When Madelyne Toogood was taped beating her daughter in an Indiana parking lot in September, the recording was played on heavy rotation on news shows across the country. The tape was disturbing, no question about it. It showed a 29-year-old woman savagely beating a four-year-old in a public place. The tape showed no one interfering. It showed a child defenseless against the violent actions of her mother in a public shopping area in America.
Because the situation was made public, questions were raised about child abuse in America and how it is handled. Experts were asked, people were interested and seemed to ponder the issue. That lasted for about a week. Then, the media directed the public’s attention to another story that was more timely or deemed more important.
People forgot and moved on.
Fast forward to this week. A seven-year-old boy’s remains were found mummified in a plastic storage container in the basement of a Newark, N.J., home. The boy’s two brothers were also found in the basement. They were starving and living in an environment not fit for any living being. New Jersey’s Division of Youth and Family Services had received 10 complaints about the family during the past 10 years, yet nothing changed. The children were burned, starved and abused.
The media jumped all over the story. CNN, NBC, CBS, any and every news channel had the story included in its broadcast. Much like in September, child abuse is brought to light. The public is shocked, lines of communication are opened and people are seemingly doing things to change the way “the system” works.
New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey is proposing steps that could help limit a situation like this from happening again. Fantastic! Things need to be changed. It’s just sad that things are being inspected and changed in New Jersey when all 50 states, including Oregon, have problems with this issue.
The Child Welfare League of America has statistics from state to state on child abuse. When comparing New Jersey and Oregon on the issue of child abuse, some interesting figures are produced. In 1999, 13.6 per every 1,000 children in the state of Oregon were identified as abused or neglected. The same year in New Jersey, 4.6 per 1,000 children were identified as abused or neglected. What does that mean? It means that Oregon’s child abuse problem is larger than New Jersey’s. Thanks to the media attention, the main difference is that New Jersey is getting a re-evaluation on how abuse cases are handled, and things will maybe improve.
Too bad for Florida, the home state of the man who was recently convicted for locking his 8-year-old stepdaughter in the closet and starving her until she weighed only 25 pounds. Too bad for most states that don’t have the funding to cover the costs associated with hiring and maintaining social workers to check that individual cases of abuse are fully realized and corrected. Too bad federal funding of social programs isn’t a priority for our government. Until the country comes to the realization that the system that let down thousands of abused children needs to be changed nationally as well as locally, horror stories like these will continue to roll out of towns across America. Until fixing this problem becomes a national priority, the fact will remain that child abuse continues to be a problem that our society mostly ignores.
America needs to realize that horrible acts of child abuse and neglect occur everyday in every city in the country. They’re not rare events and they don’t just occur in places like New Jersey and Indiana. Child abuse in America is a problem. If people need to be shocked into realizing that, they need to look at the statistics, not their televisions.