The death of Caden McWilliams, the 7-year-old boy whose body was found in a Denver storage unit in December, caused a flurry of finger-pointing. Every time a child dies it should cause a societal soul-searching, particularly when a child’s death goes unnoticed for seven months.
Human services had likely been in contact with McWilliams’ family. The police had been to his home.
More needed to be done.
What if the case was handled years ago, not as a police or social issue, but as a health issue, when Caden was younger, perhaps still an infant? What if this death had been stopped in a previous generation?
About 1,700 children died due to maltreatment in 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That’s nearly five young lives a day. What if their assailants had been treated by doctors?
That is the guiding force behind a massive undertaking from a Colorado pair united by fate: Dr. Richard Krugman and Lori Poland, founders of The National Foundation to End Child Abuse and Neglect (EndCAN). The two believe that the child abuse epidemic is an “under-addressed public health crisis” that can be treated.
Lori Poland’s name should sound familiar. In 1983, at the age of 3, she was taken from her front yard in Denver, assaulted and left to die in the pit of a mountain outhouse in Genesee Park, 20 miles west of Denver. Miraculously, she was discovered after spending more than three days in the filth.
Krugman served as dean of the University of Colorado School of Medicine for 25 years, headed the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect and, perhaps most noteworthy, was Lori’s childhood pediatrician. Poland and Krugman reunited for a mission both admit is daunting: end child abuse in our lifetime.
Lori Poland is unflappably positive even as she retells her personal story of abuse. Then she drops the disturbing detail, letting the point sink in; her attacker was also abused when he was 3.
The pair knows prevention is key to stopping the cycles of abuse and neglect. EndCAN reports that while pediatric cancers, which affect 10,000 children a year, receive $315 million in research dollars, only $29 million is raised for research of child abuse and neglect, which has more than 600,000 young victims annually.
“We now know, because of lots of studies, the impact of abuse and its later health consequences, that it is just as much a public health and mental health issue as it is a social and legal issue,” says Krugman.
So Krugman and Poland launched EndCAN the first national health foundation for child abuse, adding that health professionals they have approached were shocked none already existed.
Today they are soliciting ideas and research from medical providers, hospitals and agencies that have been in the trenches dealing with cycles of abuse. EndCAN will award grants for research and prevention programs, with the hope of implementing the best treatment, and cure, for this health crisis.
It is important to remember, not every abused child becomes an abuser, but many abusers were victims in their childhood.
“There are tens of millions of survivors. Many of whom have not only survived but are doing well,” Krugman said.
EndCAN’s approach intuitively makes sense. Don’t stop the critical work of our social workers and police, but understand that our nation’s physicians and scientists have proven unstoppable when dealing with public health crises. Funding research into treating young victims and their families will lead to public policy that will prevent the spread of this affliction.
“What we need is to bring together as many voices as we can,” says Poland.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.
