Welcome

                Hello, my name is Jessica and would like to first of all welcome to my blog. My blog is going to address the heavy, and sometimes taboo, subject of child abuse. I was a victim of mental, emotional, and physical abuse through my childhood and teen years. This blog a work in progress, as much as it is a   journey for me to see what is out there in the form of literature & statistics, ads and public service announcements. It is also a place where I want to pursue and understand all of the different facets that encompass child abuse. I want focusing mainly on the causes, prevention and awareness. I guess that is kind of broad focus, but I feel like to understand prevention of child abuse you have to understand the causes.

                If you haven’t read my “About Me” page I would suggest you do so to understand what I am about to say next. So go ahead click on the link above if you haven’t already.

It seems to me as a society we don’t really see the problem associated with child abuse correctly. We just see the symptoms. Most often, it seems, when a child is abused the child is just taken from the home and put in foster care. It appears to fix the problem. The child isn’t being abused anymore, but that isn’t really the heart of the problem, that’s just a band aid patch. In reality the child doesn’t always want to be taken from their parents, who are most often the abusers. They don’t want to leave school, or their friends. They don’t want to leave their family behind, go into foster care, and live with strangers. They don’t want to be in an unfamiliar place. If you read my about me page you would see that I had that issue. I had the choice to leave my family, but I didn’t. I just didn’t want to be abused anymore, I wanted my parents to love me, not hit me.  

Another example of how I believe we treat the symptoms and not the problem would be the use of crisis hotlines. Do they really help? I have seen some amazing ad campaigns that are seem as though they are able to reach child, but I don’t believe they do. I know I would never have called a crisis hotline to share my woes of life at the hands of my abuser.

I believe we need to reconsider how we approach prevention and awareness of child abuse. To end I would just like to say that I think that if we address the causes of child abuse, in our society, with parents and make them aware, that is the prevention.