Hello everyone. Not much going on in my life right now… just summer school and the increasing hassle of finding a place to live next year.

Anyway, I thought I’d throw out some interesting statistics I learned in my PSC 153 class from first session. You’re all familiar with the mandatory reporting laws for child abuse, right? Well, even if you weren’t, they are pretty self-explanatory… all professionals who regularly come into contact with kids are required by law to report the suspicion of abuse to Child Protective Services (CPS) and to the police. Do you know how often the Child Abuse Hotline gets calls?

Every nine minutes!

By the way, that’s not a national hotline or anything… that’s for the Greater Sacramento Area. Every nine minutes, a case of child abuse is reported. Every twenty-seven minutes, a social worker hears a new allegation of abuse or neglect. (Because some are repeats.) That’s still just under twenty thousand children annually in Sacramento. And every two hours, a child is removed from his or her home. Pulling back to nation-wide numbers… CPS receives about three million referrals for suspicions of maltreatment concerning five million children yearly. About sixty-two percent of these referrals are investigated, and almost one million children are involved in substantiated cases.

You may wonder why only some cases are investigated. It’s partly due to the fact that the average social worker has a caseload of over five hundred children already. With their attention spread so thin, only the most heinous of newer cases are picked up.

To quote Helen Lovejoy, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”