Informative on Child Abandonment

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Jasmin Cooper October 30, 2012 Informative Child Abandonment What is Abandonment you might be asking, well abandonment is a legal term describing the failure of a parent who isn’t able to provide support to his/her children, however many things can be abandoned, Children are my main topic of interest. Legal abandonment has been a very big issue that has received attention since the 1970s. It refers to parents who do not fulfill court-ordered financial responsibilities to their children such as child support, regardless of their involvement in their children's lives. In 2002 it was estimated that up to 30 percent (19.8 million) of children in the United States, representing 11.9 million families, lived in single-parent households. Fewer than half of single-parent children under the age of 18 received any financial support from the parent who had abandoned there child. There are many contributions to the cause of abandonment. One example that plays a very large role is poverty. Poverty is the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support. Today, abandonment of a child is considered to be a serious crime in many jurisdictions because it can be considered malum in se (wrong in itself) due to the direct harm to the child, which I agree, child abandonment should be charged as a crime. Most people believe that abandonment typically involves physical abandonment - such as leaving a child at a stranger's doorstep when no one is home, it may also include extreme cases of emotional abandonment, such as when a "work-a-holic" parent offers little or no physical contact or emotional support over long periods of time. There are many laws against child abandonment. The laws against this vary from state to state, however most states do classify this as a felony. Because child abandonment is considered child abuse in some states, certain people may
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