Child
Abuse: As American As
Apple Pie
By Lucinda Marshall
30 October, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Lost
in the homophobic political and media posturing over the Mark Foley
incident is the reality that there is a global pandemic of sexual and
non-sexual child abuse. The scandalous thing about the Mark Foley incident
isn't that he is gay. It isn't about pedophilia either, because the
roots of that word come from a Greek word meaning to love children,
and there is nothing loving about sexually abusing children. What is
truly scandalous is that we live in a society where not only is such
behavior condoned in the hallowed halls of Congress, but in every corner
of both this country and the entire world.
In 2002, 150 million girls
and 73 million boys were sexually assaulted. Two million children were
forced into working in prostitution and pornography and over one million
children were actually bought and sold, according to the U.N.
The global atrocity of child
abuse however, goes far beyond sexual assault.
53,000 children were murdered
in 2002, 2893 of those murders were here in the U.S. 220 million children
are economically exploited every year, half of them working in dangerous
situations such as mines and 5 million children live in slavery. In
Bangladesh, contractors providing clothing for Hanes, Wal-Mart and J.C.
Penney employ children less than 11 years of age, making them work shifts
as long as 20 hours according to the National Labor Committee. The children
are paid 6.5 cents an hour.
300,000 children around the
world are pressed into military service every year. While there seems
to be plenty of money for military recruiting in the U.S. (the Pentagon
spends $4 billion dollars a year on it), the Bush Administration provided
$9.4 billion dollars less in funding than promised for the educational
programs mandated by the same No Child Left Behind Act that allows recruiters
access to schools.
More than one million children
are imprisoned worldwide, 100,000 of them in the U.S. The U.S. is one
of only four countries that sentences children to life without parole,
and along with Somalia is one of only two nations in the world that
has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
16,000 children die of hunger-related
causes every day and more than half a million children under the age
of 15 died of AIDS in 2005. According to the Census Bureau, there are
8,310,000 children in America without health insurance. The U.S. ranks
28th in the world in infant mortality. There are 9 million children
between the ages of 6-19 in this country alone who are
obese. And the Washington Post reports that,
"In 2002, about 6 percent
of all boys and girls were taking antidepressants, triple the rate in
the period 1994-96. And about 14 percent of boys -- nearly one in seven
-- were on stimulant drugs in 2002, double the number in 1994-96."
In the context of the real
enormity of child abuse both in this country and in the world as a whole,
it is hardly surprising that we allow the moral of the Foley story to
be mis-framed as the sexual proclivities of one man, rather than a symptom
of a much larger crime. If we truly valued families and the lives of
children, these are the issues we would address.
Lucinda Marshall is a feminist artist, writer and activist.
She is the Founder of the Feminist Peace Network, www.feministpeacenetwork.org.
Her work has been published in numerous publications in the U.S. and
abroad including, Counterpunch, Alternet, Dissident Voice, Off Our Backs,
The Progressive, Countercurrents, Z Magazine , Common Dreams and Information
Clearinghouse. She blogs at WIMN Online.
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights