Throughout the past seven years, the number of children and teens in New England with developmental or emotional disorders has increased exponentially, the Kids Count Data Center reports. Developmental disorders are conditions that interrupt a child’s development. They include Autism Spectrum Disorder, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy and spina bifida. Emotional disorders affect a person’s ability to be happy, control their emotions and pay attention in school. They include attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder, anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder.
In stark contrast to the general financial well-being of Connecticut residents, the state is in a hunger crisis that is negatively impacting children, primarily in urban areas. The most recent data from Feeding America shows that in 2016, 11.6 percent of the total Connecticut population was living with food insecurity, and of that percentage, 15.6 percent were children. According to the parameters set at the World Food Summit in 1996, “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”
While food security may be something most Connecticut residents take for granted, a significant portion of the Connecticut population wonders every day where their next meal will come from. The impact of this issue is especially concerning when considering how it is affecting children. The 2018 report on Child Food Insecurity by Feeding America states that struggling with food insecurity puts children at a greater risk for “stunted development, anemia and asthma, oral health problems and hospitalization.”
Connecticut’s governor quickly weighed in with a strongly worded statement on July 16 when two children who were separated from their families at the U.S- Mexico border because they were all undocumented were reunited with their parents. “It should not take a lawsuit to convince President Trump to reunite the families his administration heartlessly ripped apart—nor should it take public intervention from governors, United States senators, and members of Congress,” Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said in a statement. The children were a 9-year-old boy from Honduras who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in June to escape gun violence and a 14-year-old girl from El Salvador who crossed the border in May with her mother after the girl’s stepfather was murdered, according to the Hartford Courant. According to the emergency lawsuit filed by the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic at the Yale Law School, “some mental health experts have concluded that the separation is profoundly damaging to the short-term and long-term mental, emotional, and physical health of vulnerable children, who lose their primary caregivers at a time of almost unimaginable stress and fear.”
Malloy said that Trump’s zero-tolerance policy is nothing short of child abuse and has “caused unimaginable trauma.”
“While it is good news that these children will be reunited with their parents today, they never should have been separated in the first place,” Malloy said. In an interview, Kathleen McWilliams, a Courant reporter who has been covering this case, said she would like more people to understand about immigration.
Efforts to mend relationships between police and communities have contributed to a continued decrease in crime in New York City. The city reported a drop in overall crime for the fourth straight year. Records show that there were 96,517 crimes reported in 2017, compared with 102,052 in 2016, a drop of 5.4 percent. In 2017, there were 292 murders in New York City, compared with 335 the year prior. That’s in contrast to the 2,605 people killed in New York City in 1990.
Connecticut public high schools have become a familiar territory for military recruiters. At Conard High School in West Hartford, Nolan Asadow, a junior, said that he sees recruiters from all service branches giving away branded merchandise and speaking to any student interested in learning more about military service. “I see the recruiters in the cafeteria and in the halls at my school about once a month,” he said. One reason that they’re in Connecticut high schools so often is because there are so few people eligible to serve. According to the U.S Army Recruiting Command, there are 33.4 million Americans age 17 to 24 and only a little less than 140,000 of them are eligible for service when whittled down by standards, quality and interest.
Shataia Alicia Morris, 16, of West Hartford has been dancing since she was 6 years old, has won an abundance of awards and wants to continue dancing for years to come. As a young child, she would watch the TV show “Dance Moms.” She said those hour-long episodes sparked a fire in her that will never be put out. Morris has won over 20 dance awards, mostly for her solos in jazz, tap and lyrical dance. She recently won an award for a solo performance in lyrical dance.
Maren Sanchez, 16, a student at Jonathan Law High School in Milford, was stabbed to death in April 2014 by Christopher Plaskon, 19, after she refused his invitation to the school prom. He was convicted of murder in June 2016 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. While Plaskon’s conviction may have offered little comfort to Maren Sanchez’s loved ones, her death called attention to the issue of teen dating violence. Connecticut enacted a state law in 2014 requiring teachers, administrators and other school personnel to receive training in how to recognize teen dating violence and domestic violence. And the pain from the loss of her daughter prompted Donna Cimarelli-Sanchez to create the Maren Sanchez Home Foundation with the mission “to empower girls to defend themselves against emotional, psychological and verbal manipulation and physical violence.”
According to the 2017 Youth Behavior Risk Survey, about 10 percent of teens in Connecticut said they have experienced sexual dating violence in high school.
Every 98 seconds an American is sexually assaulted and every eight minutes that victim is a child, according to Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). One in five women and one in 71 men will be raped at some point in their lives, according to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. People ages 12 to 34 are at the highest risk for rape and sexual assault.
Detective Brendan Gibbs of the New York Police Department said he has investigated 40 to 50 sexual assault cases during his 13 years on the police force. He said the victims have usually ranged in ages from 15 to 17. The victims are mostly Hispanic females who have been assaulted by a relative or a person who is very close to the family, he said.
Connecticut hospitals ranked fourth from the bottom nationally for timely treatment of sepsis, new data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) show. Sepsis is the body’s extreme response to an infection and occurs when an infection you already have triggers a chain reaction throughout your body, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Without timely treatment, sepsis can lead to tissue damage, organ failure and even death, the CDC reports. In 2015, CMS decided to start assessing hospitals’ treatment for sepsis. The first treatment statistics were released recently. A high percentage score means that a hospital has been following sepsis treatment protocols; a low score indicates poor sepsis care. Connecticut’s average score was 43 percent, compared with a national score of 49 percent, the data show. C-HIT has updated its Hospital Infections easy-to-use searchable database to include the sepsis ratings for each hospital.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 700 women in the United States die each year as a result of pregnancy or pregnancy-related complications, and the rate has more than doubled since 1987. Pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births rose from 7.2 nationally in 1987 to 17.3 in 2013, peaking at 17.8 in 2009 and 2011. In Connecticut, there were eight pregnancy-related deaths from 2011 to 2014. But there’s no data available yet for the years since 2014 and at the moment there are precious few dollars devoted to accessing it
For more on this story by Christine Stuart of ctnewsjunkie.com click here.