Sometimes men speak as though women are surprised when men take a strong moral position about the death of children, particularly in conversations abo
Sometimes men speak as though women are surprised when men take a strong moral position about the death of children, particularly in conversations about abortion or a mother who kills a child while experiencing severe postpartum mental illness.
I don’t think surprise is quite the issue.
Women have been asking people to care about children’s lives and safety for a long time. What many women would like to see is consistency.
If your principle is that the lives of children are precious, then bring that principle with you. Don’t leave it behind when the circumstances become politically inconvenient, expensive, complicated, racialized, international, or difficult to solve.
Bring it here, too.
1. Bring That Energy to Children Killed in Family Annihilations
When a parent kills a spouse, children, or an entire family, those children deserve more than fascination with the perpetrator afterward.
Research on familicide has repeatedly found that the most commonly studied pattern involves a male head of household killing his female intimate partner and children. And the larger domestic-violence picture should trouble us: in CDC violent-death data from 2022, intimate-partner violence was a precipitating circumstance in 41.8% of homicides of females for which circumstances were known.
Children living inside violent homes need adults concerned about their lives before the final act of violence.
Concern for children should mean taking threats, stalking, coercive control, separation violence and escalating domestic violence seriously.
Not only mourning children once everybody is dead.
2. Bring That Energy When Black Children Are Being Killed
There is an ugly habit in American discourse. When violence falls heavily upon Black communities, concern can turn almost immediately into explanation.
People start talking about neighborhoods. Fathers. Culture. Crime. Poverty. Behavior.
Anything except the dead.
CDC data show how severe the racial disparity in homicide remains. In its 2022 violent-death surveillance, Black Americans accounted for 55.1% of homicide victims in the reporting system, despite representing a much smaller share of the U.S. population. Black males had a homicide rate of 56 per 100,000, compared with 3.9 among White males.
Children do not become less deserving of protection because somebody can produce a sociological explanation for the danger surrounding them.
We should be able to investigate causes without explaining away casualties.
3. Bring That Energy to Children Dying From Abuse and Neglect
Some children’s deaths arrive after warning signs.
Some arrive after reports.
Some happen inside homes where adults knew things were going terribly wrong.
According to the U.S. Administration for Children and Families, an estimated 2,000 children died from abuse or neglect in fiscal year 2023. Approximately 546,159 children were identified as victims of maltreatment that year.
The youngest children were especially vulnerable.
And there is another disparity we shouldn’t hurry past: federal data for 2023 put the maltreatment-fatality rate for Black children at 6.04 per 100,000, more than three times the rate reported for White children.
If we believe children have a right to live, then child protection cannot begin only at pregnancy.
It has to follow them home.
4. Bring That Energy to Children Living With Domestic Violence
Children do not have to be the person being punched to be endangered by domestic violence.
They can be injured during assaults. They can become targets themselves. They can lose a mother or caregiver to homicide. They can be caught in retaliatory violence during separation. They can live for years inside terror before anybody outside the household understands how dangerous things have become.
Federal child-maltreatment data make that connection visible. Among reporting states in 2023, domestic violence was identified as a caregiver risk factor for roughly one-quarter of child maltreatment victims included in that analysis.
So when women say, “This household is becoming dangerous,” protecting children requires listening before somebody has to die to prove the point.
5. Bring That Energy When Poor Children Cannot Get Health Care
A child’s right to remain alive should not depend upon whether their parents have enough money.
Yet in the United States, 6.1% of children under 19 were uninsured in 2024. The rate was higher for children living in some populations and regions. Hispanic children had an uninsured rate of 10.1%, Black children 5.7%, and children living in the South 8.4%.
Insurance is not the whole story either. Families raising children with disabilities can face battles over therapies, mobility equipment, home nursing, specialists and other medically necessary supports.
A society cannot congratulate itself for valuing children’s lives while making parents fight through poverty and bureaucracy to obtain the things their children need to survive and thrive.
6. Bring That Energy to Preventable Childhood Disease
This is where the numbers become almost difficult to comprehend.
An estimated 4.9 million children died before reaching their fifth birthday in 2024.
That is roughly 13,300 young children every day.
