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March/April 2003
The $ubtle War Against Children by Yvonne M. Vissing
This campaign has constructed a complicated ideology that masks how desperate individual battles, one after another, force young lives into conditions of misery and despair. When looked at en masse, the pattern of these assaults becomes clear. They constitute nothing less than a concerted attack against children in general, and poor children in particular. Poverty, hunger, homelessness, illiteracy, and illness are not accidents, but the natural result of systematic and strategic choices made to deny children the essential ingredients for survival. War, in the simplest definition, is a set of public and private acts of hostility forcing conditions upon a group that paralyze it and make its members incapable of successfully acting on their own behalf. The current assault on the lives of children is more than the "juvenile discrimination" described by child advocate and psychiatrist Dr. Jack Westman twenty - five years ago. The systematic denial of elements necessary to positive health and development is forcing millions of children into unnecessary suffering, morbidity, and mortality. According to UNICEF, in this decade there has been "a global undeclared war" on women, children, and adolescents. Poverty, conflict, chronic social instability, and preventable diseases such as HIV/AIDS threaten their human rights and sabotage their development. In a $30 trillion global economy, 1.2 billion people - a quarter of the human race - live in conditions of almost unimaginable suffering and want. Despite unprecedented global prosperity, a staggering forty percent of all children in developing countries - over half a billion - are struggling to survive on less than $1 per day. Poverty is the main underlying cause of millions of preventable child deaths each year. It is the cause of tens of millions of children going hungry, missing out on school, or being forced into child labor. Poverty causes lifelong damage to children's minds and bodies, perpetuating the cycle of poverty across generations. Yet even our democracy, which prides itself
on the notion of equality and freedom, has joined the war against
improving the lives of
children. Poverty has been inflicted upon innocent children in
quiet, almost indiscernible, but quite methodical steps. We have
what Marion Wright Edelman refers to as "a Third World within," for
many children in our nation of affluence live in conditions that
are little different from those in Forty years ago this nation made a commitment to eradicate child poverty and to improve young people's lot in life. In doing so, society as a whole benefited. But many of the efforts designed to nurture the minds, bodies, and spirits of children under President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and Great Society programs have been dismantled. The carefully woven safety nets have been ripped apart, thread by thread, and now are incapable of catching more than a few lucky ones. These slow and incremental, subtle attacks have accumulated monumental impact. Initially hard to discern, the assaults on children have been waged by smiling people in designer suits and carefully coiffed hair. They've assured us it's something other than war. But it takes only a moment of looking at the evidence to realize that children are "under the gun." Millions of young lives are strategically endangered. Consider the hard, cold facts. Poverty. About forty - one percent of US children under age six live in or near poverty. Over twelve million children exist on $13,290 or less in a family of three , or under $17,029 in a family of four. One in three of all African - American and Latino children live below the poverty line. It's not as if their parents have abandoned them. More than three - fourths of children in poverty - 77.6% - live in families where someone works. Families face enormous obstacles in seeking to lift themselves out of poverty, especially when there are few jobs, low wages, no benefits, and high housing costs. In many communities, fewer than half the entry level jobs can be reached by public transportation, and many low income families do not own cars. Even people who once had good jobs have found themselves downsized, laid off, and unable to meet their bills. Data released from the 2000 census show that in
some counties in the
In the Homelessness. Poverty begets all
kinds of medical, emotional, and social problems. If children have
a place they can call home, they fare better. But increasing numbers
of children find that simple dream to be elusive. The number of
homeless people is at its highest in a decade at most places across
the A family is at risk of homelessness when
it spends fifty percent of its income on housing costs. If tragedy
were to
strike and all expenses had to be paid out of savings, most families
lack a cushion that goes beyond a couple of months. Homelessness
is thus no longer an experience only of the destitute: it is an
increasingly common occurrence for middle - class families as well.
