National Commission on Online Child Sexual Exploitation

On March 5, 2020 a new bill was introduced in the Senate titled “Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2020” or the “EARN IT Act of 2020.” This bill was brought forth to try and establish a National Commission on Online Child Sexual Exploitation Prevention, and for other purposes. The purpose of this Commission is to decide what practices the providers of interactive technology may use to implement prevention, reduction, and response to online sexual exploitation of children. This Commission will include nineteen members, which will be composed of: The Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (or any of these leaders’ representatives). The remaining sixteen members are appointed by the Senate and House of Representatives. All these members will meet certain qualifications that make them fit for the job, including experience with such matters. Sexual abuse is a serious issue these days for both adults and children. A child, however, may not know that such an event is taking place therefore, it is not generally reported. It is important to minimize the possibility of this abuse happening and establishing a Commission to help stop it from happening online is a great start.  

Let’s talk about child sexual abuse. It’s a tough subject, but one that we must address. Only about one-third of child sexual abuse cases are identified, and even fewer are reported. Although it has been shown that internet and commercial sexual exploitation are a relatively small segment of total sexual abuse cases, this is still significant to the overall problem. Over 90% of children that have been commercially sexually exploited have also experienced sexual abuse in the past. One of the most gut-wrenching facts though, is that “About 75% of child pornography victims are living at home when they are photographed. Parents are often responsible.” Perhaps with this bill getting passed and consequent formation of the Commission, these children can be saved from their abusers, often their own parents. 

If these children are not saved now, there are many consequences that often result for persons who experience sexual abuse. These include academic problems, emotional and mental health problems, substance abuse at a young age, higher risk of teen pregnancy, etc. Everyone knows someone that is under the age of eighteen. Whether it is a relative or not, would you want the chance of electronic sexual exploitation happen to them? Hopefully the answer is “No.” You know how people say “Kids are brutally honest?” Why would any of that change now? Many of the victims of sexual abuse are not believed because usually the abuser is a family member or someone they are close with, and almost always the perpetrator is someone they know. “It is estimated that only 4 to 8% of child sexual abuse reports are fabricated. Most of the fabricated reports are made by adults involved in custody disputes or by adolescents.” Kids, especially at a young age, usually do not have much sexual knowledge, and when they do show knowledge in such a subject, it should raise awareness that something bad might be going on. This should be one of the signs to acknowledge that a child has been sexually abused. Whether the statement the child has made is true or not, it should most definitely be reported and investigated.  

Just take a moment and think about how much exploitation is out there commercially and on the internet for literally everyone to see. There are pornographic web pages out there on the internet that have no censorship or any safety measures taken as to who has access to such websites. If this type of material is out there for anyone to see, there is also child exploitation out there that people can get their hands on. Just keep in mind, the reader of this article knows someone under the age of eighteen. Would you want that individual exploited all over the web and other places? Hopefully you readers keep that in your mind when thinking of wanting to push this bill further into legislature, possibly making it a law and creating a Commission to help put an end to all of this abuse against children.  Please join me in letting your senators and your U.S. House Representative know that you care about the EARN IT Act and want to see it passed into law.    

Website for Statistics: 

Child Sexual Abuse Statistics (2015). Darkness to Light. http://www.d2l.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/all_statistics_20150619.pdf   

Source for Bill Information: 

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/3398/text   

Even Foster Care can harm children

Removing children from families can also cause harm

This is a student reaction paper about the issues around removing children from families and putting them into foster care.

In the assigned reading for class I came across the article Foster Care vs. Family Preservation: The Track Record on Safety and Well-being. This article argues that family preservation is based upon one overriding assumption: If you remove a child from the home, the child will be safe. If you leave a child at home, the child is at risk. The risk can go both ways, for instance real family preservation programs have a better record for safety than foster care. Studies have shown that children left in their own homes typically do better than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. According to the article, a study of reported abuse in Baltimore, found the rate of "substantiated" cases of sexual abuse in foster care more than four times higher than the rate in the general population.  Using the same methodology, an Indiana study found three times more physical abuse and twice the rate of sexual abuse in foster homes than in the general population.  Studies were found that In group homes there was more than ten times the rate of physical abuse and more than 28 times the rate of sexual abuse as in the general population, in part because so many children in the homes abused each other.

Thomas Morton argues in his article “Foster care vs. Family Preservation” is the wrong debate because neither foster care nor family preservations is absolute in its safety outcomes.  The purpose of having child welfare is to ensure physical protection and emotional security for all children.  Emotional security is compromised when children are being neglected or abused. However, removing children from a home where they are neglected or abused so the child can be safe can also cause damage by the trauma experienced when the child is removed from their caregiver and placed into foster care. When a child is removed from their home, away from their primary caregiver and placed into foster care, this violates the basic trust existing in child’s life.  These occurrences can affect the child’s overall performance in life. 

For more information visit, 

https://chronicleofsocialchange.org/featured/16584/16584

http://www.nccpr.org/reports/01SAFETY.pdf 

I just want to point out that while foster care situations (or even adoptive situations, for that matter) are riskier than family situations in the general population, the comparison group here is not the general population.  The comparison group here is families where a child protective worker was so concerned about the situation that they decided to remove a child from the household to protect the child from harm.  What is the risk of abuse or neglect or harm to a child in the sample of homes where a social worker decided that removing a child was necessary because of the risks to that child of staying in the household?  I have strong feeling that the risk of abuse in such households is probably more than 28 times higher than it is in the general population, and far, far greater than it is in the foster care family households or adoptive households.  

Yes, abuse and neglect can happen, and sometimes do happen, in foster care families.  But, such abuse and neglect also happen in some very small fraction of biological families or families of origin.  In that small fraction of "natural" homes where abuse takes place, the risk of further abuse or continuing abuse is very high, and much higher than the risk in foster care.

The contribution of this article is to make us remember that the very act of removing a child from a dangerous home is likely to harm that child.  Chemotherapy harms cancer patients; it may save them, or it may not, but it may also kill them, and it's always dangerous.  Removing children from their families is like that.  Even a vaccination is obviously good, in the general sense, but every one and a while someone who is vaccinated will have an allergic reaction to the vaccine, and some people will even die from vaccines.  But, for most of us, the vaccines protect us, and create a society that is protected from diseases that will do more harm, in total, than vaccines will.  Is the child protection method of removing children from homes going to be disastrous and wrong every once and a while?  Yes.  There will certainly be cases, hopefully very few and isolated cases, where children will be wrongly removed from fairly good homes, where the child protection worker will be making a bad decision, because there will be no real risk to the children, and the natural family is loving and good, but still, sometimes child protection workers will make mistakes, and in one of these cases where the child is wrongly removed from a family, the child will end up in a placement where the child will be abused. That is the nature of the system.  What is the solution?  Maybe the solution is to have interventions where teams of people move in and live with the family around the clock so the parents and children are never alone together, thus preventing any abuse, and the teams of people who have entered the household can ensure that the child is never neglected.  That would stop the harm of removing the children from bad placements, and it would stop the harm of the abuses that some children suffer while in foster-care or group homes.  Is it plausible?  Is it feasible?  Maybe it should be, but there is no state where this sort of solution has been proposed, as far as I can tell.  Far more often when I have heard people say is "some people don't really deserve to have children."  I think most people would just rather remove children from families than spend $150,000 per year to have a team of social workers and child care workers intervening in the household and preventing the parents from harming their children.  That is not where our priorities as a society are placed.