Wait, what? A young teen to get married in Michigan? Since when can young teenagers get married in Michigan? Actually, many people don’t realize it (including most people who live here in the Great Lakes State). But Michigan’s marriage age – with parental consent, of course – is the unbelievably young age of 14! Yes,…
Category: Child Abuse
There is hardly a month that goes by in Michigan, that there isn’t a terrible child abuse case making the rounds in the news. Some of them are legitimate – those children really were harmed and the state is right to step in and protect them. Some of them are bogus – those kids are…
The Michigan-based female genital mutilation case that rocked the nation over the last two years came to a surprising an rather controversial end recently, when a federal judge dismissed the charges on the grounds that they aren’t constitutional. Come again? What was that, you wonder? How on earth can cutting the genitals of little girls…
Welcome back to this conversation about how parents should talk to their children about sexual abuse. In a nutshell, we’re looking at the difficulties that come up when a parent questions their child about a possible sexual abuse situation. Obviously, as parents, we want to know that our kids are safe, and find out the…
An ongoing case in the Battle Creek area has brought up a very difficult subject – the issue of child sexual assault, and how to know when it’s happening. As parents, we want to protect our children from harm, and make sure that nothing frightening or damaging is happening to them. But what if it’s…
This is a very difficult subject. One that few people want to talk about, and fewer people even want to acknowledge. Why? Because it’s uncomfortable, and it puts into sharp focus the fact that even children are capable of doing terrible things that are damaging to others. When it’s your child perpetrating the actions, you’re…
Welcome back and thanks for joining us. In this two part article we’ve been talking about a form of child abuse that often goes unacknowledged as abuse – the emotional kind which leaves no visible marks. However, the lack of scars doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a serious effect on a child, and in many…
As we’ve discussed many time in the past, parental alienation is a form of child abuse. And while it usually comes up as a subject in family law situations (because it often happens after a divorce) we believe that it’s a very appropriate subject to discuss here as well on our child abuse and neglect…
Larry Nassar has become the symbol of everything that’s wrong with medical professionals, universities, and sex offender laws. His case has received wider media attention than the Jerry Sandusky/Penn State sex scandal, and has given birth to a nationwide fan club devoted to the Judge, Rosemarie Aquilina, who presided over his trial. But these new…
If you follow our blog, or even just read the local news, you already know something about the Female Genital Mutilation case that took Detroit by storm last year. It started with a single female doctor, 44-year-old Jumana Nagarwala of Northville, who was charged with performing genital cuttings on two young girls from Minnesota, aged…