MOST CARING people have strong feelings when it comes to stories about terrible mistreatment of children, particularly when it is compounded with sexual assault. When I hear or read such stories my heart aches, followed quickly by total revulsion for the perpetrator(s).

Caring folks wonder how anyone could commit such a heinous act. When the story includes repetitive incidents against the same child, then outrage is hardly containable.

Even prison inmates regularly target convicted child abusers for violence.

In my more than 50 years of editing and publishing small town newspapers, the number of sordid stories of child abuse seemed to grow each year in greater proportion than the population growth rate.

CASES OF sexual abuse of a child become even more critical when the justice system fails to mete out appropriate punishment to the perpetrators. In one county, we reported the incredulously inappropriate action of, and the sometimes total lack thereof, a prosecutor on scores of cases of child abuse. There was one trial in the 4-year term of that “people’s attorney” and every other case resulted in his recommendation for pre-trial diversion (even in repeat incidents), probation, deferred adjudication or outright dismissal of charges.

Fortunately, most prosecutors in Texas aggressively pursue child sexual abuse cases and seek to take the offenders out of circulation.

However, the faults in the system to protect children run deeper and are more complicated than the level of prosecution.

There was a Houston-area case last summer that outraged the entire state.

ACCORDING TO newspaper reports, the child’s mother, a registered nurse, claimed the injuries that resulted in the child’s death were self-imposed. The mother even went so far as to super-glue her child’s skull together. If more is needed to bring outrage, the mother claimed that the child contracted genital herpes on two areas of her body from a toilet seat.

The mother, separated and in divorce proceedings with her husband, and her boyfriend were arrested and charged in the case. Additionally, the boyfriend was out of jail on bond in another matter and was under investigation for the possible abuse of the children of a previous girlfriend.

Many express outrage and incredulity at Children’s Protective Services (CPS), Texas’ agency charged with seeing to child safety.

First of all, the agency’s primary goal is to keep the family unit together. Secondly, the agency has no real capacity to investigate the crimes often perpetrated against children. Those agencies that have the training and ability to investigate crimes all too often don’t get a case until it has gone to a terrible extreme.

WHILE CPS’S principal aim is to protect and preserve the family unit, a police agency’s primary goal is protection of the complainant/victim — the child — so law enforcement can prove the crime.

In the particular crime outlined here, CPS said a sexually transmitted disease (STD) is not enough to put a small child in custody without actual proof of sexual abuse since STDs can, in some instances, be transferred by non-sexual means.

TEXAS legislative bodies have conducted investigations into CPS. Investigations have been spread out over at least 30 years with few meaningful corrective steps taken.

In August, CPS made some positive policy changes that should improve the system and enable faster action on severe abuse cases.

First, if a child who is a suspected abuse victim tests positive for an STD, all children in that household will be tested as well. Any child who tests positive will get a sexual abuse examination followed by a thorough forensic interview with child abuse specialists at a Children’s Assessment Center.

A forensic interviewer is someone specifically trained in working with sexually abused children and skilled in obtaining information necessary for law enforcement, child safety and prosecutors. Such interviews are videotaped.

AT LEAST two things need to happen before Texas has as effective a system as possible to protect children from abuse. There obviously has to be legislation to make protection a priority for any agency involved. Secondly, and perhaps less obvious, the public needs to back up its outrage by reporting any sign of child abuse to the proper authorities. Abuse might not exist in every case investigated. But how can we not err on the side of safety for a child?

Willis Webb is a retired community newspaper editor-publisher. He can be reached by email at wwebb@wildblue.net.