Two daycare facilities that were closed down in Washington State reveal some typical patterns of abuse in these facilities. While parents may dread the specter of overt sexual abuse against their children, daycare abuse oftentimes takes more subtle, but equally dangerous, forms. In fact, some of these forms of daycare abuse are so difficult to detect that they may go on for many years and may put many different children in danger of being harmed.
Lacking Facilities
One of the ways that daycare child abuse sometimes ends up being a problem is because a facility is lacking in its resources for the children. Running a daycare facility is a complex and expensive affair. It requires that the people responsible for the facility take every precaution to provide for the health, welfare and safety of the children under their care. Taking such measures may include purchasing security systems, extensive background checking of employees and regularly purchasing new resources for the children, such as games, places to sleep, furniture and so forth.
When a daycare facility is found to have been lacking in these regards over and over again, it will sometimes be shut down by the state, as happened in Washington. The state of Texas has its own licensing requirements and, if a daycare facility consistently runs afoul of those requirements, it is generally not very long before their license is pulled. This is the best situation possible, as it represents state regulators doing their jobs and making certain that a dangerous product – incompetent daycare – is taken off of the market and no longer presents a threat to children.
Cruelty
Parents have significantly differing philosophies about disciplining children but, on the whole, all parents have an objection to other people disciplining their children in a way that contradicts their own philosophy. In some daycare facilities, discipline measures have been found to be excessively harsh – including physically throwing children – which sometimes leads to the facilities being shut down. This was another reason that one of the facilities in Washington was shut down.
If you get a bad feeling about a daycare facility, it’s always a good idea to pull your child out of it as soon as possible. If you find out that your child was the victim of abuse, contact a daycare abuse lawyer to see if they are willing to take your case and represent you by arguing a lawsuit on your behalf in court.