Political Correctness Cooks The Books

This week, I had to be a detective, searching out reasons why reports of child abuse are soaring.

Patrick Fagan and Dorothy Hanks of the Heritage Foundation have released a shocking report from Britain that pins the blame on the family structure in which the child lives. They found:

The safest environment for a child, not surprisingly, is when he or she lives with married biological parents.

A child whose mother married a stepfather is six times as likely to suffer physical, emotional, or sexual abuse as one in a home with married natural parents.

Even more dangerous is growing up in a home where the biological mother lives alone. The child is 14 times more likely to be injured than one with married biological parents.

Sadly, it gets worse.

If the boy or girl is living with natural parents who are unmarried, but cohabiting, the child has 20 times the risk of suffering abuse than the most stable family form.

“The rate of abuse is 33 times higher if the child is living with a mother who is cohabitating with a man who is not the father.”

Similar risks can be seen in statistics concerning murders of British children. The greatest peril for children is if their mother is living with a non-natural father. Those children are 73 times more likely to be murdered than children in a home with married, natural parents.

Are American kids abandoned by their father in as much danger as those in Britain?

It’s difficult to tell because U.S. studies of child abuse don’t ask whether an abused or neglected child is living with a cohabiting person. Why the question is not asked is a mystery.

But in 1996, the National Center of Child Abuse and Neglect published its third major study of the 2.8 million reported cases of child abuse - a figure that has soared 146 percent since 1980.

It did contain some useful data. Children living in single-parent families with income less than $15,000 a year are twice as likely to be abused as those in homes with incomes between $15,000 and $30,000, and 16 times more apt to be injured than in homes with $30,000 income.

But some of the data are downright confusing.

U.S. children living with single parents face a 77 percent greater risk of physical abuse than do children with two parents, according to Michael Kharten of the Center on Child Abuse. They are 87 percent more likely to suffer physical neglect and 80 percent more likely to be inflicted with serious injury such as broken bones, cigarette burns, etc.

But those figures are not even double the risk faced by a child living with his natural parents. How could the British study, “Broken Homes and Battered Children,” report that living with a single biological mother is 14 times more dangerous than living with one’s married natural parents? If anything, U.S. kids should be at much greater risk, since Britain is a fairly homogenous culture, compared to the wild cacophony of America’s clashing cultures.

The key word here is “married.” It is an odious word to U.S. sociologists.

“The U.S. data is misleading because it blurs three categories into one set of numbers,” said Dorothy Hanks, one of the Heritage authors.

For example, by simply combining cohabiting parent couples who are 20 times more risky than married parent couples, the kids in the lumped-together groups are about 10 times more likely to get hurt than those with married parents, according to the British data. By comparison, a child with a single mom is 14 times more at risk, only slightly worse off.

But for heaven’s sake, why lump together cohabiting, stepparent and natural parents?

Privately, some researchers at the Center for Child Abuse agree. But it is politically incorrect to suggest that single moms, stepfamilies and cohabiting couples are a disaster in protecting children from harm.

Contrary to public perceptions, Heritage says, research shows that the most likely physical abuser of a young child will be that child’s mother.

It is time for the U.S. Government to give the facts to the American people, says the Heritage Foundation’s Patrick Fagan. Only then can we decide what steps are needed to protect kids.

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