Bruised and Battered – April 8, 2018

My favorite color is blue – the color of sea and sky.  It seems to me to be the color of God.  All the different shades – all beautiful to my eye – remind me of the beauty of diversity in God’s creation.  Turquoise, cyan, robin egg, sky, powder, royal, teal, baby, navy, cobalt azure, lapis, indigo…  The list goes on and on.  The late, great neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote that indigo was the color of heaven. 

Blue is also the color of the bruised and battered bodies of the thousands of children who are abused and neglected every year.  That is why the blue ribbon is the international symbol of Child Abuse Prevention and Awareness. 

April is the month for blue ribbons.  It’s the month to learn more and talk more and pray more about the reality of child abuse and to do more to help survivors heal and to prevent more victims.

The US Department of Health and Human Services produces a “Child Maltreatment Report” annually.  It includes important and tragic information.  The most recent report  to be published states there were an estimate 676,000 child victims of abuse or neglect in 2016.  These are children for whom the state determined at least one substantiated or indicated “maltreatment.”

(God only knows how many unreported cases of child abuse and neglect there are.)

Three-quarters (74.8%) of reported victims were neglected, 18.2 percent were physically abused, and 8.5 percent were sexually abused. In addition, 6.9 percent of reported victims experienced such “other” types of maltreatment as threatened abuse or neglect, drug/alcohol addiction, and lack of supervision. 

The HHS report also analyzes data for four care-giver risk factors: alcohol abuse by caregiver, drug abuse by caregiver, financial problem of caregiver (a risk factor related to the family’s inability to provide sufficient financial resources to meet minimum needs) and inadequate housing of caregiver (a risk factor related to substandard, overcrowded, or unsafe housing conditions, including homelessness).

Alcohol abuse.  Drug abuse.  Financial problems.  Inadequate housing. These risk factors are something we can do something about.  It will take work (and cost money).  It will demand charitable work and political advocacy.  It will demand that our eyes are open and that our hearts are broken.

But it’s not impossible.