Washington, February 07: Reports say an American child becomes the victim of domestic and social violence every ten seconds in the US and the number of the abused kids has increased over the past decade.
Many children in the United States are victims of physical and sexual abuse within their families, schools and communities.
As child poverty grew in 38 states and the rate has hit more than 20 percent in the US, poor children in particular are at higher risk of experiencing different forms of violence that have psychological impacts on children’s development.
“Nearly 8 million children lived with at least one parent who was actively seeking employment but was unemployed in 2010. This is double the number in 2007, just three years earlier,” said Laura Speer, associate director for policy reform and data at the Casey Foundation.
The problem of violence against children is so much more acute in the US than anywhere else in the industrialized world, said president of Every Child Matters foundation Michael Petit.
The child maltreatment death rate in the US is triple Canada’s and 11 times that of Italy. Millions of children are reported as abused and neglected every year, Petit stated.
It is also reported that more than 20,000 American children have been killed in their own homes by family members.
According to the law in the United States, underage criminals cannot face the death penalty but dozens of offenders imprisoned for crimes committed when they were young teenagers will still die behind bars.
Many reports have revealed that the US teen criminals are imprisoned in adult jails and many of them who are physically weak are abused even more when in prison.
The prisons in several states use an ‘adult crime, adult time’ argument for children and believe that minors who commit adult crimes should be punished as adults.