The Child Abuse Cultural Cowardice - Actual Abuse Takes a Back Seat in Discussion to Psuedo-abuses in Public Debate

I make it a regular practice to engage in online and in-person debates on a variety of subjects. I have engaged in more than one discussion about the effects of gay people on families, on the effects of violence in video games on children, and abortion. All of these have been called child abuse or killing by their proponents. Most of the time, these people are not professionals in child development, they are not experts of any kind in those fields; just interested and concerned people. It occurs to me, though, that I have never engaged in a spirited debate about how to tackle actual child abuse by anyone who did not work in the system. We will talk about a plethora of pseudo-abuses topics worth our attention and discussion but when real lives are at stake, we shut our mouths, turn our heads, and change the subject.

When I realized how much attention I was giving to these hypersensitive, ill founded, PTA-mommy concerns, I was pretty ashamed of myself. I have worked for 15 years with actually abused children. Children with broken bones, punched-in faces, born addicted to meth, raped by their family, pregnant by their fathers, sent to live with their rapists, mothers pimping out their kids, foster kids human trafficked, all things the consequences and actions of which I have seen personally.

What if My Mom Went to Hell

My mother recently died. If we judge people by their actions and not their intentions, my mother was a terrible person even though that was never her intention. When she was dying, her aunt was terribly upset that she was going to go to hell. She was sick with worry. It made me so angry that her religion made her feel that way. My mother's aunt is undeserving of such fear, worry, and sadness -- especially at such a time. It is hard enough to get through times like this without compounding it with this garbage.