If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.

I wish everyone would see "Les Voleurs d'Enfance". It's a frenh-Quebec documentary on child abuse, the abusers, the victims, and the inefficient system which is supposed to help protect those abused children. For a second I wished I hadn't seen it. It broke my heart, I can't stop thinknig about it, but who am I ? What can one person do ?

I learned about some things I had never even really thought about. I learned that a typical child abuser will go to jail for 2-3 years, some only have to serve 2 years of house arrest. While in jail they may benefit from spouse and family visit, they may work for a little money, they get counseling, psychologists, training and counseling to prepare them to go back into the real world and enter the workforce. The children they abused lived in youth centres that look exactly like prisons, their rooms even looked smaller and were definitely bare compared to their abuser's prison room. The children are shoved Ritalin down their throats, get thrown in solitary confinement if they are not 'behaving'. I can't believe they do that. The documentary interviewed the minister in charge of the youth department and she said these rooms were to her knowledge only used in extreme circumstances. The interviewer then took her inside one of these small bare concrete rooms, with the youth centre manager, and all 3 were locked inside the confinement room from the outside like one of those children who according to many interviewed social workers and psychologists, are often locked in those rooms 21 hours a day, for DAYS. The minister freaked out and asked to be let out of the room after 1 minute and a few seconds. She insisted that those confinement rooms are only used in rare circumstance. The interviewer then asked her : Then why does this centre have THREE confinement rooms ?

I can't believe that this is happening and people are letting it happen, here in Canada, in 2005. I can't believe that there are so many people out there who genuinely think it is okay to abuse children sexually or physically. I can't believe those kids try to tell people they trust and the system can't help them and they get abused more as a consequence when the parents find out. I can't believe these children have to move from centre to centre from family to family from social worker to social worker. They are thrown out of the system the day afte their 18th birthday and many end up on the street, homeless. I can't believe many commit suicide and no one cares and they are lying under unmarked graves.

Why doesn't society do something ? Did you know that there are only 1% of children who quit school in Finland vs 12% in Montreal ? Did you know that Finland's teacher to student ratio is 1:15, and here it's 1:35 ? Our society is trying to raise obedient quiet kids, otherwise they shove Ritalin in their face. Don't get me wrong, some kids genuinely do need Ritalin, but do so many kids need it ? Do obedient quiet people change the world and make things change ?