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United States: Child Violence Rising |
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Written by Miguel Fernández (PL)|
Monday, 04 June 2012 07:36
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 It is not longer a surprise to hear United States news involving children with histories of violence, sex, abuse and neglect in the school facilities system, a situation that is becoming more serious.
Despite the long history the northern nation has regarding children´s rights and safety, its leaders are not ascribed to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 November 1989.
Not even the slaughter at Columbine High School on Apr. 20, 1999 that caused great controversy in the U.S. about children´s safety in schools stops the indolence, irresponsibility and the abandonment to which infants are exposed after leaving their homes. In Columbine School (Colorado state), 15 children died during a shooting and 24 were injured in what was considered the third most terrible school shooting in U.S. history, after the one taking place in Bath School, Michigan, in 1927, where 45 children were killed and 58 wounded. In a shooting at Texas University in 1966, 14 died and 32 were injured.
Dead children´s list in American schools as a result of violence would be huge if a chronology of this phenomenon is conducted. This is a mater shaking the human consciousness in the XXI century.
In the country declaring itself as "an example of human rights", there is no the slightest security for children, exposed to a troubled area of society due to the violence influence in the mass media, the indiscriminate use of firearms, drugs illegal abuse and explicit aggression in students and teachers relationship.
Many persons agree the United States is the worldwide leader of school violence. A federal study conducted in 2008 found that nearly nine of 10 public schools reported at least one violent incident and more than half of them had at least 20.
According to the report issued by the U.S. government, 1,700 000 children were once under threat of death during the academic course reviewed.
Only between 2008 and 2009, 5,574 children and teenagers were reported dead as a result of firearms use, a number exceeding military casualties in recent conflicts.
But the violence goes far beyond the assault and death, mainly at the hands of the teachers, involved in terrible episodes of physical, sexual and psychological abuse against minors.
Recently it was known that Jacob Amatuccio, a 14-year-old paraplegic boy with special needs, from Hudson High School in North Carolina, was forced by his teacher to spend hours locked in a cardboard box as a way of "discipline" .
Laurie Bailey-Cutkomp, professor in Zephyrhills city, Florida, was charged on putting dog collars to their students for minor infractions like drinking soft drinks in class; in Los Angeles, California, a teacher from Gratts primary school was charged on committing lewd acts on a child under 14.
At Miramonte elementary school, under a lawsuit filed by 20 former students alleging to be victims of sexual abuse, teacher Mark Berndt, 61, was charged of allegedly committing lewd acts on 23 students.
It is still fresh Andre McCollins´ case, a 18- year - autistic boy attending to a school for children with special needs in Rotenberg, Boston. On Oct. 25, 2002, he was subjected to torture for seven hours and humiliation from their teachers for refusing to remove his coat. The student was given 31 electric shocks, leading him to comatose for three days.
These and many other cases demonstrate a cruel reality threatening the survival of children and adolescents in a first world society, which favours the profits of arms dealers and protect drug traffickers, over vital rights for children.
It is shocking the ironic dichotomy existing in the United States, where children under 18 are not allowed to buy cigarettes and alcohol, but at the same time, they are sent to wars invented by the leaders of the Pentagon.
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