Letters

Child abuse
EDITOR: I hesitate to quarrel with a magazine which provides such an important service to Illinois citizens, but 1 have serious problems with William Syers July Illinois Issues article on child abuse. Of course we need to know the statistics, and we need to know about the law. But there is such a curious distance in the whole article. Child abusers are they: the paragraph on the "typical child abuser" puts all us intellectuals reading the article comfortably out of the picture. We can cluck our tongues with concern, but it's not us or anyone we know, unless we happen to be social workers.

Child abuse is not a "modern" problem, nor is it "growing." What is growing is our ability to find out about it. And the place where we find it most easily is with the poor and the ignorant, the losers, the victims who tend to get pushed around by society for their own good. The people who don't fit into the system are almost always the ones who are caught in the act.

The rest of us, the more or less educated ones who can see farther ahead than the next meal, may be damaging our children just as badly. We usually stop short of doing what we could be prosecuted for. And our family doctors are extremely reluctant to do anything that might make waves, like reporting a suspicious injury. They have to live in the community too.

We must all count ourselves in on the issue of child abuse and neglect. As long as we stand back from it, we are part of the problem.

C. H. Smith

October 1977 / Illinois Issues / 31