UNICEF reports that most of these deaths are preventable through established, relatively inexpensive interventions and access to quality health care.
Pneumonia and other infections still kill children. Complications surrounding birth kill children. Malaria kills children. Diarrheal illnesses kill children.
Children whose deaths could have been prevented count, too.
7. Bring That Energy to Children Dying From Hunger
Hunger does not become less deadly because nobody pulled a trigger.
For the first time, recent UN child-mortality estimates calculated deaths directly attributable to severe acute malnutrition. More than 100,000 children between one month and five years old died directly from severe acute malnutrition in 2024.
And that number does not capture the whole toll.
Malnutrition weakens children’s immune systems, making diseases that another child might survive far more dangerous. The UN therefore warns that the true contribution of malnutrition to childhood mortality is considerably larger.
If deliberately allowing a child to starve in a house horrifies us, children starving beyond our borders should not become morally invisible.
8. Bring That Energy to Sudan
Children do not become somebody else’s children when a border runs between us.
Sudan has provided one of the clearest tests of whether the world can sustain its concern for children when their suffering is far away and politically complicated.
UNICEF reported that more than 15 million children needed humanitarian assistance as the conflict entered its third year.
In just the first three months of 2026, UNICEF reported at least 160 children killed and another 85 maimed. More than 5 million children had been displaced over the course of the war.
In 2025, an estimated 770,000 Sudanese children under five were expected to suffer severe acute malnutrition.
These children count.
9. Bring That Energy to Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
The children of Congo count, too.
During a major escalation of fighting in eastern DRC in early 2025, UNICEF reported that incidents involving the killing and maiming of children increased sevenfold. Reported abductions increased sixfold. Attacks on schools and hospitals multiplied twelvefold.
During one week, health facilities supported by UNICEF partners recorded a fivefold increase in people receiving treatment following rape. Thirty percent of those receiving treatment were children.
There should be no ideological prerequisite for being horrified by that.
10. Bring That Energy to Girls Who Become Pregnant Far Too Young
Pregnancy in a very young girl should make adults ask an immediate question:
How did she become pregnant?
WHO estimates that the global birth rate among girls ages 10–14 was 1.5 births per 1,000 girls in 2023, rising to 4.4 per 1,000 in sub-Saharan Africa.
Girls and adolescents face greater risks from pregnancy than women in their twenties, including higher risks of serious pregnancy and childbirth complications.
And pregnancy in childhood cannot be separated from sexual violence. WHO reports that approximately 120 million girls younger than 20 have experienced sexual violence by someone other than a partner.
When a girl’s developing body is endangered because an older male impregnated her, protecting children means protecting her, too.
She does not disappear morally because another life has entered the conversation.
11. Bring That Energy to Children Without Homes
Children need somewhere safe to sleep.
In January 2024, HUD counted 259,473 people in families with children experiencing homelessness on a single night in the United States. That was an extraordinary 39.4% increase from 2023.
Most were sheltered, but 18,557 people in families with children were unsheltered.
Homelessness exposes families to weather, illness, violence, disrupted medical treatment, interrupted schooling and extraordinary instability.
Keeping children alive cannot be separated entirely from keeping children housed.
12. Bring That Energy to Disabled Children and Their Families
Sometimes protecting a child’s life is not dramatic.
Sometimes it looks like a wheelchair.
A ventilator.
A communication device.
Home nursing.
Accessible housing.
Transportation to specialists.
Respite care that keeps an exhausted family functioning.
Adequate Medicaid reimbursement.
A ramp.
A piece of equipment somebody sitting behind a desk has decided isn’t “medically necessary.”
Disabled children should not have to become inspirational stories or medical emergencies before society decides their needs are worth paying for.
And their vulnerability to violence deserves attention as well. CDC survey data found that in 2022, 13.9% of U.S. children ages 5–17 with disabilities had experienced or witnessed violence in their neighborhood, compared with 6% of children without disabilities.
Their lives count before a crisis.
13. Bring That Energy to Preventing Child Sexual Abuse and Listening to Girls
Bring that same fierce concern for children to child sexual abuse. Before the arrest. Before the documentary. Bring it to prevention.
