Blogging For Hope. Reduce Abuse For Our Children's Sakes.

I'm a 42 (43 in a couple months) year old guy with a Four Year old marriage, a three year old daughter and a one year old son. For both my wife (34) and I these are our only children, and honestly when we married, we didn't really think we would have children. Not that we didn't want them, but I had just assumed that I had played with a little too much microwave radiation in the Army and that this explained why, at nearly 40, I had not had any children yet.

Those who converse with me in forums and IM know that these two children are my world. The idea that any one could want to harm such creatures as these leaves me simply twisted up in knots and confused beyond any confusion I've ever known. It's unimaginable, and yet it is the reality. There are evil predators who seek out and harm our children.

I'm not going to cite a lot of statistics here. You can find that if you are interested. I don't need statistics. If one child is at risk of being abused that is one child too many, and we both know it's more than one. A lot more than one. We both know there is a problem, and me pretending to lecture you on it is pointless.

What I am going to do is make three simple recommendations for you to do something about this. Awareness of the problem is only one part of things. Taking action on that awareness is what gives it value. Awareness without appropriate action is worthless.

The first thing I want you to consider doing is to visit Code Amber. There you can pick up the code to insert into your blog to display a news ticker containing any currently running Amber Alerts. You can get the code for either the U.S. or Canada.

If you are from another country, and you know of a similar program for your country, tell me about it and I'll add a link to it from here also. If you don't know how to get the code into your blog theme contact me through my contact form here And I'll help you, or arrange help for you if you are using software I'm not familiar with.

The next thing I'm going to recommend is that you get involved at some level with some organization that is dedicated to either preventing child abuse, rescuing abused children or healing child abuse survivors. These precious little people are our future. They are our lives. We must do all we can to support them and bring them to adulthood in the safest and sanest manner we can. Whether you can volunteer your time, make a donation, offer resources or services or whatever else. Please seek out an organization and get involved in making our children's lives safe and abuse free.

I'm not recommending a specific organization for you to support, because there are many of them to choose from. Some are global and others are local. Some aid children in all types, stages and degrees of abuse while others focus on specific aspects of the problem. Please choose on as your heart moves you. You can find many to investigate here.

Wikipedia's page on child abuse is a good place to start looking for an organization to support. Please take the time to do so right now.

The third thing I challenge you to do is to post links to resources for preventing child abuse, reporting child abuse, rescuing abused children, and healing survivors of child abuse. Post links to the organizations you find on your own blog. Post them to the Blogging For Hope: Child Abuse Thread. Post them to imaginif's Blog Against Child Abuse Post List. Post them to the comments section here. Post them to Topix. Post them to other blogs posting against child abuse. Just post them. What ever resources you find. People with resources can accomplish amazing things.

If you blog against child abuse today, be sure to send a track back to this post so my readers can visit your blog too.

Also if you add the Amber Alert code to your blog be sure to post a comment or contact me and let me know. I'll be creating a special page of links to blogs that have amber alert (or other similar services in other countries) codes installed on their blogs and promise to keep them there.