29-year-old Dean Morace was charged with child abuse after he reportedly struck a child in the back and knocked them to the ground because the child slapped him while they were playing.
On December 6th, Metro Nashville Police officers responded to reports of a domestic incident at 1136 Bubbling Well Road. When officers arrived, they made contact with Tremale Marable. Tremale stated his child and Dean Morace were playing. He claimed Dean became frustrated and struck the child in the back, which knocked the child to the ground.
Dean and Tremale got into a verbal altercation over the incident. Dean stated to officers he did hit Tremale’s child because the child slapped him while they were playing. Officers noted a red mark was on the young child’s back, showing where they were hit.
Dean Morace was arrested and charged with child abuse of a child 8 years of age or less. He is currently jailed in lieu of a $3,500 bond.
“It has been said that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty. Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practicing medicine, ‘I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood’.” (Childhood Disrupted, pg.228).
Chronic abuse (sexual, emotional, physical, etc.) typically causes the child’s brain to improperly develop; and if allowed to continue, it’s the helpless infant’s starting point towards a childhood, adolescence and (in particular) adulthood in which its brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammation-promoting stress hormones and chemicals, even in non-stressful daily routines.
Meanwhile, general society perceives and treats human reproductive “rights” as though we’ll somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture our children’s naturally developing minds and needs.
As a moral and ethical rule, a psychologically sound as well as a physically healthy future must be all children’s foremost right—especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter.