nobody rescued me, especially back in my day ,the 60's and 70's. Am thankful people are becoming aware of how abuse of any kind effects a human being.

The fact that no one rescued me, in spite of the fact that many people knew there were obvious clues that something was terribly wrong, causes me to wonder, why do the social workers, police officers, school counselors, and other such people even get paychecks? Why should they have jobs at all? Do they just enjoy doing paperwork and making entries in their computer files, and once they've done these things, they think that they are heroes? Do they not know that they need to get out of their chairs, out of their offices, out of their cars, and actually talk to people and confront abusers and help the abused? Don't they know that the cost to society to provide endless therapy and other treatment to survivors of child abuse is much higher than it would be if they intervened and stopped the abuse by removing abused children from the circumstances of their abuse before they become damaged survivors?

Ah, for so many of those workers, I think they lack training to recognize what some abuse looks like. Multiple fractures unexplained gets flagged in a hospital and reported. The kids who gets locked in their closet and doesn't get to eat, not so much.
The other thing I think happens so very often, is we (By we I mean adults) don't listen to what a kid says. I have two "books" I wrote in school (like as a class project) about our favorite place to be, and my destination vacation. Little paper books. Guess what I wrote about? My very favorite bathroom, with the newspapers in it I could read when mommy let me leave the light on. LMFAO! The teachers notes? Very Creative! Great imagination! Really? Didn't flag that one huh guys? Way to go!
I was shocked, just shocked, when I have talked with my SO about the training provided to him as a drug enforcement task officer/domestic violence specialist on the police force. They are trained to recognize signs of physical abuse ONLY. All other training must be completed on officers own time (like my SO did) . They are not trained to see signs of neglect, emotional abuse or anything of that nature.
Also, much like we have ridiculous laws concerning livestock, we do for children as well. Did you know that if you have a starving animal on your property, you are required to prove that food is on premises, but not that it is being fed? A bale of moldy old hay, and a starving horse, but not a thing can be done legally. Your parents can refuse to feed you, but if there is food in the fridge, they can't prove the parent didn't try to feed you. If there's no food? Well, quick, get that family food stamps!
Those people need more training, more experience and they need to truly listen to the children, not the parents.
As a side note, a friend of mine a few years ago lost custody of her son, he was placed in foster care and they were granted supervised visitation for two years. A three year old boy. Know why this kid was pulled (as well as his two siblings)? He grabbed a cup of hot tea she had set on a counter he had to climb a chair to reach and spilled it on his foot, causing a small first degree burn. Was it tragic? Yes. Should she have been watching him? Yes, but her hubby was giving their older son a bath while she nursed her new baby, and even though she was trying to get to him, she couldn't in time. They took him promptly to the hospital, and promptly lost custody. They were not (and I know first hand) abusive in any way! Great parents, and are to this day. Damn scared of their kids getting hurt now! The only thing we could all figure with this was they were a poor family in a multi racial relationship (he was black). Theres the system helping out for you.
I think our system is broken in many ways, not just on the abuse end, but incarcerating child molesters is not effective, the recidivism rate is so flipping high. How many people charged with drug crimes really improve after prison? How well does our system work really? It is tragically flawed, imo.

Wow, you just took me back to a memory from my childhood. The refrigerator in the house was often full of foods like peanut butter, bread, meat spreads for making sandwiches, orange juice, milk, lettuce, and other food, but I was not allowed to go near it. Peanut butter . . . only rich people could afford food like that! The punishment for opening the refrigerator door was a severe beating from my father, even if only to look inside and not to touch anything. My parents could have food from the refrigerator, and sometimes my brothers and sisters could, but I went for days at a time having only weeds from the backyard to eat. I am so lucky that I didn't eat any poisonous plants, because I did not know the poisonous plants from the safe ones. I passed out frequently in school from starvation, but no adult ever investigated or asked why. I remember passing out a couple of times and waking up in the school nurse's office and being sent right back into the classroom without the school nurse asking me questions. Somehow, someone must have carried me from the classroom to the nurse's office while I was unconscious. I passed out in physical education classes, which was one of the reasons that I never got picked by the other children to be on their teams. What a freaky situation to have to look back on. But I digress . . .

