Disrupting Social Norms: Eliminating Child abuse and Neglect in our Lifetime
- PDF / 687,943 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 101 Downloads / 167 Views
Disrupting Social Norms: Eliminating Child abuse and Neglect in our Lifetime Richard D. Krugman1,2 · Lori Poland1,3
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
In an effort to accelerate the changing of social norms with regard to how the public and professionals view child abuse and neglect in the United States, we incorporated the National Foundation to End Child Abuse and Neglect in January 2018. The mission of the Foundation is to end child abuse and neglect in our lifetime. The National Foundation to End Child Abuse and Neglect (EndCAN) is unlike any other organization that has entered into the human services field. EndCAN enters the field not as a new organization that will impede and encroach on others, or compete for scarce funds. Instead, it will focus on unifying the field, supporting it by collaborating with foundations in health and education related areas such as heart disease, cancer, suicide, obesity, and zero to three in order to improve research, prevention, education, training, and advocacy. EndCAN has two goals. First, change the public and professional’s perception of child abuse and neglect as a primarily social and legal problem to view them as the health, mental health and public health issues as well. Second, bring the currently siloed field together by financially supporting research, training, prevention and advocacy. We wish to create a larger voice and work together to end child abuse and neglect in our lifetime. We expect that paragraph to create a reaction varying from surprise to skepticism by readers of this commentary partly because those are the very reactions we have had from the hundreds of individuals in our professional community and the public since we first started exploring the idea in July 2017. Those who are surprised “thought there was already such a foundation”. There is not. Those that are skeptical have their own reasons or roll their eyes at the seeming impossibility of the task. Such a reaction suggests * Richard D. Krugman [email protected] 1
National Foundation to End Child Abuse and Neglect, PO Box 102428, Denver, CO 80250, USA
2
University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, USA
3
Denver Counseling Options, Lakewood, CO, USA
to us that the current social norm is to accept child abuse and neglect as akin to the weather: it happens. That ignores the > 1700 annual deaths of children – at least five per day in the US—and the millions of children and adults who live with the pain of having experienced sexual, physical, emotional abuse and neglect that they can never talk about (because another social norm is silence and gaze aversion). The current mode for approaching abuse and neglect often leaves its victims self-treating the pain in ways that often lead to a multitude of struggles like alcoholism, substance abuse, eating disorders, and suicide among a myriad of other health issues. The group, community or culture defines social norms as the accepted behavior of individuals in groups who adhere to unwritten rules
Data Loading...