A recent Urban Institute study found that of an estimated 3.5 million
people who are homeless in the Despite a fifty percent increase in unemployment since November
2000, housing prices have stayed at or near historic highs. Requests
for emergency shelter by families with children in twenty - five What has been the pattern of response to people in need? Increasingly, it has been a colder heart, in which young victims are blamed for their homelessness and poverty. Helping resources are being depleted; there aren't enough beds in shelters (the new American poor - house) for those who need them; and many shelters have taken on a hotel mentality in which the homeless are required to pay if they want to stay. The best solution is to help homeless families find affordable housing. But across the nation, this is increasingly difficult: new houses cost, on average, a quarter of a million dollars. It's even difficult to afford an apartment, since that means coming up with a security deposit and first and last month's rent as well as paying monthly rent and utilities. It's difficult to have anything left for food, gasoline, or medical care. While handouts to corporations are plentiful, children and their parents find that help from the government is almost nowhere to be found. Nearly half a century ago, when homelessness was not nearly the problem it is now, the Housing Act of 1949 authorized the creation of 810,000 units of housing over six years. Later the Johnson Administration proposed legislation to fund the creation of six million units of affordable housing in ten years, or 600,000 units per year. The Ford Administration requested over 400,000 Section 8 vouchers in 1976. But for 2003, the Bush budget request is for the creation of only 34,000 housing units - despite skyrocketing demand. This administration also announced a thirty percent cut in operating funds for public housing, while the House Appropriations Committee approved a bill to cut $938 million from the federal budget for rental vouchers, historically one of the government's main methods for paying to house the homeless. The federal government's hard - heartedness has trickled down
to local levels. Health. Worldwide, easily preventable diseases, such as pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, and measles, account for the deaths of nearly eleven million children under the age of five each year. Approximately 1.3 billion people lack safe water, and over half of the developing world's population (2.6 billion people) is without access to adequate sanitation. Yet if the world were to invest an extra thirty cents out of every $100, all children would be healthy, well nourished, and in school. In the Medicaid and CHIP programs are being cut across the nation because of federal mandates. The Children's Defense Fund, along with more than 130 national groups representing tens of millions of members committed to children's healthcare, appealed to Congress to preserve $2.7 billion in expiring CHIP funds. Despite their efforts, to date, our nation's youngest, neediest population is still waiting for strategic action to protect its health.
The current war strategy against children seems clear, and conditions for children are going to get worse.. Americans with average incomes of over a million dollars will be handed an astonishing $121 billion in tax cuts in the year 2010 alone - more than those for all the rest of American taxpayers combined, according to an analysis of the Bush tax cuts by Citizens for Tax Justice. From 2001 to 2010, the wealthiest one percent of Americans with average incomes over a million dollars will pocket almost a half trillion dollars from the tax cuts, with each member of this elite group averaging $342,000 over the decade. The tax cut skyrockets for those at the very top. By 2010 it grows to give the wealthiest taxpayers average tax cuts 180 times bigger than the tax cuts for the bottom sixty percent of Americans earning less than $59,000 a year. By 2010, when the Bush tax reductions are fully in place, an astonishing fifty - two percent of the total tax cuts will go to the wealthiest one percent, whose individual windfall in that year alone will average $85,000. The repeal of the estate tax accounts for $50 billion of the total $121 billion tax cut for the rich in 2010 - with a whopping ninety - one percent of the estate tax cut going to the top one percent. Taxpayers with average incomes of around $1 million would take forty - two percent of the value of the proposed dividend tax cut too, according to the Urban Institute/Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. At this time it is clear that there will be no aid for children. Most families have already received the only tax rebate they will ever see from the current tax plans, and the minute amount received by poor and middle - income people in no way comes close to compensating them for the new expenses they must endure because of cuts in other essential areas of their lives. Housing. Food. Clothing. Schools. Health insurance. Day care. Bush recently announced yet another $674 billion tax cut proposal. It includes eliminating taxes individuals pay on stock dividends. For the cost of eliminating the dividend tax, the government could provide comprehensive health care for all 9.2 million uninsured American children and Head Start for all unserved eligible preschoolers, and prepare them for school and a productive future. What does our collective behavior say about us? We have become a society that allows a third to a half of its youngest citizens to live in poverty. If we systematically fail to introduce children into a peaceful, full, and joyful expression of life, what kind of future can our society anticipate? There is an alternative to the war on children. When children have decent food to eat, warm homes and beds, when they have "enough," we have a chance of embracing a different future. Peace and the end of poverty are interwoven. Poverty reduction must begin with the protection and realization of the human rights of children. Investments in children are the best guarantee for achieving equitable and sustainable human development. If we wish to create a peaceful tomorrow, then action for economic justice is our only choice today.
Yvonne Vissing,
PHD, is Professor of Sociology at Salem State College in Salem,
©2003 Fellowship of Reconciliation |
Unlike the overt war against terrorism, a
covert war is being waged against children. Weapons of mass destruction
jeopardize
the lives of the future of our nation - indeed, the future of the
world. Yet the most serious weapons affecting them are not
tanks, aircraft, or missiles, nor are they biological, chemical,
or nuclear. Rather, the weapons are terrible economic, political,
and social decisions that are fueled by collective indifference,
neglect, discrimination, and denial.