I wonder how many children there are right this moment who wish that someone would rescue them, but their voices are silenced by the fear, fear of punishment from their abusers, fear of talking to strangers about what is going on in the home or other place where abuse is occurring, fear of their family being split up if they speak out, fear that they might be punished by the law and sent to jail, the fear of the unknown . . .

In my mind, I imagine how they could be rescued: every county in the country could be required by law to set up teams consisting of a police officer or sheriff's deputy, a medical professional, a child legal advocate, and volunteers from the community. Forget about 'social workers'; I don't believe they serve any useful function, and they may do more harm than good in their ignorance. Teams would be sent out in a vehicle to investigate suspected cases of child abuse, neglect, abduction, endangerment, confinement, etc. They could work with judges to obtain warrants. They would have the power to force abusers to take parenting classes, and to prove that they are properly caring for any children by showing shopping receipts for food and clothes and other necessities children need, and by having, if necessary, daily or weekly visits from the team to monitor the situation. A team might even pop in and share an evening meal with a family, to observe their interactions, bizarre as that idea might seem. Every child in every school would be required to complete a confidential written form with questions that might reveal if they are being mistreated by adults or other children, to give the teams investigative leads. I'm sure similar ideas have been put forward by other people, and possibly even carried out, but if there are such 'dream teams,' I did not encounter one when I needed to be rescued. Maybe I'm a little insane for even thinking of this idea?

Wow, you just took me back to a memory from my childhood. The refrigerator in the house was often full of foods like peanut butter, bread, meat spreads for making sandwiches, orange juice, milk, lettuce, and other food, but I was not allowed to go near it. Peanut butter . . . only rich people could afford food like that! The punishment for opening the refrigerator door was a severe beating from my father, even if only to look inside and not to touch anything. My parents could have food from the refrigerator, and sometimes my brothers and sisters could, but I went for days at a time having only weeds from the backyard to eat. I am so lucky that I didn't eat any poisonous plants, because I did not know the poisonous plants from the safe ones. I passed out frequently in school from starvation, but no adult ever investigated or asked why. I remember passing out a couple of times and waking up in the school nurse's office and being sent right back into the classroom without the school nurse asking me questions. Somehow, someone must have carried me from the classroom to the nurse's office while I was unconscious. I passed out in physical education classes, which was one of the reasons that I never got picked by the other children to be on their teams. What a freaky situation to have to look back on. But I digress . . .

I wonder how many children there are right this moment who wish that someone would rescue them, but their voices are silenced by the fear, fear of punishment from their abusers, fear of talking to strangers about what is going on in the home or other place where abuse is occurring, fear of their family being split up if they speak out, fear that they might be punished by the law and sent to jail, the fear of the unknown . . .

In my mind, I imagine how they could be rescued: every county in the country could be required by law to set up teams consisting of a police officer or sheriff's deputy, a medical professional, a child legal advocate, and volunteers from the community. Forget about 'social workers'; I don't believe they serve any useful function, and they may do more harm than good in their ignorance. Teams would be sent out in a vehicle to investigate suspected cases of child abuse, neglect, abduction, endangerment, confinement, etc. They could work with judges to obtain warrants. They would have the power to force abusers to take parenting classes, and to prove that they are properly caring for any children by showing shopping receipts for food and clothes and other necessities children need, and by having, if necessary, daily or weekly visits from the team to monitor the situation. A team might even pop in and share an evening meal with a family, to observe their interactions, bizarre as that idea might seem. Every child in every school would be required to complete a confidential written form with questions that might reveal if they are being mistreated by adults or other children, to give the teams investigative leads. I'm sure similar ideas have been put forward by other people, and possibly even carried out, but if there are such 'dream teams,' I did not encounter one when I needed to be rescued. Maybe I'm a little insane for even thinking of this idea?

