Rainer Steinhoff

This year's first flowers in my back yard (Feb. 20, 2012)

 

 

 

 

Unruly charges against children ‘a call for help’

By Allison Manning

The Columbus Dispatch Monday February 13, 2012 7:00 AM

 

The parents of two underage girls who got body piercings at a Delaware tattoo shop last month didn’t intend to have their daughters end up in juvenile court on unruliness charges.

Among the thousands of unruliness cases filed statewide last year, that’s unusual, say prosecutors and court officials. Almost always, the filings are prompted by frustrated parents who ask the court to charge their son or daughter so they can get some help.

“It’s a call for help from the parents in the simplest form,” said Scott Saeger, director of the juvenile-intake division at the Franklin County prosecutor’s office.

An unruly child is defined as a child who doesn’t obey parents, teachers or guardians; who is habitually truant; who endangers his or her own health or morals; or who violates a law. The child could have problems making curfew, attending school, running away from home or just breaking rules, either at home or at school.

“Unruliness doesn’t allow for jail time, it doesn’t allow arrests,” Saeger said. “It’s not a very big stick, for lack of a better explanation.”

The parent might simply be looking for the court to order children’s services involvement or counseling. At the very least, it could be a request to threaten their kids in the hope that they get their acts together.

Statewide in 2010, the most-recent figure available, 15,400 unruly cases were filed in juvenile courts, nearly 1,700 of which were in central Ohio. Franklin County had the bulk of cases, with nearly 1,300.

Saeger said his staff has someone on the calendar every day asking for unruliness or criminal charges to be filed against a child. Usually, the courts can work with the parents to figure out an alternative to facing a judge.

The difference between an unruliness charge and the more-severe delinquency charge is whether a crime was committed, said Delaware County Juvenile Court Judge Kenneth Spicer. If the child vandalizes something, or is threatening or abusing his parents, criminal charges could be filed.

Adults can’t be charged with unruliness. They can, however, be charged with contributing to the unruliness of a minor. That’s what Jason Parks, the man accused of piercing the two Delaware girls, was charged with this month.

More than 6,500 adults were charged in juvenile courts statewide in 2010. In central Ohio, there were 286 such cases.

Charges against adults could entail drinking with an underage child or helping a child sneak out of the house. In Parks’ case, he’s accused of piercing the 12-year-old’s tongue and the 14-year-old’s bellybutton, aiding them in disobeying their parents.

Parks could receive jail time for the offenses, up to six months and a $1,000 fine for each for the first-degree misdemeanors.

He pleaded not guilty to two charges in Delaware Municipal Court of performing a procedure on a minor without consent of a parent or guardian, a fourth-degree misdemeanor, and one count of obstructing official business, a second-degree misdemeanor.

The two girls will avoid formal charges, said Kathy Sturman, of the Delaware County Juvenile Court’s intake-diversion office. As with most first-time offenders, they will come in for a diversion conference.

If they complete all terms of the diversion within 90 days, the charges will be dismissed and the record expunged.

Neither mother is thrilled with the court’s involvement after they went to the police to complain, as both girls already have faced discipline at home. But the Delaware County prosecutor’s office didn’t need the parents’ permission. They based their decision on the police report that said the girls got pierced and violated the unruly statute.

The mother of the 14-year-old said her daughter disobeyed her and was definitely defiant.

“But a lot of kids are defiant,” she said.

“If every child had unruliness charges filed against him or her every time they defied their parents, every child in the city would have charges against them.”

Youngest kids in most danger of abuse

Study finds age, economic status are factors

By  Allison Manning

The Columbus Dispatch Tuesday February 7, 2012 7:22 AM

Children younger than 1 year old are more likely to be hospitalized for abuse than suffer from sudden infant death syndrome, a first-of-its-kind study has found.

More than 4,500 children were hospitalized for serious abuse in 2006, according to researchers at the Yale School of Medicine. Of those, 300 died from their injuries.

Tens of thousands more are treated each year at hospitals but are not admitted.

The study, published yesterday in the journal Pediatrics, shows that the youngest children, and those on Medicaid, were at the highest risk.

The study is the first to quantify the severity of abuse and determine whether a child was admitted to a hospital. It puts hard figures behind the anecdotes many clinicians already know by heart.

“The results don’t really surprise me,” said Dr. Jonathan Thackeray, medical director for Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s Center for Family Safety and Healing. “There’s a good body of literature now that suggest socioeconomic status is a risk factor for abuse.”

The study found that children on Medicaid, a health-care program for poor people, were six times more likely to end up in a hospital with injuries from abuse.

That mirrors Nationwide Children’s figures: 81 percent of children admitted for an abusive head injury were younger than 1 year old. And 93 percent came from uninsured families or those on Medicaid.

For Thackeray and his colleagues, the study provides more information than the abuse databases that experts already use. Each number in the study represents a specific case of abuse, such as an infant covered in bruises or a 3-month-old with head trauma.

“It is a new way to look at how frequent serious physical abuse is,” Thackeray said. “We haven’t had a really good estimate to what the burden is.”

Another indication is the number of calls Franklin County Children Services has received to its child-abuse hot line. The agency took 28,000 calls and opened 13,000 investigations last year. About 75 percent of those were child-abuse or -neglect cases.

Executive Director Chip Spinning said all families are susceptible.

“We believe the stresses associated with economic conditions cause a spark that could put a child at risk, and we are addressing that with as many resources as we can,” he said in a statement.

The importance of putting resources into prevention was highlighted in a study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month that estimates that child abuse costs about $124 billion in health care, loss of adult productivity and recovery measures each year.

These studies could help advocates push for prevention, whether it is in support groups or home visits, Thackeray said. “It’s leverage for us to go to the policymakers to say, ‘This is where you should be investing your dollars.’  ”

The CDC study looked at 579,000 children nationwide in 2008 who survived abuse or neglect and 1,740 who died because of it.

In their lifetimes, the cost of treating surviving children will reach $210,000 per person, more than the victim of a stroke or many Type 2 diabetes cases, the federal agency said. That includes medical and legal costs, counseling and lost productivity.