STUDY FINDS CHILD ABUSE UP IN RECESSION. WHO ELSE SUFFERS?

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Jeffrey Newman

Dr. Rachel Berger of Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh just completed a study of 422 abused children from mostly lower income families which confirmed what pediatricians have been reporting, that there has been an increase of shaken babies and other forms of abuse causing brain damage. The study was released on line this week in Pediatrics. The numbers are not modest, they are striking, up by 65%. The authors attribute these injuries directly to unemployment rates. This study and others examining the evidence of the effects of our waning economy are disturbing not just because the most vulnerable are on the losing end but because absent factors of Wall Street greed ad fraud, governmental complicity in this wrongdoing and a continuation of politics by kickback, these infants, many who have died would not have been victims. Of course, it is impossible in any single case of child abuse and death to attribute the direct cause to the subprime mortgage scandal. In a court of law, the case would be dismissed for lack of what lawyers call direct proximate causation. This does not mean there is no correlation. Malcom Gladwell, author of Blink and Tipping Point has written about the direct connection between income opportunity and crime and the causes of violence. He bases much of his work on social science and epidemiological studies. If we wait for social scientists to conduct long terms studies and then for writers to popularize the concepts, thousands more children will become victims. The media seem vapid on examining the real societal effects on children and the elderly of an economy on the decline. The massive foreclosures displacing families, the jobless numbers on the rise cry out for more active participation by Americans in the process of our own governance and the attention of the media and writers like Mr. Gladwell. In the mean time, the banks and major corporations report record profits.