Child Abuse Culture

By now everyone with a TV knows of the underage girls and some boys abused in Texas. Authorities there have taken legal action against an entire community. While I think that's wrong, that cases should have been handled individually from the start, let's consider now the mostly unreported and unremarked upon abuse that goes on in our cities every day. In yesterday's Tribune, Dawn Turner Trice speaks out, "We cannot ignore men abusing girls":

Mary Cozzens and Ele Santini are social workers who have worked for years in the acute rehab unit of their Melrose Park hospital. About six months ago, they were asked to help out in the obstetrics unit. That's when they noticed several cases of young girls, ages 12, 13 and 14, who were either pregnant or new moms.

But that wasn't the shocking part of this tale. Neither was it that the girls' boyfriends, the doting fathers, were grown men, ages 18, 19 and 20. In these situations, hospital staffers are required to contact the state Department of Children and Family Services. So that's what Cozzens and Santini did.

The women say the really shocking part of this story is DCFS representatives often seemed rather lukewarm about these cases. DCFS spokesman Jimmy Whitlow confirmed a list of conditions under which the agency steps in, including that the man who impregnated the girl is a parent, caregiver, immediate family member, someone residing in the home, the parent's paramour, or someone else responsible for the child's welfare. Otherwise, it's not a DCFS matter, he told me. It's a police matter.

"We were told that if it's a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, DCFS doesn't follow up," Cozzens said. She said she pressed one DCFS representative until finally he took the information and said he would call the police.

The Cook County state's attorney's office, by the way, said DCFS is always supposed to contact the police in these cases.

Are you as angry as I am?

But wait, this story gets better. The women said they themselves have contacted area police departments, including Melrose Park's. "Officers said there was little they could do if the parents of the girls didn't press charges," Cozzens said.

Lt. John Simpson, the Melrose Park officer in charge of the department's juvenile division, told me he wasn't aware of any such cases. "Who am I to set my culture on somebody else's?" he said, adding that many of the girls are immigrants who come from cultures in which this is acceptable.

So when I asked about the laws of this country—Illinois law in particular, which says 17 is the legal age at which a young person can consent to sex—he said, "You want the honest-to-God truth? I don't know the law."

This is the consequence of a liberal culture of neglect, of sexualizing at younger and younger ages, of moral equivocation, and of sanctuary cities, which over time erode the moral fabric of society and the rule of law for all.

Then there are the online predators after teens. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-10th), covering points north of Chicago, alerts parents to Second Life, complete with virtual rape rooms and drug dens.