Children_Lost

Ranita Gatling Instructor R. Jacobs ENG 112-71B June 12, 2011 Fact Claim Paper Children Lost Thesis Statement: Sadly, the rate of child deaths due to involvement of one or both parents has risen in recent years. OUTLINE Introduction 1 Hook 2 Claim Casey Anthony 1 Background NY Mom Missing DAD Statistics Children Lost This just in there are currently two hundred and ninety five children listed in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database that are from Virginia and went missing during this last year. In recent times whenever you turn on the television there seems to be one news station or another broadcasting a story about another child missing, found barely alive, or either having been killed by their own mother and or father. Needless to say that is 295 children to many. Sadly, the rate of child deaths due to involvement of one or both parents has risen in recent years. Case in point, the overly televised murder trail of Florida mother Casey Anthony. For those people who are not familiar with this trail which is highly unlikely it is about a young mother who is accused of killing her two year old daughter Cailey. Not only is she accused of murdering her child but of using chloroform to sedate her daughter so that she could go out and party with her friends. As if this is not bad enough she is said to have then covered up the murder for over a month and only then to report Cailey missing after her mother finely tracked her down and saw that she did not know where her daughter was. Casey told the police that the nanny took Cailey only for them to later find out that the nanny in question did not exist. Officers would later find Cailey’s body a few miles from her grandparents home badly decomposed. Although this trial is still in progress it still stands to fact that children are being hurt by those who are supposed to protect him. Then there is the case of the New York mother Lashanda Armstrong who drove her van loaded with herself and her four children ranging in ages of eleven months old to ten years old in to the Hudson River. Subsequently, Lashanda ended up killing herself and three of her four children. Her ten year old son fortunately got out of the van just in the nick of time. Now this incident happened in April of this year after a domestic dispute with her children’s father. Was this her only way out' Did she feel as though she had no other choice' Who would know, we don’t. According to the US Department of Justice between 1976 and 1994, an projected 37,000 children were murdered and one in every five murders was committed by a family member (US Dept. of Justice). On top of this, 2,000 children go missing everyday which in terms adds up to be about 297,500 children every year. Unfortunately, when a child is kidnapped those figures become increasingly grim. There is more often than not a two-hour delay if not more in the initial report of a missing child. Sadly, 74% of those children that are murdered are killed within the first three hours of the abduction (Making Sense of Child Abduction Statistics, Christopher Beam). Now mothers are not the only parents who are killing their children. In October of this year a New Jersey man shot and killed both of his children before turning the gun on himself. Thirty eight year old Kurtis Birth and his wife Zoey Mendoza-Birth, were in the process of separating, but police called the situation a "friendly" separation and said there were no court orders or domestic calls to the house (The Record, Hannan Adely, Staff Writer). The most up to date statistical data to be had on child homicide rates, Murray said, indicated that the U.S. had the highest infant-child homicide rate -- four times as high -- as all other Western nations surveyed, at 4.1 children per 100,000 people (US Child Murder Rates Soar, Jon E. Dougherty, 2011 WND). These are the grime facts of our nation. There is a steady increase in child murders. Nationwide approximately 80% of homicides involving children as the victim are perpetrated by parents. That is about 1,300 children who have been killed by their parents nationwide according to the ACF of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Administration for Children and Families). Some say that a considerable amount of children who died at the hands of a young man, are usually the father or the mother’s boyfriend. When in reality that is definitely not the case nationally. Every year since at least 1998, women have killed notably more children than have men, no matter what their relationship has been to the victim. Within the ACF’s report of state data for 2007, approximately 56.5% of child homicide was committed by women. On the other hand about 42% was committed by men. These figures are in cases where the perpetrators were known. Even ten years before that, the figures were round about 63%/37% as far as women and men were concerned. There are those people who would beg to differ but the facts are solid. Some people would say that in the ten to fifteen years, the rate of parents killing their children for one reason or another has dwindled but that would be false. There are those people who would have others to believe that most child deaths occur because of some sort of infection or unexplained phenomenon. In 2008, forty one percent of deaths among children under 5 were neonatal (Global, Regional, and National Causes of Child Mortality in 2008; A Systematic Analysis, Lancer). That the rate of children being killed by one or both of their parents have gone down if not halted all together. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The evidence is plastered on every news channel on our television screens. Every day of every month of every year there is a story, if not two, of the remains of some child being found that was reported missing and better yet that child’s parent or parents are the ones who committed the murder. Or a child is now missing and never found. Then there are those who instead of out right killing their children they would rather starve them to brink of death. This was the case in recent news of the Virginia couple who was housing their daughter in a crib filled with her own feces and starving the child and another of their children remains were found under the shed. The truth of these situations is that not only did the children have to be weary of strangers but also of their own parents which is truly distressing. That there are a lot of children that are not safe in their own homes as much if not more than they are safe walking down the street alone. The facts have been presented and as disturbing as they may be the rate of child death has increased significantly over the years, which is sad to say but true. Works Cited National Center for Health Statistics Global, Regional, and National Causes of Child Mortality in 2008; A Systematic Analysis, Lancer Administration for Children and Families US Child Murder Rates Soar, Jon E. Dougherty, 2011 WND The Record, Hannan Adely, Staff Writer Making Sense of Child Abduction Statistics, Christopher Beam United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2009). Crime in the United States: Uniform Crime Report, 2008. Retrieved from http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_02.html Susan Hatters Friedman, M.D., Sarah McCue Horwitz, Ph.D., and Phillip J. Resnick, M.D. Child Murder by Mothers: A Critical Analysis of the Current State of Knowledge and a Research Agenda. Am J Psychiatry 162:1578-1587 NSPCC Child Homicide information All of the sources in which I have used in my paper have been cited using MLA documentation. I understand that if SAFE ASSIGN identifies any sources that I used in paper that I did not cite, I will receive a zero for this paper. Ranita Gatling