CHILD ABUSE and SUBSTANCE ABUSE

The correlation between chld abuse and alcohol and drug abuse (substance abuse) has been researched and documented. It is established fact. Hundreds of thousand of children are impacted annually and removed from their homes by the courts. Many of the parents will have their parental rights terminated and the children will grow up in foster or group homes. At eighteen (in most states), they will be discharged from the court's case dependency system into the world. Statistically these children do not stand a snow balls chance in hell of living normal lives. The majority of these children end up in prison, in mental hospitals, homeless or living marginal lives.  

Chooper's Guide is committed to child abuse advocacy and to promoting awareness of the prevalence of this malignant derivitative of our current draconian legal sytem. The majority of these children grow up without consistent parental care as their parents have been incarcerated for a brain disease. They grow up emotionally and cognitively impaired and are over 100% more likely to become addicted to drugs or alcohol.

"I wonder as I develop this web page how many of the visitors who take time to read and reflect on the contents have ever been homeless, helpless and hopeless. To be young, alone and without the experiential wisdom, the skills for living, the support of a loving family and the financial resources to survive is an experience to horrific to express in words.

I speak from experience having spent years of my younger life in group homes, institutions and living in the streets. At the age of fifteen, I became homeless and by sixteen I had become a hard core narcotics addict.  My journey through hell ended when I was 30 on a hospital gurney in a New England city addicted to narcotics and acutely alcoholic, a knife wound in my abdomen, Hepatitis C, cirrhosis of the liver, cellulitis rotting my hands and arms and a broken bone or two. I was alone and dying.

Almost 32 years later, I am truly grateful to be alive and I try to pass it forward.

Many of these kids aging out of foster care will follow similar paths. They will spend their lives in and out of jails and institutions or die.  Many of them will die with no one there at their bedside. They will never have learned to live and they never would have known what normal is or what it feels like to be loved. They have been thrown away, first by their parents and then, upon their 18th birthday, by society

Each of us can make a difference. Sometimes it only takes one kind gesture to alter a persons direction in life. If you would like to help a substance abuse impacted child, you may make a donation to the Chooper's Foundation." ~ Tim