Should Child Abuse Victims Be Charged with Committing a Crime Related to Abuse? Argumentative Essay

A child is protected by the law against different things due to the fact that they have not developed to a level of making their own decisions or having their own ideas. Child abuse victims should be charged with committing a crime related to abuse but with more intensified punishment since the nature of the crime ways more magnitude as compared to other abuse-related crimes. This implies that the sentence for such law offenders should be more intensified in all manner. They should be used as examples since the child is still in danger from over child abuse victims since it doesn't mean that the child stops being a child after abuse hence what the government or the legal department can do is to intensify the charges related to these crimes.

There are different reasons behind such decision and my opinion towards the decision, but it is wise to first address the key term in the concept, a child.' This is a small a person who has not yet attained the age of 18 in most parts of the world and they are considered to be protected by the government. This is due to many reasons such lack of the ability to make decisions; this happens due to the fact that they have not completely attained the mental capacity of choosing before different opinions faced by them (Hillis et al., 2015). This has been one of the main ideas as to why children are highly protected by the government. Other reasons such as the fact that the children can be easily manipulated make it more serious for the government to ensure this does not happen.

There are different types of crimes towards children which can happen either directly or indirectly and result in abuse of a child. These different types of crimes involve the following. Child endanger meant. This involves the placement or involving a child in risky situations which may endanger the life of this child. This is valid as a crime since the child has no decision-making position hence the law needs to see to it that the child's life is not endangered. One of the recent incidents hit the media was a mother who had locked her baby in the car and went to a shopping mall. The car had all its windows closed, and the weather was quite hot. The baby in the car after a few hours started having difficulties breathing and due to the high temperatures in the car, the baby was very dehydrated (Palusci, 2017). Fortunately, a police officer on duty realized the baby from his patrol car, and broke one of the car's door window and saved the baby. The mother was charged with child endangerment since this would have led to the death of the child and as we can see from the case, the child had no choice in making the decision that had resulted to them being in that position. The charges against the mother needed to be more savior so as to create awareness of the dangers associated with child endangerment. There are other worse cases which involve child neglect that needs as well to be addressed.

With this in mind different measures in relation to this type of child abuse the measures should be intensified. A good example Is the Pennsylvanian government new laws in relation to child abandonment. The new law state that the age of the baby gets to dictate how intensive the punishment is to be. As per these new laws in the younger the child, the more intense the punishment becomes. In this case, if a baby is less than five years the number of years increases to more than five years imprisonment (Palusci, 2017). I completely concur with this since the younger the child, the harder it is to communicate their current predicament hence it's up to the parent to take care of the baby or the government. So, in case the parents or the guardian or anyone responsible for the child fails to do so then their charges are to be higher. This was prompted by the death of a ten months old baby in the year 2010 Heath Ryder who happened to suffer a head and neck injury after being shaken and thrown; these charges were filed against a 9-year-old girl and an adult babysitter who was sentenced to 6 to 23 months in jail. This shows a gap within most of the legal department. Such incidences did not need to occur so as to implement such laws but they should be in place so as to avoid such incidences to happen in the first place. From the case, in relation to baby Heath, the babysitter waited for more than an hour before calling for help after realizing the baby was breathing abnormally.

Another form of child abuse is child brutality which involves the physical infliction of pain on the body of a baby. Back in the year 2016, a video of a house-help beating up a small baby circulated in most of the social media platforms. The video had been captured by a nanny-cam which was present in the house. The house-help had no idea hence as seen from the video the baby was giving the lady a hard time feeding and the parents we not at home and the lady had no idea there were cameras in the house (Palusci, 2017). The video captures some horrifying moments of the house help beating the baby to the extent of stepping on the small child and from the look at the video the baby could not have been in a position to even tell the parents since he was a small baby. Looking at the video made most of the people cry with nothing to do about it. This led to an online movement that needed the lady to face serious charges due to her actions. The rise of technology helped in the capture of such ugly moments. The law had to take serious action towards the lady. I would have passed a life imprisonment for such a crime. The infliction of such amounts of pain on a small baby who has yet to separate wrong from right is such a huge offense.

