My social issue is about child abuse in Indian River County Florida. Child abuse is the maltreatment of a child under the age of 18 by a parent, guardian, someone living in their home or someone who works with children. Abuse of a child is anything that causes harm or puts the child in danger of physical injury. Child abuse can be physical, sexual, or emotional. Child abuse captured the country’s attention in 1962. In 1974, a federal law called The Child Abuse Treatment & Prevention Act (CAPTA) was made. (Reuters, 2015)
Some facts about abuse in Indian River County are 77% of children receive no services following the abuse investigation. 98% of abuse is committed by parents or someone known to or close to the family. Crying, …show more content…
It is also called functionalism which is each aspect of society is interconnected and contributes to society's functioning as a whole. The government or state, provides education for the children or youth of the family, which in turn pays taxes on which the state depends to keep running. Functionalism sees society as a complex system whose parts all work together to promote solidarity and stability. Functionalists believe that society is held together by social consent in which members of the society agree on and work together to achieve what is best for the whole society. Emile Durkheim suggested that social consensus can take one of two forms. Mechanical solidarity is a type of social cohesion that appears when people in a society maintain identical values, beliefs, and engage in similar types of work. Mechanical solidarity commonly exist in traditional and simple societies. Amish society is an example of mechanical solidarity. Organic solidarity is a form of social cohesion that appears when the people in a society are interdependent, but hold to varying values, beliefs, and engage in changeable types of work. Organic solidarity most commonly exists in industrialized and complex societies such as those in large cities like New York in the 2000s. (Harcourt, 2015) Robert Merton an American functionalist, whom divides human functions into two types. Manifest functions are intentional and obvious, meanwhile latent …show more content…
Functionalism interprets every part of society in ways of how it contributes to the stability of the entire society. Society is more than the sum of all of its parts; rather, every part of society is functional for the stability of the whole society. The functionalist view of child abuse usually leans towards thinking that the abuser has also been a victim of abuse themselves. This socializes into them believing the behavior is normal. A functionalist would view child abuse learning to adapt to one’s own environment. For instance, a father could beat his own child for no reason. The explanation for that is the father could beat the child to gain total control over them. Another explanation is that abuse could be all the father knows because of his past childhood with his own father. The father would abuse the child to gain control, show, and maintain his total dominance. He would continue to do this to scare the child into never trying to over dominate him. By maintaining his role of being the dominant figure, it could also be seen as forcibly making others adapt to said