Innocence Destroyed

I write virtually every day. Sometimes I write about politics, sometimes social issues and sometimes just a rant about poor customer service or some other issue that;s on my mind. . I also write about children at risk and they are the most difficult articles to write. I find it difficult to control my anger as I try to speak out about what we are doing and are allowing to happen to our children.

Every ytear in North America, more than five children a day are killed by members of their own family/. Since 2006 more than 800,000 children in the United States and 60,000 in Canada have gone missing and more than 1,000 children in the care of Child Protection Services in the United States are murdered annually.

These are our children but nobody talks about them.
Their safety and their well-being are ignored by politicians and those who support them. We're in the middle of election campaigns in Canada and the United States but not one politician or political party has put the safety and well-being of children on their agenda.

More effort and energy is put into trying to prove President Obama was not born in the United States or that conservatives are racists than is put into demanding more safeguards for children. We have become too important to concern ourselves with the trivia of protecting children, especially children we don't know and never see; the children of the poor and in broken homes.

Teachers are quick to protest salary freezes but never march to demand government action to eradicate child poverty. Child Protective Services is underfunded because having spent so much money on entitlements and election campaigns there is little money left to provide much more than band aids. It causes the system to take short cuts and they are accommodated by the courts which are part of the bureaucracy designed to keep the cases moving rather than truly protect children.

Nobody has time to do the job right, just expeditiously.

Innocence Destroyed is a short documentary written and directed by Bill Bowen in 2010. It would be reassuring to be able to say that things have improved since this documentary was released. It would also be untrue. Not only s the situation for children worse than ever, nobody talks about it; not politicians, not community leaders, not the medical profession, the legal profession or all the sanctimonious defenders of this candidate or that on social media.

Children are not just being abused and murdered, they are being abused and murdered in horrendous, barbaric ways: scalding, asphyxiation, beaten to death, starved, dehydrated, whipped, battered, smothered, drowned and drugged. Every year, children in the protection of our government agencies die from these and related causes.

The phrase, "in the best interest of the child" has become meaningless because we are people who have forgotten what it actually means. It is a disgrace to any civilized society, especially one that is filled with people who use leaving our nations in better shape for our children as justification for supporting this policy or that. What they don’t talk about are policies that actually protect children and improve their lives. We are societies that put salary increases and entitlements ahead of the security and well-being of children. 

Every day some politician, some political strategist, some morally superior bright light on social media talks about how important our children are and about leaving a better future for our children. It isn't about protecting children, it's about justifying the latest political platform. For them, children are an abstract concept. They never talk about doing something to protect the thousands of abused, abducted and children who are murdered every year in our societies. Those children are invisible to them.

We are too sophisticated to see those children and we are societies that lack the values to be ashamed of that simple fact let alone have the will to take action and do something about it.

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