Community Safety

Roughly four out of five parents don't install car seats correctly, and the results can be disastrous. A new investigative series by The Arizona Republic finds that Hispanic and Native American children were from two times to as much as 10 times likelier not to be properly restrained.

Balitmore Sun reporter Andrea McDaniels set out to tell the stories of the children and families who aren’t the direct victims of violence but who suffer its horrible after-effects for years afterwards. Almost nothing about the project was easy, as McDaniels and editor Diana Sugg recently shared.

A casual observer watching the preschool-aged children bounce around the outdoor playground at the Children’s Institute wouldn’t immediately notice anything amiss. Except that these kids wouldn’t be here had something not already gone very wrong in their young lives.

While Americans tend to think of sex trafficking as a problem that happens overseas, the United States is a major sex trafficking hub for obvious reasons—it's a rich country. An estimated 100,000 children in the U.S. are forced into the sex trade every year.

In Arkansas, judges make frequent use of their authority to lock up children known as "status offenders," despite the fact that they haven't broken any laws. Few people outside the juvenile justice system know how easy it is for a child to end up behind bars. Even fewer see the long-lasting impact.

How can we keep abuse and neglect from occurring in succeeding generations? Florida judge Cindy Lederman offers a vision of juvenile court as a crucial opportunity to turn around the lives of both parents and young children, before it's too late.

The U.S. has a much higher rate of child maltreatment deaths than other rich countries, and studies are beginning to show that early child abuse can spark changes that are linked to later-in-life health issues. But how do you get poor, stressed parents to be kinder and more engaged?

Last year, more than 50,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America crossed the Mexico-U.S. border looking for their parents or better opportunities. But the journey north can entail serious trauma and suffering. What are the long-term mental health issues such children face?

Every day as I drive to my office at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I pass homes with yard signs stating “Black Lives Matter and “I heart Ferguson,” but also, “We must stop killing each other,” a nod to the constant human stress, trauma and, ultimately, shortened life expectancy in these communities.

Three-and-a-half-year-old Dylan was tiny, feisty and freckled with tousled blond hair. His mom brought him to the pediatric clinic because he had tried to smother his 2-week-old sister. She didn’t know what to do with him, and frankly neither did we. It was 5 p.m. and the clinic was closing.