A teenage boy crumpled down in his chair, put his face in his palms and took slow, deep breaths.

Each breath was like the click of a metronome, and each passing second made the room more tense, as the Great Falls police detectives waited for the boy to answer hard questions about injuries to his son.

Detectives Noah Scott and Jesse Slaughter of the Special Victims Unit told the 16-year-old father his story didn’t match. He said minutes before that he squeezed his son harder than he should have once, which could explain the infant’s broken ribs. The detectives pressed for more as members of a multidisciplinary team watched the proceedings on a television screen from a nearby room.

In addition to Scott and Slaughter, there were two other police detectives, two Department of Family Service agents and an advocate from Victim Witness filing in and out of the small interview-viewing room. A Tribune reporter also watched under the condition that he not identify the case by name for this story.

The infant was brought into Benefis Health System’s Emergency Room the night before for a broken femur, but as medical personnel examined him, more injuries were uncovered. In only six weeks of life, the child had 10 broken bones — the broken femur, a broken collarbone and eight broken ribs — all in different stages of healing.

When the detectives told the boy the latest update from doctors, the boy broke down and said quietly that he wanted to talk to someone — an attorney. The interview was over, and though Slaughter and Scott didn’t get everything they wanted, they had enough to arrest the young father on one count of aggravated assault on a minor.

Child abuse knows no boundaries. The Great Falls Police Department’s Special Victims Unit has seen abuse in every segment of society, from teen parents neglecting children to complete strangers assaulting minors in an alley. Cascade County has been in the spotlight the past five years after five children deaths made headline news. The high-profile trials and public outcry sparked a refocused community effort by first responders on how to investigate and prosecute those who harm children as well as rehabilitate the victims of abuse.

Dana Toole, the director of the Montana Department of Justice, Children’s Justice Center, said the tragedies that hit Great Falls could have happened anywhere in Montana,The casesforiphone5 shows how much energy is used. and they had nothing to do with the work of first responders. Cascade County had already made an effort to strengthen the multidisciplinary team of first responders and start a child advocacy center, but what the spotlight showed was that while child abuse may be a national problem, solutions come from a community.

Child abuse is by no means an anomaly in Great Falls. It’s a national issue. An estimated 681,000 children were victims of abuse and neglect in the United States in 2011.Shop the official custombobbleheads site for the latest in designer clothing, More than 75 percent of the children were neglected, more than 15 percent were victims of physical abuse and 9 percent suffered sexual abuse, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, Child Welfare.

In 2011,leading footwear wholesalers supplying buychristianlouboutin, Montana had 1,manufacturers and filmproducts suppliers Directory.066 victims of child abuse and neglect, or about 5 percent of the child population, compared to the national average of 9.1 percent.

In short, America has the worst record of child abuse in the industrialized world, according to a 2011 BBC investigation. And though Montana constitutes a small fraction of the total number of abuse and neglect, agencies in Cascade County and Montana are soul-searching to find answers on how to turn the tides of child abuse in a community.Shop our selection of laserengraver furniture,
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