Gina Heslop
When parents need to put their child in daycare, they carefully search for the best center. They look at reviews and ask others for recommendations to find a safe and caring environment for their child.
Many times, everything goes smoothly, and the children are well taken care of by loving and supportive staff. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Sometimes, caregivers neglect or even abuse the children in their care.
According to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, there were over 3.5 million reports involving more than 6.4 million children in 2013 alone.
Most of these reports involved neglect, followed by physical, sexual, emotional abuse, and medical neglect. Both boys and girls have an equal risk of being abused, with children aged 0 to 3 years old being the most vulnerable.
Recently, a child in Arizona had a traumatic experience at daycare, which shocked her mother, Alice Martin. Alice had been taking her 15-month-old daughter to Creative Beginnings daycare in Tucson, Arizona. They chose this center because it was close to their work and Alice’s university, and it had good accreditation.
One day, Alice picked up her daughter and noticed she was unusually irritable. She didn’t think much of it at first since the daycare staff hadn’t mentioned anything unusual. However, when she got home and began to give her daughter a bath, she discovered red scars all over her daughter’s back and arms.
Alice was horrified to realize that these were bite marks. She counted at least 25 marks and was devastated that the daycare staff had not protected her child. It seemed that the caregivers had either ignored her daughter’s cries for help or had left the children unsupervised.
Alice was furious and couldn’t believe that no one at the daycare had intervened. She felt that the staff had completely neglected their duty to care for the children.
Alice planned to take legal action against the daycare, but she knew it would be challenging to prove her case. She doubted that the Arizona Department of Health Services would take significant action even though the incident had occurred months ago.
