The war against child abuse has become a war against children. Every year, hundreds of children die, thousands more are forced to live with strangers, and countless American families are torn apart. This is called a 'child-protection system'. While the problem of child abuse is serious and real, journalist Richard Wexler charges that our solutions to the problem have actually made it worse - in fact, hurting the very children that they were intended to help. Wexler reinforces his arguments with horrifying descriptions of children summarily removed from their homes, of families shattered because of false reports, and of children whose parents are guilty of nothing more than poverty being thrust into the maelstrom of the chaotic foster-care program.He writes of severely abused children - those needing the most help - whose cases are ignored because the system diverts scarce resources to trivial or unfounded cases, and who are re-injured, sometimes fatally after their plight has been called to the attention of authorities. "Wounded Innocents" illustrates how well-meaning efforts to help children have gone terribly wrong and how the current child-protection system desperately needs to be replaced with one that offers real help and real hope to abused and neglected children.
Richard Wexler is Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (www.nccpr.org) a group he helped to found after writing Wounded Innocents.
His interest in the child welfare system grew out of 19 years of work as a reporter for newspapers, public radio and public television.
During that time, he won more than two dozen awards, many of them for stories about child abuse and foster care. Wexler has testified before Congress and State Legislatures and advised the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families in its 1995 rewrite of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. Wexler's writing about the child welfare system has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and other major newspapers, and he has been interviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Time, the Associated Press, USA Today, 60 Minutes, National Public Radio, CNN, Good Morning America, Today, CBS This Morning, ABC World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News, and other media.
Wexler is a graduate of Richmond College of the City University of New York and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he was awarded the school's highest honor, a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. He was formerly Assistant Professor of Communications at The Pennsylvania State University -- Beaver Campus.
