Invisible Children
by Mike Tikkanen

Across America, 90% of the children in our Juvenile Justice systems have come out of our Child Protection system (they all began as abused children). Over 90% of the adults in our Criminal Justice system have come out of our Juvenile Justice system. Legislators predict the need for new prisons by extrapolating from the number of children in their Child Protection System.

Our country has created the perfect prison feeder system for poor and abused children. Abused children are 66 times more likely to end up in the Juvenile Justice system than children who are not abused. A very large percentage of the people in the Child Protection and Justice Systems are people of color and poor. Income and color seem to be great un-equalizers.

For the last twenty years America has suffered about 40,000 murders per year (plus millions of assaults and robberies) and for twenty of the last twenty five years between one out of four and one out of five Americans has been a victim of a crime every year.

For a long time the United States has had the highest per-capita rate of incarceration (imprisonment) of all the industrialized countries (except for Russia).

Today, there are 600,000 felons in Florida (without counting the current prison population in Florida). Over 500,000 felons are released each year in America, with little chance of employment, or fitting back into to the community. Our nation has decided that prisons are for punishment, not rehabilitation. For many years now, the U.S. rate of recidivism (returning to prison) has been greater than 66%.

The U.S. executes more juveniles than any other country in the world. We are the only nation at the UN to refuse to sign the Child Rights Treaty (190 other nations have signed it), because we would have to stop executing juveniles. Consider the aforementioned sad truths the next time your DA charges a 16 year old who randomly shoots someone outside a convenience store, as an adult (or, the 12 year old girl who left her baby in a shoe box under her bed). Both children were tortured and abused by their parents (national and local cases this year).

Juveniles sent into the adult Criminal Justice System are 8 times more likely to commit suicide and five times more likely to be raped.

The prison industry is a good business in the USA and it makes big money. Prison related industry has a much larger PAC (money raising political action committee) than do the abused and neglected children of our nation. Actually, there is no money raising PAC for children's issues.

Most children in Child Protection, Juvenile Justice, and adults in Criminal Justice are people of color and poor.

As a nation, we don't spend much money helping children in need of protection, or the ex- convicts they become, to fit back into our society. We do spend a fortune on prisons, parole, and the court systems that send them to jail.

Child Protection Systems vary from state to state. When a county gets bad press (a child dies forgotten, or lost in the system) county child workers get the blame. The media doesn't explain the huge case loads of the social workers, or the lack of services that are available within the system to help the worker to get results. The community may be outraged, but it continues to provide minimal funding to run these systems.

I have met many social workers and service providers in these past eight years and I have yet to meet one that is in it for the money. They are all committed hard working people who work in this field because they want to make a difference and they care about people. The people that I have met are all overburdened and working without the resources needed to complete the job they were hired to do. The children they protect need more help than they are getting. I am in a Child Protection System in a county that is better funded and better respected than many others.

Our Child Protection and prison policies are costing us much more than the just the cash to build and maintain prisons. It has been my experience that children in Child Protection who are too old, or plagued with serious mental health issues to be adopted, can be part of the Child Protection System for ten years or more.

These are the same children who are 66 times more likely to experience both the Juvenile Justice System and the Criminal Justice System. The cost of institutionalizing millions of American citizens for ten to thirty year periods runs into many millions of dollars per child/inmate (and it is the rule).

By not removing children from abusive homes, we incur huge costs related to crime, mental health, education, and the livability of our communities.

Between 50 and 75% of the children admitted into the Juvenile Justice system have diagnosable mental health issues. It costs great sums to treat these illnesses (especially if the child has been abused for some years). It costs a great deal more to 'not' treat these illnesses.

The cost of crime in America is estimated at between 500 billion and 1.6 trillion annually (and that's valuing the rapes and murders of our family members at what most of us would consider unacceptably low numbers).

There are also the misunderstood costs of abused and neglected (children in our public school system. Many of these children have severe mental health problems and they can be uncontrollable and dangerous in our classrooms. The national statistical data of assaults and students carrying guns on school property is in excess of ten percent of the student body (for each category).

