One of the advantages of being in juvenile court is that what happens there is confidential to protect the young person from a stigma that might inhibit his or her chances from moving beyond the child's present situation. It is terribly important to maintain that.
But one of the problems with the confidentiality is that the public simply does not know the number of lives and heartbreaking severity of the problems that are dealt with in our State of
Alabama juvenile system, yes even in Blount County, that we tout as a perfect place to raise children.
In Blount County alone, the system deals with, well I'm just going to say hundreds of children each year, because I don't really know. I suspect it is more than a thousand. Some more informed reader may let us know by commenting. They come through the system in two primary ways, delinquency and dependency. Delinquency is when a child under the age of eighteen is charged with a crime. Dependency is when a child is in a situation when he or she has no one appropriate to take care of them, or suffers abuse or abandonment.
This is where the confidentiality is a problem. The public needs to know how much our children are suffering and the horrible, deplorable things that happen to them. But the details offer too much chance of identification and that is prohibited.
So I will post a fictional story every once in a while for the next few weeks describing some common situations of drugs, abandonment, abuse, neglect, and the predictable yet horrible behavior that those circumstances elicit from a child. Unfortunately they have become common to me. But they should be shocking.
For now I would like to raise this issue because the State of Alabama is cutting back on services. You may have heard.
And right now, one of the main areas for the cuts is in the services we provide to our troubled and endangered youth. Thousands of kids in life or death situations will be without needed services, protection and guidance.
At graduations around the world, and certainly across Alabama, the cliche was piously proclaimed thousands of times during the past month:
"Our children are our future."
We'll see.
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As a teacher I see some of these children on a daily basis ...granted, I do not know, or comprehend, exactly what they must be going through. I do know that it is not a random case here and there, but that kids are hurting right under our noses ... lots of kids. It breaks my heart that the most vulnerable in our society are the ones often the most neglected. Yet services and programs in schools and communities continue to be cut .... and cut and cut. When will we learn to put our time and money into our future?
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