No one rescued me from my crazy home. I got some sympathy from my grandmother and my aunts, but they did not want to go against my father. So nothing was talked about.

I got abused from everywhere it seemed...at home, in school, in parks by other kids. Once you get abused, you seem to have a target on your back. I remember all the names they called me in school, the relentless hazing and bullying.

Like Tootsie said in her reply, I'm most angry at the adults who were charged with the responsibility to protect me...the way they pretended not to hear my cries for help when I was getting a beating in the schoolyard. I soon learned that adults don't really care about kids. I was on my own...sick a lot of the time, weak-muscled and severely underweight...the perfect target for a beat-down.

We all deserved to be protected. We all deserved to be cared for. We deserved better treatments. We deserved more attentions and protctions from the community we were in.

I remember watching a TV segment of this experiment conductied by a news station. It went like this: an adult actress and a child actor were hired to make the abusive scene in a public place. Some hiden cameras were planted to see how regular folks would react to the situation.

I thought if the abuse was in progress in from of their eyes, most people would try to be good Somaritans. It was not so. Most people would stop and watch, but do nothing. NOTHING!!! There were only two people stepped in: A lady who tried to reach police through near by pay phone, and an elderly man who intervened the situation. The show producer stopped both, and asked what made them do what they did. The lady replied that she remembered a time when she suspected a child abuse in her next door, but she didn't do anything then. She'd been carrying the guilt ever since. When she saw the abuse in the park (the fake one), she was convicted to make things right this time around. And the elderly man, he was a retired professional in the feild of child abuse.

It was a somber and heart breaking reality.

At first no one until I met this guy and he got me out.

When I worked for the Census Bureau, we were trained to ignore child abuse. If a census taker saw a child being abused, he or she had to ignore it, because the integrity of the census was alleged to be more important than the life of a child. If census takers reported crime, the public would not trust us anymore.

Is the government more important than the life of a child?

People in USA prefer to spend billions of dollars arguing over gay marriage and call that "protecting families", yet there's not a single trace of any of those people who pour money for that (on either side of the issue, regardless of where they stand on that thing) that does anything or gives a crap about child neglect or about changing or improving the laws that protect children.

I kept asking myself, even as a child how come that no one notices? They knew and I felt that they just joined the abusers club.

A survivor of a Nazi death camp wrote the following in his book:

"We who lived, in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate."

I think it's apathy and our sin nature that let typical people from doing anything about injustice done to others. I believe God gave us free will - will to exercise love. I don't think anyone can force "love" - not even God because love is a conscious choice that we all have to make.

There was a time when I let my anger control every decision I made. I didn't care about anybody, anything, not even my safety. After a few years, I couldn't take it anymore - I didn't like what I became because of what happened to me. Ultimately, I realized that it was my choice. I chose to be distructive and hurtful to myself. I gave into the circumstances. After reading the article, I decided to rise up to the ocassions and exercise my free will. I had to get away from all evil around me. I didn't hate myself so much after a while, and I started to feel comfortable being me (although it took many years to reach that point). I don't pretend that I'm strong because I'm not. I don't pretend that I'm not hurting. I try to be honest with my emotions. It was very scary, but it worth it.

People used to ask why I looked so angry all the time but no one stuck around for me to answer or I was dismissed as a liar. My mother was very good at making me look like a liar and my stepdad couldn't have cared less. He was too busy raging at what he had gotten himself into marrying my mother. She treated him like shit and he passed it on to me.
Once she drove me out of the house before my thirteenth birthday things appeared normal in the house and I really did look like the cause of all the problems in the house. I started to believe that I really was the problem. I'm now forty seven and the abuse from my family continues, mother makes sure no one from the family wants anything to do with me. My brother got married I was not told, or invited. I have a niece and a nephew that i will probably never get to meet. My son has been ignored since he was diagnosed as autistic. When he was three and he was diagnosed my mother told everyone who would listen that I had done something to my son to cause his autism, hell, while I was pregnant she would say things like, "I don't know why you bought a crib, women have miscarriages you know."