An
eighth-grade girl died the morning of Saturday, Aug. 14, in Raleigh, Miss.,
mere hours after testing positive for COVID-19. Multiple sources told the Mississippi
Free Press that the student had attended classes at the school most of the
week, including Wednesday, before testing positive for COVID-19 at week’s end.
Her health quickly declined afterward. --Mississippi Free Press,
Aug. 15, 2021
Just one week into the new school year, 5,599 students and
316 employees in Hillsborough County [Florida] are isolated or quarantined as COVID cases
continue to rise. That's equivalent to
about 2.4 percent of the student population in the county.
--WFTS-TV,
Tampa, Aug. 16, 2021
The number of
kids infected with Covid-19 is soaring as the highly contagious Delta variant
spreads and schools reopen, pushing children's hospitals around the country to
the brink. Tennessee’s health commissioner expects the state’s children’s
hospitals to be full by the
week’s end. Louisiana reached that point more than
a week ago. And Arkansas’ only children’s hospital has just two ICU beds
remaining.
--Politico, Aug. 11, 2021
Remember how some of America’s
latter-day child savers told us we’ve got to get the kids back in school as
soon as possible to protect them from a “pandemic
of child abuse” at the hands of their own parents?
Remember how they said that as soon
as the eyes of overwhelmingly middle-class disproportionately white
professionals were averted from overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately
nonwhite children those children’s parents would unleash upon their children child
abuse in pandemic proportions?
Remember the second wave of
fearmongering, the one in which we were told that as soon as schools reopened, the
children would come staggering back battered and bruised and we’d better brace
ourselves for what one oft-quoted advocate said would be a “tsunami of
suffering”? (Actually, you don’t need a
long memory for that one – that myth is still being spread.)
Remember how right-wing politicians
exploited these fears to force schools to reopen and force children back into the
classroom? As this Blog noted
almost exactly a year ago:
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wanted the perfect excuse for
opening schools, all he had to do was whisper the magic words: “child abuse.” Or
as a headline in the Orlando Sentinel put it:
“DeSantis touts return to school to counter suspected rise in child abuse amid
coronavirus.”
But,
of course it wasn’t just the right wing.
Consider
self-proclaimed liberal Prof. James Dwyer.
Dwyer’s
contempt for impoverished families is breathtaking. As we pointed out last
year:
In 2011, he
called for the massive forced relocation of poor families. The penalty for not uprooting
themselves and their children from “terrible” inner city neighborhoods and
exiling themselves – if necessary to small towns and rural areas: government
confiscation of the children.
Dwyer blithely
declares that most poor parents who live in “terrible place[s]” so do by
choice, not because it’s all they can afford. Most of the rest, he
says, made the irresponsible choice to have children – “or to risk creating a
child by having sex, despite knowing the child would live in a terrible place…”
And besides, he writes, “a relatively high percentage of adults who live
in the worst neighborhoods are marginal to begin with…”
So
it shouldn’t have been a surprise when, in May, 2020, Dwyer suggested that
child abuse in the home is so rampant that schools should never have closed at all. He claimed “the shutdown
decision arguably amounted to a prioritizing of the welfare of certain adults
over the welfare of children." By this he meant that children appeared less likely to get
coronavirus or, he claimed, to transmit it.
Defenders of
the fearmongering might say what Dwyer and others said in 2020 was excusable because
it was before the emergence of the Delta variant – who could have known what
would happen? In fact, the evidence
about COVID and children was always more ambiguous than those crusading to
reopen schools claimed. As we noted in
that earlier post:
What
is unclear is which adults [Dwyer] means. We do know that the research on the extent to which
children transmit coronavirus is mixed. We also know that in New
York City alone 63 public school employees died of
coronavirus before schools there were shut down. Presumably some of
them left children behind – some of them might even have been good
parents. And Dwyer makes no reference to a COVID-related disease
that does, indeed, attack children – and
might have attacked many more had schools not been closed.
Even
now, we don’t know how hard children will be hit by the Delta variant. As Politico put it:
Doctors and scientists say there is not enough evidence to determine
whether Delta causes children to become sicker than earlier Covid variants did.
… Still, there is growing concern among health professionals that more children
are showing up in worse condition than at any previous point during the
pandemic.
And
some children who had mild initial infections are experiencing long COVID.
We
do know, however that the “pandemic of child abuse” claims turned out to be
false – and that it was clear from the start that there was no merit to them,
because, in fact, the kind of horrors we think of when we hear the words “child
abuse” are extremely rare.
Now,
enough children have returned to school, and there is more than enough other
evidence, to show that (surprise!) Black and Brown parents are not
monsters
who will turn on their children as soon as white professionals aren’t looking. Even the head of New York City’s family
policing agency (a more accurate term than child welfare agency) has confirmed that the fearmongers were wrong.
Yet
the myth won’t die. Out of 14 child
welfare stories summarized in an email we received yesterday (Aug. 16) two promoted
the myth about COVID and child abuse.
Hardly a day goes by without at least one such story – even as the real
danger of forcing children back into classrooms becomes more apparent.
So
it’s about time the fearmongers took a good hard look at what they’ve
done. We are now witnessing a rush back
into the classroom. In some cases, school districts won’t, or are not allowed
to, require masks. And children under 12
can’t be vaccinated. How much did the
scare stories about child abuse contribute to all this?
For
many children, there may yet be a tsunami of suffering – but not for the
reasons America’s child welfare establishment predicted.
