Argument Essay On Child Abuse

Did you know that in concurrence to UNICEF each year almost 3,500 children die from physical abuse and/or neglect under the age of 15? Or that according to the non-profitable organization Child help in the United States, 3.3 million accounts of child abuse are made per year involving nearly 6 million children? From these statistics you can see how big a controversy child abuse is and how frequently it occurs. Surprisingly, child abuse is more common in developed countries than undeveloped countries. For instance in the United States, Mexico and Portugal, reports of child abuse are ten times higher than other countries with the next highest rates (UNICEF). Child abuse often occurs because adults blame all of their stress on the children, …show more content…
Evidence provided by Child help shows that 40% of children who are abused are those with step parents. This can be caused by external stress on the step-parent and added to that which is created by the biological child of the parent. The stress can come from the fact that the children believe that their biological parents are the only ones that can be right rendering the step-parent unable to live up to these impossibly high standards, and eventually causes an unmanageable amount of stress for the step parent. It has also been proved that step parents have a low incident rate of abusing their own children (if they had any) from their previous marriage(s)/relationship (s), in sharp contrast to those that are not their own (Child help).This can happen for many different reasons, but one reason that can have a major effect on this problem is when the new partner left their previous marriage primarily because of the kids. This means that the new step parent may have just come out of a relationship with unwanted kids only to remarry back into another with someone else’s kids. It is also proven that children with step parents are 100 times more likely to be murdered as step children as a result of abuse and neglect than those with biological parents (Child Abuse 56). One reason that this happens is because the children are not their own. They believe, therefore, that they can do whatever they want to the kids and won’t feel any guilt for their actions. They also scare the kids into thinking that because they are step parents and not biological parents that if they speak out, things will just get worse. Or that they’ll cause their parent unhappiness and make the other parent mad by encouraging them to leave their partner. We have established that a major cause of child