Child brutally is seen in many incidences, and we have had so many incidences where the child is not able to share his or her experiences since they are afraid that the person responsible may do the actions again. This indicates a weakness within the current justice system. This shows that the child is aware that this person will be punished but they will be brought back to the community and hurt them even much more worse due to this fact. This gives us the next worth addressing the issue. These involved victims depending on the magnitude of there offenses should be imprisoned for life. This gives the children a freedom of expressing themselves since they know the outcome of there decisions (Welch & Bonner, 2013). The involved party does not get any other chance to be back and torture the child. Different research conducted in the United States, show that children who had been abused before failed to share these experiment with the responsible bodies that are in a position to fight for their rights. For one to be able to give assurance to the child, it's by making an example from one of the convicted criminals. Nor sort of physical abuse on a baby should be excused by any chance. It is the responsibility of the law to do this as well as the parents.

The other major form of child abuse happens to be sexual abuse of the child. Most of the child within the society face this problem and do not know the right person to approach so as to get help. This affects the entire life of the child in most of the cases. A good example is a sexual abuse on a small girl. These events are usually traumatizing as seen in most of these cases. The child's perspective towards life change among other different things. This includes the fear of the opposite gender among other issues. As also seen children who happen to have faced these problems as well fear to address them with the responsible bodies since they are afraid that this may bring more pain to them from the involved party. Research conducted in a number of states in the united states shows the pattern among the children. Most claimed they feared that the responsible person would harm them. This also shows the gap between the legal system and the victims of child abuse should be punished way harder (McElvaney et al., 2014). The magnitude of these crimes as well should be observed. We have had the death of children who have also been subjected to such cases. There are different scenarios such as unwanted pregnancies as well as disease. Disease shorten the life of these small children who are harmless and have no idea the reason why they undergo search incidences. This is a clear reason as to why such crime victims should be charged with abuse charges. The permanent scar inflicted in the childs memory from such an evil act should be enough reason to convict such victims lifetime imprisonment. Most people fail to look at these matters in such a manner but the minute one takes their time and considers the amount of harm the child goes through due to such cases then most would concur with me in relation to the charges that the victims are to face. Research conducted by (Sprober et al., 2014) shows that sex offenders who have been released for crimes involving sexual violation of minors happen to do the crime again, this gives a realizable pattern within the legal system as well. The law is responsible for letting these criminals back to the community once they have committed these crimes. This should not be the case, once one if found guilty of child abuse in this manner; they are not to be allowed back to the community since they become a danger in the society as per different research indicates.

As seen different types of child abuse cases have been used throughout the paper to support the idea of the charges to be laid on victims responsible for child abuse. It is possible to classify the different types of child abuse cases but all in all, from my point of view there should be no line that demarcates charges laid on the victims that perpetrate these crimes. The children hold the future for tomorrow although they are currently not aware of this (Sprober et al., 2014). Due to this fact, any threat that is facing the children should be handled with no exceptions. The actual problem should not happen so that the legal system can take action, but the right procedures need to be laid down so as to handle these cases as they happen.

In support of the idea that child abuse victims should be charged for committing a crime related to abuse is in line with the perception that this will reduce the number of these incidences since the repercussions of these incidences are enough to prevent the events from happening. As seen in the argument, a child is in their developmental stages, and the minute such incidences happen for example sexual abuse, this moment completely affects the child growth and these events never get forgotten from their minds (Welch & Bonner, 2013). Including other forms of abuse. So, to avoid this and ensure a healthy and safe environment for the growth of the children it is up to the government legal system to ensure this happens by taking serious actions to anyone who interferes with the childs growth be it the parents of the child or anyone else.

References

Hillis, S. D., Mercy, J. A., Saul, J., Gleckel, J., Abad, N., & Kress, H. (2015). THRIVES: A global technical package to prevent violence against children.

McElvaney, R., Greene, S., & Hogan, D. (2014). To tell or not to tell? Factors influencing young peoples informal disclosures of child sexual abuse. Journal of interpersonal violence, 29(5), 928-947.

Palusci, V. J. (2017). Child protection and the development of child abuse pediatrics in New York City. Journal of forensic and legal medicine, 52, 159-167.

Sprober, N., Schneider, T., Rassenhofer, M., Seitz, A., Liebhardt, H., Konig, L., & Fegert, J. M. (2014). Child sexual abuse in religiously affiliated and secular institutions: a retrospective descriptive analysis of data provided by victims in a government-sponsored reappraisal program in Germany. BMC pub...