I admit I was appalled this morning when I read about the “Judge Rotenberg Center” in Massachusetts — “the only school in the world that routinely inflicts high-powered electric shocks as a form of punishment on vulnerable children and adults” (source). The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has issued a rare formal notice to the “school”, and five years ago a United Nations torture monitor found the center’s “electric shock technique was a potential violation of the UN convention against torture and other international laws”.

Yes, I was appalled, but I shouldn’t have been shocked (very unfortunate pun, right there).

The U.S. simply doesn’t have a good track record of protecting the most vulnerable among us. And when I say “most vulnerable”, children are the first demographic to come to mind, but I also include people with mental or physical impairments, and anyone afflicted by anything that leaves them more vulnerable to mistreatment than the typical person: illness, homelessness, poverty, addiction, and so on.

I admit I went on a hunt for links to back up my “track record” claim, but I think all my readers are aware of at least most of the avenues I traveled. The seven-year-old girl dying in Border Patrol custody last week — despite being healthy before her capture and imprisonment. The helpless migrants (including barefoot, diaper-wearing toddlers) intentionally doused with tear gas (which Border Patrol officials are praising). The sheer, ridiculous number of children who are “accidentally” or intentionally shot by police — like seven-year-old Aiyana Jones, six-year-old Jeremy Mardis, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, or six-year-old Kameron Prescott, who was killed by a stray round while police successfully attempted to kill a 30-year-old unarmed suspect.

(I put “accidentally” in quotation marks above, because very few of the events leading up to these deaths were truly accidental on the part of law enforcement.)

Or the startling number of children shot and killed each year without the help of law enforcement officers — far too many of them because parents “accidentally” leave loaded firearms lying around the house. Here, I put quotation marks around “accidentally” because I cannot fathom how something so deadly can be accidentally left lying around when children are in the house or car. But it happens with almost sentient frequency.

Or how 34 states and the District of Columbia (and Guam and Puerto Rico) legally allow child abuse and neglect if the accused claims a religious exemption. Typically these come into play when a child is in need of medical attention but a parent refuses treatment due to belief in faith-healing. And nearly all states allow misinformed parents to withhold important vaccinations from their children, as long as the parents claim it’s because of their unfounded beliefs. The list of children who have died due to these exemptions is too long to reproduce here.

And no internet-connected adult is unaware of the overwhelming numbers of children assaulted sexually by religious leaders — thousands of victims in Pennsylvania alone, from a single sect of Christianity, with little-to-no consequences. Most of us are aware that many students in public and private school are victims too, but I had no idea it was close to 10 percent of them.

And I think it’s fairly common knowledge that victimhood is increasingly likely when you add other factors like mental illness and poverty.

The only really encouraging note in all this is that it seems to get worse the further back in history one pursues the topic. Which means things have become marginally better over time.

I do know that at least some of these horrors can be relatively easily solved. For example, the Rotenberg Center is technically operating the electric-shock devices as “medical equipment”, in which case they’re regulated by the FDA. Way back in the good old days of pre-November 2016, the FDA proposed banning these devices, but then walked away with a shrug despite the clear moral imperative to do something. In the cases of religious exemptions for child abuse/neglect, it is obviously more difficult to get 34 state legislatures to rewrite 34 state laws, but there is really no obstacle to this other than inertia. The same situation exists when it comes to child marriage laws in the U.S. — get a little political willpower together and we can end this now.

Some of the others, perhaps obviously, are more difficult to solve. Teachers and school administrators are already mandatory reporters, but children are notoriously easy to manipulate, threaten, and cajole, and they’re very often left in the care of the people who prey on them. Police officers, most of them, already don’t shoot people, and we recognize that the ones who do are very often following approved protocols, procedures, and training. I don’t know an easy solution to the problem of sexual assault in schools and churches, or to the problem of children sometimes being killed by police officers.

But just because some of these are harder to solve doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands. Society never improves when we give up.

Perhaps one sign that it is improving is how appalled we are to read about the electric shock devices. A hundred years ago, very few of us would have even twitched at the news.