When you put a child into daycare, you are trusting people with your whole world. Needless to say, a lot of vetting goes on in the process of finding the right place to care for your baby. But, what do you do when the vetting doesn’t work?
Every parent that has to leave their child at a daycare in order to go to work tries to find the best center for them. They read reviews and hear everyone’s opinion about the place before trusting them with their most precious treasure, their baby.
Sometimes things turn out perfect, with great teachers and carers who love the children they are trusted with as if they were their own, who are supportive of both children and their families and just try to do their best in order to keep the children happy and safe for as long as they stay with them during the day.
Sadly, no matter how much you investigate a center beforehand, snakes sometimes still squeeze through the cracks.
Unfortunately, there are instances in which care providers don’t really focus on the children, but they rather go about their business while the children are left alone, or even worse abuse them.
According to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, in 2013 alone there were more than 3.5 million reports from CPS agencies, which involved more than 6.4 million children. The reports had mostly to do with neglect, followed by physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and medical neglect.
As child abuse statistics indicate, boys and girls are equally likely to be victims of abuse, while it has been found that the most vulnerable group involves children that are between 0 and 3 years old.
Heartbreakingly, a toddler from Arizona recently fell victim to this daycare statistic.
What her mom discovered while giving her toddler a bath was enough to make her stomach turn and her blood boil.
About a year ago, Alice Martin used to take her 15-month old daughter to the Creative Beginnings daycare in Tucson, Arizona. They had chosen the specific center because it was close to work, accredited, and close to the University of Arizona, where Alice was enrolled at the time.
However, things didn’t turn out so good for them. One day, when Alice picked up her daughter from the daycare, she noticed the little girl was fussier than usual. As the daycare staff didn’t mention anything that could have upset the toddler, she took her home and acted normally. Until bathtime.
When Alice removed her child’s onesie for a bath, she discovered her back and arms were full of bright, angry, red marks.
At first, she couldn’t really identify what they were.
“At first, I was like ‘are those really bite marks?’ And then, my brain kinda stopped thinking and I started crying,” Alice Martin told KOLD News 13. “There’s over 25 plus, it’s hard to tell. 25 would be the minimum that the police officer and I discussed.”
The mother couldn’t believe that the staff had seen her little girl being abused and didn’t do anything about it, or that they just ignored her cries. She could only assume that they had left the children alone and that’s when the incident took place, and this made the woman even angrier.
“The fact that nobody intervened in how many minutes, maybe they were left alone, maybe they just disregarded the cries, I don’t know. But it takes some time to do that kind of biting and my daughter would have been very upset,” Martin said.
Martin wanted to go to court against the daycare, but she knew it would be her word against theirs. For several months after the incident, the Arizona Department of Health Services didn’t take any action and Martin considered it unlikely to do so in the future.
It is deeply heartbreaking that people who are supposed to take care of our children at times treat them with such disrespect and indifference. Some daycares will charge you the better part of your income to neglect or even worse, abuse your child.
If we really want to see social justice, it should start with the way our babies are treated by people in charge of their care. No child should ever have to experience what this little girl had to go through.
To learn more about this case, watch the video below.
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