Child advocate columns, June 8, 2009

Office of the Child Advocate
3312 Northside Drive, Suite D-250 Macon, Georgia 31210
478-757-2661 or 1-800-254-2064 www.gachildadvocate.org
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It's [Not] the Economy, Stupid!
By: Tom C. Rawlings, Director
"It's the economy, stupid." Remember that phrase? Too often, folks try to attribute complex problems to simplistic solutions. Such seems to be the case these days with child abuse, as media source after media source claims that our faltering economy is causing child abuse rates to spike. The stress of the times, they say, is causing more people to beat their children.
Over the past few months, numerous pieces in print and on TV have made this claim. Typical is an April report from the Reuters news service citing a significant rise in child abuse cases at Boston's Children's Hospital. "We're finding that it is directly attributable to what is happening economically," a hospital official told the reporter of the spike she had seen during the first three months of 2009. Families who are "stressed" by unemployment and economic hardship "are going to turn more to controlling and hurting" their children, a child advocate told a Texas television station back in December.
I've come across a dozen of these stories lately, and they bother me. It's not that they aren't possibly true. After all, many experts claim there is a link between such factors as family stress and poverty and the incidence of child abuse. Rather, my problems with these stories are that they dumb down the problem, and they do it in a way that makes us all look as if our very lives depend on the fortunes of the market.
First, stories like these reduce the problem of child abuse to a single issue. They distract us from finding and fighting the many problems that lead to child abuse by focusing on "the economy" as the root of all evil. "If we simply improve the economy, things will change for the better," we're led to think. Child abuse has many causes, and a quick look at the data discounts any substantial correlation between the strength of the economy and the safety of children.
Compare, for example, child abuse incidence rates between 1990 and 2005 with the combination of the unemployment and inflation rates known as "the misery index." In 1991, the misery index hit 11, but it was two years before there was a substantial rise in child abuse. And although the misery index slowly rose between 1999 and 2005, child abuse rates remained fairly constant. In fact, the recent reported increases in abuse over the past year may just seem like a "spike" because 2007's abuse rate numbers were the lowest they have been in six or seven years!
Some of my colleagues and I recently took a look at the most recent child abuse statistics, and we can't find any strong increase in child abuse even though the unemployment rate has doubled in many places over the past year. So using these stories from the field to conclude that child abuse is increasing because of the economy just makes poor sense.
Now, something can be said for the fact that when a poor economy requires us to cut programs proven effective at preventing abuse or preventing its recurrence, we may very well see an increase in incidents of abuse. But we've got to keep those two issues separate, the way we might separate the cause of a fire from how quickly and effectively our fire department was able to respond. Statistics and statistical analysis can be very helpful in our efforts to determine the source of a problem like child abuse and the best methods to fight that problem. But when oversimplified and misused, as Mark Twain once said, statistics gets lumped in with "lies and damn lies" as the three kinds of untruths.
My second problem with these stories is their potential impact on all of us who abhor child abuse. I fear that in the minds of some, headlines like this can create a culture in which child abuse is tolerated. It becomes "understandable" when a parent abuses his or her child. "The economy made him do it," we may begin to think. And the enemy then becomes not the abuser but the business cycle.
Moreover, the attitude that a hardscrabble, stressful life leads parents to abuse their children counters our common experience. We were all, I daresay, raised with the belief that although a family may be poor in material goods, it can be rich in love. My own father was a child of the Great Depression whose widowed mother struggled to raise him in those difficult times. But I always remember his fearing not poverty but excessive wealth.
In the end, none of us -- the individual, the business community, or the government -- has control over the economy. Each of us does have control over how we respond to the cards life deals us and how we care for our children with the limited means at our disposal. So rather than focus on economic hardship as the bogeyman who hurts children, let's focus on doing what we can to let our children know that they are more important than the Dow Jones or the unemployment rate.
If you're interested, you can take a look at some of these statistics for yourself. Visit www.miseryindex.us for that data and www.childwelfare.gov for the federal government's child welfare statistics.
Tom Rawlings, Georgia's Child Advocate for the Protection of Children, was appointed by Governor Sonny Perdue to assure quality and efficiency in Georgia's child protective systems. The Office of the Child Advocate is a resource for those interested in the welfare of our state's neglected and abused children. Tom can be reached through the OCA website at www.gachildadvocate.org .