Hard Times for Kids Too

A New Orleans man who had just lost his job slammed his baby against a wall until it lost consciousness. An Atlanta real estate agent, under severe stress when his commissions dropped drastically, lost his temper and beat his five-year-old daughter so severely she had to be hospitalized. Such incidents suggest that economic strain is an increasingly important factor in child abuse. Says Jerry White, director of protection services for the Georgia human resources department: "It's a consequence of the economic crisis that people do not think about."

To be sure, the figures on child abuse were going up well before the recession, owing partly to better methods of reporting. Indeed, some experts believe that violent abuse and neglect are now the largest causes of death among U.S. children. According to figures kept by the National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect, there were 280 cases of child abuse reported per million population in 1972, 348 in 1973 and 380 in 1974.

This increase has been caused, says Dr. Vincent Fontana, head of the New York City task force on child abuse, by "the stresses and strains that our society is suffering today--the frustrations, the poor quality of life, the increase in drug addiction and alcoholism." Fontana, like other child-abuse experts, expects things to get even worse this year with unemployment on the rise. Preliminary figures seem to bear him out. Wayne County, Mich. (Detroit), reported 219 cases in the first two months of 1975, compared with 163 in the same period of 1974. In Fulton County, Ga. (Atlanta), the number of cases jumped from 175 during January 1974 to 335 in January 1975.

LaVerne Braddock, a caseworker in Wayne County, says she has "never run into so many cases of child abuse in so-called stable families as I have in the past two months. Parents say they can't afford to feed their children. They just lash out at whatever is there."

People who lose their jobs often suffer a loss of self-esteem and experience unfocused rage, and there is also the simple fact that an out-of-work father has to deal with his children more because he is at home. "Suddenly a man who used to see his child an hour or two a day is exposed to him for hours at a time," says Dr. Henry C. Kempe, director of the National Center. The fact that so many mothers now live with a man other than the child's father causes extra strain as well, says Kempe, especially when "the boy friend is out of work, the kid is bugging him, he's not the father and he hates the guy who was."

No one knows why one person takes out his frustrations on children and another does not. But to some extent violence runs in families. As Louis Jolyon West, chairman of U.C.L.A.'s psychiatry department, puts it, "There is a remarkable likelihood that parents who batter have been battered themselves as children." New York City's Fontana sees child abuse not only as a self-perpetuating problem but as a training ground for general violence as well. "The eleven, twelve-and 13-year-old murderers we see today," he says, "come from violent homes where they were battered."

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