My wife, Gena, and my hearts and prayers go out to the residents of Alabama who were hit by that devastating tornado, killing 23 people and injuring at least 100 others A beloved young victim by the name of Cora Jones lost 10 members of her extended family – a tragedy of epic proportions.
The citizens of the Yellowhammer state are enduring a tidal wave of grief right now. Last Saturday that grief was multiplied as a precious 11-year old missing Alabama girl, Amberly Lee Barnett, was found dead after vanishing from her aunt’s home in the northeast sector of the state.
A 33-year old murderous thug who lived next door to the aunt is being held without bond on a capital murder charge after tests showed that Amberly was strangled to death, then dumped in the woods about 200 yards behind the suspect’s house.
Any murder is a heinous crime and the gravest of sins. But the murder of a child is one of the most barbaric acts of evil there is. And they are becoming all too commonplace, and we must do more to protect those precious American souls.
Within the last week alone, a mother and her three-year-old child were shot and killed by the mother’s boyfriend in Morgantown, West Virginia.
A woman and her boyfriend were convicted in the death of her 4-year-old daughter in Cleveland, Ohio.
One adult and two children were murdered in their home in Terrytown, Louisiana.
And out in California, a father took the lives of his three children in their West Sacramento apartment, and a mother killed her two children then took her own life in a murder-suicide in San Jose.
How tragic!
The U.S. Department of Justice’s study on homicide trends from 1980-2008 reported that 10 percent of all U.S. homicide victims were children under 18. Children under 14 accounted for 1.5 homicides per 100,000 people in 2008. Teens had a 5.1 per 100,000 victimization rate.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “In the U.S., youth violence is a leading cause of injury and death for young people aged 15 to 24 years. Nonfatal and fatal violence are substantially higher among young people than any other age group. In 2011, more than 612,000 youth were treated in U.S. emergency departments because of physical assault-related injuries. In 2010, 4,678 young people were homicide victims. This translates into every day 13 young people in this country are murdered and an additional 1,600 visit our hospitals for non-fatal injuries. Homicide is the number one cause of death for African American youth, the second leading cause of death for Hispanic youth, and the third leading cause of death for American Indian/Alaska Native youth.”
As far as the rate of child homicides around the world, UNICEF’s 2014 report “Hidden in Plain Sight: A statistical analysis of violence against children found that: “In 2012 alone, murders claimed the lives of about 95,000 children and adolescents aged 0 to 19 – almost one in five of all homicide victims that year.” Their worldwide research discovered that about 90 percent of those child victims lived in low- and middle-income countries, with Latin America and the Caribbean having the highest levels of child homicide.
The fact is, as the above child homicide news I cited reported, it is more often than not the parents who are tragically most responsible for the homicides of their children. That’s true in the U.S. as well as around the world.
A BMJ Paediatrics Open journal article, “Child Homicide Perpetrators Worldwide: a Systematic Review,” reported on who commits the most child homicides: “Data were obtained for 44 countries. Overall, parents committed 56.5 percent of child homicides, 58.4 percent of female and 46.8 percent of male child homicides. Acquaintances committed 12.6 percent of child homicides. Almost a tenth of child homicides had missing information on the perpetrator. The largest proportion of parental homicides of children was found in high-income countries and East Asia and Pacific Region. Parents committed the majority (77.8 percent) of homicides of children under the age of 1 year.” (On average, according to FBI statistics, 450 children each year are murdered by their parents in the United States.)
A 2015 study by Child Trends that examined infant homicide also discovered “the risk of infant homicide is highest on the day of birth, and a tenth of all infant homicides occur by the first month of life,” a value that is “greater during this period than in any other year of childhood before age 18.” Child Trends found a 7.2 per 100,000 homicide rate among infants in 2013.
Of course, we cannot overlook that roughly 1 million babies in the womb are discarded each year in the U.S. via abortion.
Another potentially dangerous time in the life of children is when their parents are warring. In the U.S. Divorce Child Murder Data, the Center for Judicial Excellence explained: “Experts in domestic violence have long known that the most dangerous time for a domestic violence victim and her/his children are the days immediately following their separation from their perpetrator.”
These statistics and child homicides are simply tragic, and the cry for help, correction and improvement obviously remains on the domestic forefront or primarily with parents.
The good news in the horrific news in our own country is that child homicides have shrunk by 22 percent, at least according to Annie E. Casey Foundation: “In 2015, there were 25 child and teen deaths for every 100,000 children living in America. This rate, which represents close to 20,000 deaths annually, has shrunk by 22 percent since 2005.”
However, one child’s homicide is one too many, and we’ve simply got to do better to protect those precious souls to whom God has entrusted us and are the future of America.
Outside of the most basic innate instincts of protective parenting and nature’s (God’s) law, children are also protected by the U.S. Constitution and even the opening words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
We didn’t start the movement of valuing and protecting human life; it was handed down to us by America’s founders. No surprise that Thomas Jefferson explained that preserving human value and life was government’s primary role: “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”
We need to return to the core values of esteeming and protecting human life from the womb to the tomb. We need to value one another as God values us. We need to love and cherish all of God’s children.
That sacred and enduring human value is echoed in Psalm 139:13-14 in the Bible: “For You, God, created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
Jesus rebuked his adult followers for hindering the children from coming to him. He often held, prayed and blessed them, and so should we. As the old classic 1800s spiritual put it:
Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
All are precious in His sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
We are proud to share that elevating the value and lives of children is the bottom line mission of what our KICKStart KIDS foundation is all about: our martial arts instructors instill character and self-esteem through karate in middle school students all over Texas.
Harriett Jackson Brown Jr., the American author best known for his inspirational New York Times bestselling book, “Life’s Little Instruction Book,” said it best – something each of us should never forget: “Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.”
(For more on how America’s founders really valued human life, I recommend reading chapter six, “Reclaim the Value of Human Life,” in my New York Times bestseller, Black Belt Patriotism which is now more than half off at WND’s SuperStore.)
