A new child welfare campaign

Therein lies the greatest challenge of the valley’s latest child welfare campaign, a deeply personal drive to address a persistent problem that makes front-page news a few times a year, but can’t be easily distilled and can’t be solved simply by handing out products or passing laws.

The maddening, tragic trend of children being murdered by the abusive boyfriends of their single mothers has the full attention of valley law enforcement, social workers and researchers. On Wednesday, as part of National Child Abuse Prevention Month, a coalition led by UNLV’s Nevada Institute for Children’s Research and Policy launched the "Choose Your Partner Carefully" campaign. The drive, which already is under way in other communities across the country, attempts to educate parents about qualities in a partner/caregiver that officials say can put a child at risk for abuse.

The state-funded campaign will place posters at bus stop shelters and fliers and brochures at community centers, medical offices, schools, child care providers, domestic violence shelters and government offices. (You can download the posters and literature at the Internet links listed with this column.)

I first wrote about this issue in January 2011, in a column headlined "Single moms, boyfriends and dead kids." Las Vegas police reviewed child abuse and neglect homicides between 2005 and 2010 for me and found they were most often carried out by the mother’s boyfriend, with 11 such cases in those six years in Metro’s jurisdiction. I also learned that the FBI’s national homicide data list 17 categories for a homicide victim’s relationship to the killer, and "mother’s boyfriend" isn’t one of them. It’s a crime in need of deeper examination.

The Nevada Institute for Children’s Research and Policy reported Wednesday that in almost half of abuse and neglect homicides reported by all Clark County jurisdictions over the past two years, the perpetrator or suspect charged in the crime was the mother’s boyfriend.

Such crimes affect children of all ages, from 12-year-old Silvestri Junior High School student Lexis Kaye Roberts, killed in the fall of 2010, to 16-month-old Addison Weast, killed in April 2010. But the campaign is especially focused on the single mothers of babies and small children — those too young to communicate their concerns, fight back or flee, and those most likely to cry and need constant care. And the mothers most likely to have small children and no support from the father are uneducated and poor (the posters, in English and Spanish, will be placed at bus stop shelters throughout the valley’s urban core).

Needless to say, not everyone is cut out for taking care of a baby. And a handful of people (most of them men) shouldn’t take care of a baby, ever. But that’s a tough directive to communicate.

Previous successful child welfare campaigns have had far simpler messages that were relevant to far more parents. For example, installing child safety seats in cars; telling parents not to leave their children alone in a vehicle; locking access points to swimming pools and never letting kids swim alone to prevent drownings. Elected officials created laws mandating car seat usage, establishing penalties for leaving a child alone in a car and, in some cases, mandating the installation of alarms and special gates to create protective barriers to swimming pools.

Do this. Get that. Don’t do this. These initiatives have worked.

The "Choose Your Partner Carefully" campaign, however, has an overall message that’s good advice to anyone on the dating scene, regardless of whether they have kids. Its literature is long-winded with an occasional lecturing tone, covering not only undesirable personality traits, but infant-care basics and phone numbers to report child abuse. Some of the campaign’s targets might not be able to read.

And child abuse is already a crime. You can’t legislate dating, no matter how much some parents and lawmakers might want to.

For an issue this serious, less might be more. Can outreach become overreach?

Not in this case, says Tara Phebus, the interim executive director of the UNLV institute. "What we’re looking at with this issue is to use the brochures and literature as an educational tool for staff, too. These agencies can use them as a resource, so staff can take steps to be active, not passive."

Phebus noted that agencies involved in the campaign have seen untold numbers of cases in which a child has survived the severe abuse of mom’s boyfriend — cases that don’t usually make the news.

I’ve written before about the ever-expanding child welfare empire, which attracts lots of people who hold that no amount of inconvenience, no cost and no level of meddling is too much to save one child. I disagree with that philosophy.

But this kind of campaign is long overdue, and it’s about the least intrusive approach I can imagine. An awful lot of children have died horribly in this valley over the past two decades, some of them discarded in Dumpsters, simply because their mothers took up with an awful man and were too dumb or too scared to do anything about it.

Blood relatives armed with love, courage and common sense are the best hope any child has of avoiding exposure to an abusive, unrelated caregiver. Absent that, I sincerely hope this drive spares even one toddler from being tortured and murdered by the monster who sleeps in Mommy’s bed.

Glenn Cook (gcook@reviewjournal.com) is a Review-Journal editorial writer.