavioral values of society. Peers are a major source
of maltreatment but one has to ask where did that value come from. In far too
many cases, they reflect what has existed in the family.
Parton also goes on to point out how much
of the violence that occurs to children, from a parent or guardian or from a
peer, is initiated by males. This is not to say that a female cannot and does
not initiate violence, only that males continue to be the major source. Despite
the myriad of social and public health marketing, we continue to fail to alter
gender based violence. Very concerning indeed.
