child abuse

I love, scratch that, am addicted to reality TV. I’ve never missed a season of Big Brother. I jumped on board during the second seasons of Amazing Race and Survivor. Every season I say I’m not going to waste my time. Then its, “Well, I’ll just watch the first show to see what the twist is.” I don’t make any false statements at that point, I simply watch. It must be an illness yet I DO have a line and NBC has crossed it with Baby Borrowers.

Ok, so, I know I’m late to this slumber party but honestly, when I heard of Baby Borrowers a few months ago I was sure it would be cancelled before it aired. The premise was just too terrible. Apparently it’s been aired and is in fact nearing its conclusion.

We are faced with so many terrible problems in the United States and around the world. Child abuse is an unforgivable and unimaginable act yet it happens more than we would like to think. In 2005 approximately 899,000 children were abused or neglected. That number does not take into account abuse not reported or confirmed. The vast majority of these children (62.8%) were neglected. We prefer to think when abuse happens that the perpetrators are strangers but they are more often than not the parents of the child (79.4%). The most surprising statistic to me is that women were the abuser 58% of the time, but women typically are with children more than men and are often the primary caregiver.