Every year hundreds of children die, thousands more are forced to live with strangers, and countless American families are torn apart. This is called a "child protection system." While the problem of child abuse is serious and real, journalist Richard Wexler charges that our solutions to the problem have actually made it worse - in fact, they hurt the very children they were intended to help.
Wexler reinforces his arguments with horrifying descriptions of children summarily removed from their homes, families shattered because of false reports, and children - whose parents are guilty of nothing more than poverty of being thrust into the maelstrom of the chaotic foster-care programme. He writes of severely abused children - those needing the most help - whose cases are ignored because the system diverts scarce resources to trivial or unfounded cases, some are re-injured, sometimes fatally, after their plight has been called to the attention of the authorities.
The culmination of fifteen years of research, Wounded Innocents illustrates how well-meaning efforts to help children have gone terribly wrong and how the current child-protection system desperately needs to be replaced with one that offers real help and hope to abused and neglected children. Wexler has added a powerful new chapter especially for this edition which updates the latest developments and tragedies in the child protection system.
Richard Wexler (Coropolis. PA), a professor of communications at Penn State University, has won more than two dozen journalism awards. He has been a reporter, producer, and/or news director for the Albany Times Union, Wisconsin Public Radio, WGBY Public Television in Springfield, MA and for City Newspaper in Rochester, NY.
429 pages Publication date 21st September, 1995
ISBN 0-87975-936-4
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