Bring it to teaching children about bodily autonomy, privacy, consent, inappropriate behavior, grooming, trusted adults, and how to get help.
Bring it to believing children enough to investigate when they tell us something is wrong.
Bring it to creating homes, schools, churches, sports programs, and community spaces where adults understand that protecting children’s boundaries is part of protecting children.
Because the numbers do not give us permission to become casual about this.
The CDC estimates that at least 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 20 boys in the United States experience child sexual abuse. The agency cautions that the true numbers are probably higher because many children delay disclosure or never disclose at all.
And listen closely to what adolescent girls themselves are reporting.
In the CDC’s 2023 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 17% of female high school students reported experiencing sexual violence by anyone during the previous year, compared with 6% of male students.
When researchers asked students under 18 whether an adult or someone at least five years older had ever forced them to do sexual things they did not want to do, 11.8% of female high school students said yes, compared with 2.7% of male students.
Those are not numbers telling adults that our work is finished. They are telling us to pay attention.
And prevention has to include something adults sometimes resist: listening to girls about what safety requires in the world they are actually growing up in.
Their world is not ours. Technology has changed. Communication has changed. Sexual imagery is easier to encounter and distribute. Young people’s relationships can move between physical and digital spaces almost without a seam. A boundary violation can begin on a phone and follow a girl into school the next morning.
So adults cannot teach girls yesterday’s safety lessons and then dismiss them when they describe today’s problems.
Sometimes a girl will tell us that she doesn’t want to undress around boys.
She doesn’t want someone seeing her body.
She doesn’t want to share an intimate space.
She doesn’t want sexual jokes directed at her.
She doesn’t want to date someone.
She doesn’t want to hug someone.
She doesn’t want to explain why.
She wants adults to enforce a boundary instead of asking her to negotiate it. Our first response should not be to put somebody else’s feelings in her hands.
A girl should not have to demonstrate extraordinary kindness toward the person crossing her boundary before adults decide that her boundary deserves protection.
We have spent decades teaching children to say no, leave uncomfortable situations, recognize inappropriate behavior, trust the warning signals in their bodies, and tell an adult.
We cannot responsibly teach those lessons and then become irritated when girls actually use them.
There will be times when a child’s fear is mistaken. There will be situations adults need to investigate carefully and fairly. Children, like adults, can misunderstand situations.
But listening is not the same thing as automatically condemning somebody else.
Listening means taking the child’s information seriously enough to find out what is happening.
Child sexual abuse thrives in environments where children’s discomfort can be overridden by adult priorities: Don’t be rude. Give him a hug. Don’t embarrass him. He’s harmless. You’re making too much of this. Be nice. Don’t make people uncomfortable.
Child protection asks a different question:
What is this child trying to tell us?
And girls should never learn that protecting male feelings is a higher social obligation than protecting their own bodies.
The consequences of getting this wrong can follow children for years. CDC identifies child sexual abuse as an adverse childhood experience associated with serious long-term effects on health, opportunity and well-being. WHO likewise describes childhood sexual abuse as capable of producing lasting physical, sexual and mental-health consequences.
Bring it when the safest answer is simply:
She said no. We heard her. The boundary stays.
Because one of the oldest lessons in child sexual-abuse prevention is also one of the simplest:
Children need to know that their bodies belong to them.
Adults need to behave as though we believe it.
The Principle Has to Travel
This is the part that gets lost.
Women are not necessarily bewildered when men say they care deeply about children.
Many of us would welcome it.
We are asking whether that conviction survives a change of circumstances.
Does it survive when protecting the child costs taxpayers money?
Does it survive when protecting children requires confronting an abusive man?
Does it survive when the children are Black?
Poor?
Disabled?
Congolese?
Sudanese?
Homeless?
Hungry?
Born already?
Does it survive when protecting a girl requires confronting the adult male who impregnated her rather than scrutinizing her?
Does it survive when prevention is boring, expensive and invisible, and nobody gets to stand over a tragedy afterward declaring what should have happened?
Because protecting children is much larger than condemning individual women after something terrible has occurred.
It means building conditions in which children have a fighting chance to stay alive.
The strongest child-protection principle is not the one we apply most loudly. It is the one we are willing to apply consistently.