US society seems schizophrenic in dealing with perpetrators who are caught. Some cases get significant publicity and suitable expressions of outrage, but when the perpetrators are caught, their rights become the primary concern, and the outrages are often weakly "punished". In the case of abusers and sexual predators, the "justice" system sometimes unwittingly enables the perpetration of further outrages and is even used to hinder prevention measures. The murder of a child through abuse may be redefined by the "justice" system as manslaughter, even involuntary manslaughter, with a consequent light sentence. For some reason the children in such cases aren’t any less dead; a child’s life is cheap!

Too often Child Protective Services (CPS), which is supposed to protect children, becomes a victimizer. One way is when children are returned from protective custody to known abusers after the abusers have attended a few counseling sessions or parenting classes, and then CPS fails to follow up to be sure new abuses aren’t happening. Conversely (and perversely), CPS may harass healthy families on the basis of false, malicious, anonymous reports. When this neglect to supervise known abusers and the attacks on the innocent are considered together, CPS appears to be putting children at hazard, the reverse of its intended function.

Society puts a lot of pressures on parents, many of them less than beneficial to children. Men and women alike are expected to pour themselves and their energies into their careers. Their children get the leftovers of their parents’ time and energy. Raising children, being a Mom, being a Dad, are held in low esteem by society. Being a full-time parent, especially a full-time Mom, is denigrated as a waste of talent and education. Many parents have bought this line - some from self-centeredness, some because they don’t know better. They farm out their infants and toddlers to institutionalized daycare, somehow thinking that near strangers paid modest wages are going to love and care for their children with the same love and care as they would themselves. Such parents further deceive themselves with the myth of "quality time". How they think their children will only have needs when it fits into their parents’ schedules is a mystery. Also mysterious is how they can associate the word "quality" with the remnants of energy they have at the end of a full day on the job. And do those parents believe they have a close enough relationship with their children that their children will confide their needs to them instead of to the daycare worker(s) they see most of their day five days a week, or just keep their needs to themselves? I’m not speaking in all this of parents who are forced to use daycare out of true economic necessity.

One fundamental need children have is for a secure, safe, home. Our society encourages just the opposite. Living together - extra light on the morals, hold the commitment - has become a common practice. Many young couples in their late teens see no problem with getting married, even though they aren’t really mature yet. Either way, children soon are born into these "homes". Conversely, the laws in most (if not all 50) states in the US make divorce for casual reasons (or no reason) very easy to obtain. The children now have two houses but lose their home. The common, sad, thread in all this is that many children are born to and are being raised by immature, uncommitted "parents" who thoughtlessly shatter their children’s security and safety through the parents’ selfishness, casual divorce, use of custody battles and child support (or non-support) to harass or exact revenge on ex-spouses, and multiple serial "marriages" or shack-ups.

Another way society cheapens the lives of children is through abortion. Abortion is advocated as a woman’s "right", but society has willfully deceived itself about what abortion does - kill a living, growing, genetically unique, genetically human, child. Society may shut its eyes to what abortion does, but many children and teenagers know what is being killed, and understand what that means about their own value (and with some children, this knowledge encourages violent behavior by depreciating the value of other people).

Each of these is injurious to children. The cumulative perpetration and toleration of all this harm to children makes me think that many in society resent or hate children. If our society truly did hate children, it would have to approach Hitlerian and Stalinist proportions to do much worse.