When I was younger, I was abused. No one gets to choose who they are born to, and who I was born to was a horrible person. My mother didn’t want another kid, so she called me her mistake. I was physically and mentally abused for years. No kid wants to be abused, and yes, I survived it and am now thriving in my forever home with a wonderful mother, but not every child gets that opportunity. The government needs to take funds out of the military and provide more money to caseworkers to visit every child once a month to check on them. Not only will the amount of child abuse be reduced, but it will also give children a trusted person to help them.
Kids that are being abused are not getting the help they need. “Facts and Stats about Child Abuse” from the Child Advocacy Center informs us that “3.6 million cases of child abuse are reported every year in the U.S.” This connects with The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Child Welfare and Foster Care Statistics, which states that only “203,770 children under 18 entered foster care in the United States,” When you do the math, this is only about 6% of kids receiving a foster care placement. Both of these sources indicate that people aren’t hearing kids out when they need help, and when they do reach out, only some cases that are “bad enough” or are looked into by people carefully are taken on. I was lucky enough to be taken in as one of those cases, but only because my biological mother had landed herself in prison. In extreme cases, kids whose parents end up doing time are only looked at because they have nowhere else to go, and the state has to look at us. But what about those other kids whose parents go undetected? This is a huge problem because when kids do not have enough courage to get help from an adult or trusted person, no one seems to be there to help them.
Suppose the government takes out some funding from the Department of Defense and puts it in a Human Services budget for caseworkers. In that case, the amount of child abuse each year would decrease. According to the article, “U.S. Department of Defense Biden Signs National Defense Authorization Act Into Law,” “Signing the National Defense Authorization Act into law [is] allotting $816.7 billion to the Defense Department.” As you can see, a lot of money is going towards our Defense Department in 2024. We will spend $32.6 billion just on ships. The U.S. Naval Institute’s “USNI News Fleet and Marine Tracker: Dec. 28, 2023” explains that we have 291 ships that were built in 2023. Only 46 of those were deployed, and 52 were underway for the upcoming year. That’s only 98 ships. What happened to the other 193 ships? That money that just gets used to build ships that, most of the time, sit in water could be getting used to provide social workers with more job opportunities, more money, and better training so they would know what to do in situations where this is a kid being abused.
More evidence to help you think about this comes from the U.S. Treasury financial data article “How Much Has the U.S. Government Spent This Year?” This article helped me determine that the U.S. budget for 2023 was $6.1 trillion. While 14% went toward defense, and only 3% went toward education, training, and employment. That means defense got 11% more than education, training, employment, and social services. That would round up to about $854 trillion in military spending compared to education and social services, which only got about $183 trillion, meaning that the military got $671 trillion more than social services. That’s a lot of money for just one category. I think if we at least take out one to two billion dollars of that and put it into our social services, then we can more than afford the monthly visits that could help kids a lot. It might seem like a lot of money is getting shifted, but it’s not even a dent in the budget for our military. These monthly visits could save kids, and without the safety of the future kids, then there is no future at all.
Considering all the facts about child abuse and how many cases occur each year, we know that most of the time, kids don’t get the help they need. Looking into the military’s budget can help us consider putting some of it into the category that goes to caseworkers and increase the number of children getting help. When I was younger, I was lucky to be heard and saved. Some kids don’t get the privileges I got, but the plan I described would increase the likelihood that they could. Remember: saving a child is saving the future.
Author’s note:
If you see anything happening to a child, like abuse or anything non-professional, you can always look up your local police station to tell them. In the DC area, you can call The Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at (202) 671-SAFE or (202) 671-7233.
