Deputy sheriff shackles nine year old with behavioral problems. This is NEVER the right thing to do!

Courtesy of EAG News:

The boy’s wrists were too small for the handcuffs, so Kenton County Deputy Sheriff Kevin Sumner put them around the misbehaving child’s biceps. 

The boy, known as S.R. in a federal lawsuit, “has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and a history of trauma,” WKYT reports. 

A video of the incident, which occurred at a Covington, Kentucky public school, was released in conjunction with the suit. 

The boy wasn’t the only one allegedly treated that way. A 9-year-old girl was also shackled by the school resource officer in the same manner. 

“Both children were being punished for behavior related to their disabilities. Neither was arrested nor charged with any criminal conduct,” according to the news station. 

“Shackling children is not okay. It is traumatizing, and in this case it is also illegal,” says Susan Mizner, disability counsel for the ACLU, which has filed a lawsuit on the children’s behalf. 

“Using law enforcement to discipline students with disabilities only serves to traumatize children. It makes behavioral issues worse and interferes with the school’s role in developing appropriate educational and behavioral plans for them.”

This is the very population of children that I work with and let me tell you that you simply do NOT want to involve the police unless you have no other choice. 

I would also suggest that if this young child really only has a diagnosis of ADHD that this school is tragically ill equipped to deal with him, or any children with even more disruptive behaviors.

And this ACLU spokesperson in right on the money when she suggests that this response only serves to traumatize these kids further and make them much harder to handle moving forward.

Trust me I have been cursed at, spit upon, had my hair pulled, been bitten, and had a boy threaten to kill my entire family. In none of those instances did I use unnecessary force or traumatize the client in any way.

You either have the skills to deal with this population or you do not. And quite often law enforcement officials are simply not trained appropriately, nor do they have the temperament required. 

Study finds that child abuse damages the development of grey matter in the brain.

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

A recent study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry concluded that child abuse contributes to a reduction in the volume of grey matter in the brains of its victims. 

According to Lena Lim, Joaquim Radua, and Katya Rubia, child abuse — or “childhood maltreatment,” as it is called in their study — leads to lifetime-long alteration in brain structure. 

“Childhood maltreatment,” they write, “acts as a severe stressor that produces a cascade of physiological and neurobiological changes that lead to enduring alterations in brain structure.” 

Using an imaging method that allows them to compare differences in brain anatomy between groups of individuals called “signed differential mapping,” the researchers studied structures of 331 individuals with a history of child abuse, and 362 without. 

They discovered that individuals who had suffered abuse had reduced brain matter in areas of the brain related to the cognitive process of decision-making. 

The most salient reduction in grey matter volume among victims of child abuse occurred in the ventrolateral prefrontal and limbic-temporal regions — areas of the brain linked to cognitive control.

I have no difficulty at all believing these findings.

I have worked with emotionally disturbed and cognitively impaired children for years, and one thing that is universal to all of the cases is abuse and some form of neglect.

I also suffered some fairly life altering abuse when I was a child.

Considering that I am fairly high functioning I am not sure how much brain matter was beaten out of me, but it certainly fucked up my ability trust or interact with people for quite a number of years.

Trust me when I tell you that no matter how extreme the behaviors might be, using violence as a behavior modification tool only creates far more problems than it appears to solve.

I have worked with kids who called me every name in the book, spit at me, pulled my hair, and even threatened to kill my whole family. In the end the techniques I utilized brought them out of crisis and put them on the path toward becoming contributing members of society.

Hell more than one of them now works with troubled kids themselves.

If you want to create loving children then love them.

If you want to create future guests of a Federal penal institution then by all means beat them into compliance.