Private schools don't have to deal with these problems and that's why their cost per pupil is lower. The next time you are asked to consider vouchers, remember this. Public school teachers are under much greater stress in their classrooms than are private school teachers. Some of us believe that most private school teachers are escapees from a public school atmosphere that they would rather not cope with. That's at least partially the reason that some of them take the reduced salaries to teach in private schools.

Abused and neglected children are dumped on the public school system (12 to 14 thousand are in the Child Protection System in Minnesota) and many of those are not receiving the mental health services that they need. New Jersey has recently completely dropped it's mental health services within their school system. Their abused and neglected unmanageable children are all going to directly to jail.

The problem of abused and neglected children in our schools is a largely unreported phenomena that results in a terrific amount of bad press for our schools. I challenge those of you who doubt this to spend a little time in the inner city public schools to learn about this issue.

It's not the teachers in these schools who are costing us money, is quite simply the 900,000 American children who were reported as abused, or neglected last year that our teachers have to provide safety, discipline, and an education for.

That's why our national high school dropout rates are approaching 40% and why 25% of high school graduates can't read.

If you compare the difference between how the rest of the developed world handles these same problems, I think that you would agree that our current treatment of abused and neglected children is expensive, counter productive, and cruel.

But, thanks to the politicizing of social issues, we will be seeing many more NEW prisons in the next few years (and much more crime).

WWJND (What Would Jesus Not Do)

God help us.

Mike Tikkanen is a Minneapolis MN businessman and Hennepin County volunteer guardian ad-Litem who writes, speaks, and gives workshops on what it REALLY costs us (personally, communally and nationally) to continue abusing and neglecting our American children.

He can be reached at mike@packardgroup.com

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Comment by Sieglinde W. Alexander:
...and then we expect that these children will become nonviolent adults.
Once we were all innocent children, had no more than a need to be nourished and loved, and born with the right of integrity.

In reality, our society protects the dominators, the real perpetrators, who were once innocent children too, and so the "Black Pedagogy" (Schwarze Pädagogik, by Katharina Rutschky) continues.

Many stories have been written to alarm the world, that the violence of today is no more than a lesson learned in childhood, but the authors are ignored, labeled and blamed, and shamed for telling the truth.

Just to name a few:
The upcoming film "COLDWATER" by Sean Michael Beyer and Wyatt H. Peabody, Director of Operations of Rafelson Media, will tell another harrowing story of how rehabilitation is executed; how young humans receive their lecture in how to abuse.
http://coldwaterthemovie.com

Tragedy of child labourers comes to light
Tens of thousands of "Verdingkinder" (discarded children) were given away as cheap labor from the early 1800s until the 1950s in Switzerland.
Historians believe as many as 12,000 children were given away during the 1930s alone.
The trade of child labor trade was often managed by local authorities. Sometimes, even public auctions were held for these child workers.
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=105&sid=4749833

"Sleepers" movie and book
Before reform school, during, and after.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117665/

"The God Quad" by Paddy Doyle, Ireland
A Mother dies. The four year child ends in an orphanage. The abuse krippel him for Life.
http://www.paddydoyle.com

"Mundtot" by Jürgen Schubert, Germany
The unwonted child is cast of in an orphanage. To keep him quite he was drugged. As an adult he had to proof that he was not insane. http://www.aaacworld.org/info/art_bookcom1.htm

"A never-ending pain" by Sieglinde W. Alexander
The 14 years of my childhood were her private holocaust. Then she became
acquainted with other frightening cruelties, oppressions and dehumanizing humiliations and all this in God's name.
http://www.boxbook.com/Writing_table/writings/a_never.htm

How many more books need to be written,
how many more movies produced,
how many more children need to grow into adults with a history of trauma,
U0ntil we understand the message that it is the adult who teaches violence to a child,
and it is US, the human, who destroy each other.

"Why"