Child abuse, crime and other social issues.

Child abuse has occurred since ancient times, when children were considered property and were forced into hard labor.  During the industrial revolution, children were placed into apprenticeships, factories, mills, and farms to work long hours, receive little pay and be denied an education.  Read more here. Children have been subject to physical, sexual and emotional abuse since the beginning of humanity. Not so long ago, only about 40-45 years, child abuse was considered a family matter.  Although there are agencies and laws in place now, child abuse continues to be a significant social problem.  As recently as the 1950s and 1960s, if child abuse was suspected, outsiders looked the other way.  The abuse was considered a family matter.  In 1960, physician C. Henry Kempe began to notice an unusual number of unexplained broken bones and fractures in his pediatric service.   Kempe and some of his colleagues researched the issue and in 1962 they published “The Battered Child Syndrome” in The Journal of the American Medical Association. The paper was considered to be important in creating awareness about child abuse.  A copy if the paper can be found here. Radiology uncovered physical abuse in children, but sexual abuse wouldn’t be recognized until the 1970s and emotional abuse wouldn’t be acknowledged until the 1980s and 1990s.  In 1974, the first federal child welfare law, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, was passed.  There have been numerous amendments to the law over the years.  While we have made great strides in fighting child abuse, we have not succeeded in eliminating it.

So far, there is not a final report for 2009 on the FBI’s website for crime in the United States.  There is, however, a priliminary report for 2009 states that law enforcement agencies in the nation show a 4.4 percent decrease of violent crime reported in the first half of 2009.  This category includes murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault.  Property crime, defined as burglary, larceny-theft and motor theft, decreased 6.6 percent in the first half of the year.  Again, these are only rimes reported to law enforcement agencies.  There are more conclusive statistics on the 2008 crime report. The report states the 1,382,012 violent crimes that were reported took place in 2008.  There are 308,828,772 people in the U.S. according to the government’s census website. That is a .45 percent chance of becoming a victim of violent crime in the U.S.  There were 9,767,915 occurences of property crime in the nation.  A person has a 3 percent chance becoming a victim of property theft.  In comparison to Houston’s statistics, the national average shows that there is 1.6 percent less chance of becoming a victim of a violent crime and 2 percent less of a chance of becoming a victim of a property crime than in Houston.   There will be comparisons of Houston’s crime statistics to its region and state in later posts.

According to the Houston Police Department uniform crime report, crime does not very much from month to month.  Crime statistics from January to December 2009 show that there were 296 murders, 818 rapes, 11,359 robberies and 13,294 aggravated assaults, totaling 25,767 violent crimes in the city of Houston.  The City of Houston website states that as of January 2010, there were 2,257,412 people in Houston.  Let’s assume the most of the rape victims were female.  It has been shown that 50 percent of Houston’s population is female. This means that roughly one in every 1,380 women in Houston will be raped in one year’s time.  Out of the entire population, one in 7,626 people will be murdered,one in 199 will be robbed and one in 170 will be assaulted.  It was found that there were 119,674 non-violent crimes in Houston in 2009.  This number breaks down to 28,749 burglaries, 76,184 thefts and 14,741 auto-thefts.  This translates to one in 79 people being burglarized, one in 30 becoming victims of theft and one in 153 becoming victims of auto-theft.  There is less than a 2 percent chance of becoming a victim of violent crime in Houston and just over a 5 percent chance of becoming a victim of a non-violent crime.  In all, there is less than a 7 percent chance of becoming a victim of any crime in Houston.  Whether this is a large chance or a small chance is relative and data from other cities of comparable populations must be collected before a conclusion can be met.