Does Colorado Really Care About Its Most Vulnerable Children?

Child abuse injuries and deaths have been headlining the morning papers and leading the evening news stories. Absent from press coverage, however, is what happens to these children after they are removed from abusive homes. Even for those kids lucky enough to be placed in a loving foster home, the trauma of abuse, neglect or violence has already done significant mental, physical and emotional damage. Love, alone, cannot heal these children – trauma requires intensive and often extensive mental health intervention. Such treatment, while effective, is expensive. This is where the continuum of support that vulnerable children should be able to count on can fail them.

What is trauma? Child victims of sexual abuse, neglect and exposure to violence suffer from trauma, which affects every aspect of their life: brain development, sexual development, language development, and memory development. Traumatized children suffer from anxiety, impulsivity, aggression, sleep problems, depression, respiratory and heart problems, vulnerability to substance abuse, developmental delays and school failure. Difficulties in trusting others and establishing meaningful relationships also form part of the host of problems these children display. Child protection policies mandate that child abuse is reported, and that child victims are removed from abusive homes. But trauma does not do not go away simply because the child is now in a place of safety.

The neurological pathways in the brains of traumatized children have been disrupted, and without treatment, they cannot heal. Most will not grow up into normal adults. Traumatized children cannot interact normally with their peers or adults, and they cannot learn in school! We can fulminate all we want about the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” but expecting a traumatized child to ace the CSAP is an exercise in futility. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2006 study on “Long-Term Consequences of Child Abuse and Neglect” about 30 percent of abused and neglected children will later abuse their own children, are 59 percent more likely to be arrested as a juvenile, 28 percent more likely to be arrested as an adult, and 30 percent more likely to commit violent crime. We see these cases in the headlines too, when traumatized kids crack and commit horrible violence. We typically try them as adults and lock them away for life.

There are traumatized kids throughout our community living lives of desperate misery in dysfunctional homes. In 2009, the Denver Department of Human Services conducted investigations of 6,845 cases of child neglect, 2,728 cases of physical abuse and 1,081 sexual abuse allegations. These children can be healed, and even the most fractured families with multi-generational histories of abuse and violence can be strengthened, but it isn’t cheap. As a society, we seem unwilling to make that investment in repairing our most vulnerable citizens, preferring instead to wait until they are grown and ready to be absorbed the criminal justice system, which has ample funding. Of course, kicking the can down the road increases the cost exponentially. At DCAC, our most expensive case last year involved a little girl who had been brutally beaten, sexually assaulted, and starved from the time she was a toddler until her Kindergarten teacher raised the alarm. It costs $22,000 to provide intensive mental health treatment and support for her foster mother, but she is now on the road to recovery. In contrast, just one year of prison costs more than $30,000. But of course, it is much easier for policymakers to justify the urgent need for prisons to “keep us safe.” The answer, they say, is for charities to tap into private resources.

We are a charity, and like all charities we strive to raise public and private funding to meet the needs of the people we serve. The recession has made this very, very difficult. As half of the traumatized children we serve at DCAC are ages 1-6, when brain development is at its peak, we are acutely aware of the urgency of meeting their mental health care needs immediately as if we fail, they may pay for it in poor mental and physical development that will create life-long health problems. They also run the risk of juvenile detention, adult prison, and perpetuation of the cycle of abuse and violence with their own children.

We know that we’re not the only nonprofit struggling to protect children as the funds to do so dry up. Our question is why are our elected representatives failing to connect the dots between child abuse, lack of treatment for traumatized children, and the very, very expensive – in both financial and human terms – for these children’s future when public funding is cut.

There are little children for whom the clock is ticking and who desperately need treatment for their trauma. When teenagers commit terrible acts of violence, as a society we ask ourselves how a child could commit such an evil act. The answer, in many cases, is that we know the reason, but we choose to ignore it.

Mandy Rigg,
Fundraising Consultant and Grant Writer


The Denver Children’s Advocacy Center (DCAC) works to improve the lives of children traumatized by sexual abuse and violence—as well as those who are at high-risk —with prevention, education and direct services.