akmom said:
Yeah, I definitely think society has come a long way in valuing children's rights over privacy, which in cases of ongoing abuse is the correct balance. Frankly, there's a lot of crummy people who need to be held accountable by more than their own under-developed consciences. But I think the most people are good, and still do the occasional awful thing, so we should look at it in terms of patterns rather than isolated incidents.
My dad pushed my (then teen) sister down the stairs in anger once, which is clearly not okay. He had severe remorse over it. I'm pretty sure she'd be in foster care if anyone reported it, and I don't think that would have been a good outcome. Also, I locked my infant in a car alone, in a grocery store parking lot, in -20 degree weather. I had to run inside (alone) just to call a locksmith, since my phone got locked in too. If anyone saw that, it'd look pretty bad. I'm glad I never had my mistakes recorded and publicly judged.
From what I know about child welfare in most countries, they do look at patterns, rather than isolated incidents. Kids don't end up in foster care because of single incidents. These days, even kids who I think would be better off in foster care, often don't end up there. It really is a last resort, only used in extreme circumstances. If someone reported your dad, t is much, much more likely that he would have had to get some anger management training which, if his anger caused him to loose control far enough to push his own daughter down the stairs, was possibly something he could have benefited from. The common belief that if you report something the kids will end up in foster care is really not true, and is becoming less and less true as time passes and welfare organisations acquire more knowledge and more tools with which to help families, rather than break them apart.
The thing one has to keep in mind is that most abusive parents are really good at hiding their true nature, and they also train the kids to hide it well - it is very rarely obvious, and if people are too scared to report unless they are 100% sure, well, then the kids are left to fend for themselves. I know you think that most people are good, and I agree that the average parent has their children's best interests at heart, but there aren't special communities where child abusers live, far from everyone else. They live among us. They can be your neighbour, the car behind you in the school drop-off queue, the mom who sits behind you at the school concert. Yes, child abusers even go to school concerts and PTA meetings - it's part of the facade.
In short - incidents should be reported. Someone who is trained in child welfare is much more capable of judging whether an incident is simply a human error, or if something more serious is going on, than the average person.
