Child Abuse Rights

Children, small human beings who are innocent to the big world surrounding them. Their average environment is typically filled with love, support, and nurturing and happiness. But that isn’t always the case for children, who are physically, sexually and verbally abused by their parents. These environments are extremely toxic and dangerous for the child to live under.

Child abuse isn’t okay in any situation as it can affect the child psychologically and physically. With most child abuse cases now-a-days DSS (Department of Social Services) or now known as Social Services, can be called and an accusation can be filed for child abuse. If DSS has been called and they are surveilling the actions going on in the house and if they see that the child is being abused they will take the child away. The benefit of this is that the child is being removed from the harmful environment they were in, the downside of this is that sometimes they will return the child back to the environment a couple days later. This is one of the arising problems with this program is that they aren’t focusing on the severely abused children and permanently taking them out of that dangerous environment.

In Massachusetts there are laws on hitting your children, they basically state that you can hit your child with minor force, without hurting/ causing bruising to the child, so spanking would be considered tolerable, but physically punching and causing the child severe pain is not allowed. According to Lynch and Owens PC; “the force used against the minor child is reasonable; the force is reasonably related to the purpose of safeguarding or promoting the welfare of the minor, including the prevention or punishment of the minor’s misconduct; the force used neither causes, nor creates a substantial risk of causing, physical harm (beyond fleeting pain or minor, transient marks), gross degradation, or severe mental distress.”

In the Deshaney v. Winnebago County Social Services case of 1998, Joshua DeShaney a four-year-old who lived with his father who physically abused him to the point where Social Services did take him, but eventually returned him back to the extremely dangerous environment he was living in. His father abused him so badly after being returned that he was hospitalized with bruises all over and had severe brain damage. His father permanently paralyzed and mentally disabled his own son, and his father was convicted of child abuse and sent to prison. This case shows how unreasonably a parent was abusing his child for no good reason and causing him physical pain and mental harm, this is where hitting a child should never go, but it happens quite often to this day.

A case relating to this one is the Teghan Skiba case, where her abuse went unnoticed and led to her death. The Daily Mail has a brief summary of the case; “Jonathan Douglas Richardson, 25, her mother’s boyfriend of six months, faces the death penalty over the child’s brutal death. He faces additional charges of felony child abuse, kidnapping and sexual offense. Teghan Skiba died in July 2010 from blunt force trauma to the head at hospital in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her body was covered bite marks that tore off flesh and bruising, the court was told on Wednesday.” This is also a quite a severe case compared to Joshua Deshaney. It’s more violent but they both have the same thing in common which is that the abuse goes unnoticed or relatively cared about and resulted in awful endings.

The Deshaney v. Winnebago case and the Teghan Skiba case goes to show how there needs to be a change within the constitution and a majority of state laws across the country.  Children need protection rights from their own parents. It’s completely unfair to the child for the government to put them back into the severely abusive environment they lived in with many severe risk factors for that child’s life. All children have a right to survival and development, whether they be severely abused or whether they be disabled. Putting a child back into an environment where their survival and development is greatly risked is unacceptable and there needs to be set protection rights for severely abused children.