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Aussie group blames social isolation for child abuse
Filed under: Health & Safety: Babies, Media
Down in Australia, the National Association for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect
(NAPCAN) blames social isolation, along with other factors including poverty, inadequate services and substance abuse,
for the increase in child abuse rates, which have doubled there over the past five years. NAPCANs state
president, Pat Jewell, also blamed the increase in working parents on the disintegration of community.
I can see NAPCANs point - after all, these are no longer the days when you can trust the village to help keep your child safe. When my mom was growing up, all the women in the neighborhood kept an eye out, and you couldn't spit on the sidewalk without your mother hearing about it two minutes later. These days, in many communities, people don't even know their neighbors. But is that a result of "working parents", or something else? People have always worked, even back when we all lived in villages. So what is it about today's society that's so much more isolating?
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ReaderComments (Page 1 of 1)
12-18-2005 @ 7:13PM
Ann Adams said...I grew up in the 40's and 50's in a small (10,000) town in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. We had two major factories and several smaller industries, four grade schools (one Catholic) and one high school. We had half a dozen churches. My grandfather retired from one of the factories, my dad from the other. Most of the people in town worked for the factories, or supporting businesses. My mom's family had been farming there since the 1700's; my dad's since around the Civil War. We were the village of "it takes a village" with all the good and bad that goes with growing up in a small town.
With my generation and the short-lived prosperity of the 50's, kids started leaving after graduation from high school or college. More kids could afford college - the depression was over. At the same time, industry began its exodus to the south and as people retired, they weren't replaced. When the last of my mom's brothers died, the farm was sold to people who have turned it into a country estate. Beautiful, but non-functional.
That village is now a bedroom community for Utica, 10 miles away or maybe even Syracuse, 60 miles away. When I was a kid, a trip to Utica was an event and Syracuse took days of preparation. Now my home town is just a village between exits on the NY State Thruway. I don't know if there's anything left of the two factories who, incidentally, were ahead of their time in their treatment of employees.
I guess we can call it progress. Much of the 50's was pretty awful and vestiges still linger today, but the bedroom communities seem to have lost much of the closeness that existed between neighbors. It's hard to be neighborly when most of your life consists of working and commuting. When do you have time to chat over the fence or sit down for coffee?
When my neighbor's sister died a while back, I took dinner to her and her visiting relatives. She almost cried - said no one did that anymore. Pity - that's part of what we've lost.
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