Are there injustices in the U.S that concern children, eating disorders, or abortion?

What course is this for? A little context would help.

One possible avenue of investigation is whether eating disorders are treated on a par with comparable disorders when it comes to insurance coverage.

Another is whether school codes of discipline and appeal for youngsters violate their rights as U.S. citizens.

But whether or not something is an injustice depends on your understanding of what is just and your interpretation of how something falls short of that principle. You are going to have to define the idea of justice clearly in your mind in order to talk about injustice. Unjust is not necessarily the same as illegal. If you are concerned about the rights of an unborn fetus and consider abortion as an injustice, you’ll find plenty of material on that subject.

Nah, everything’s fine.

The living conditions of children on native reservations is an injustice. I believe some police interrogations of children without their parents and charging very young children as adults may be an injustice. Definitely the detaining of anyone without formal charges or a fair trial is an injustice. The entire patriot act is an injustice. I believe asset forfeiture laws are an injustice based upon the constitutional protection of private property.

You could make the case (certainly, many have) that abortion is itself an injustice.

That’s what I said, @Nullo.

@Jeruba And I just lurved you for it. :D

You might look at the inequalities in access to good elementary and high school education between rich and poor communities and how that perpetuates the cycle of poverty. That is certainly an injustice to children in this country. You would want to look into how schools are funded by property taxes, local control and recruitiment of teachers. Have Federal programs such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” mitigated these inequities at all?

I think the current mind set towards healthy eating habits for kids is woefully inadequate, This encompasses not just blatant advertising of junk food to kids but IMO more towards the overall degree of importance towards healthy food choices across the board both at home and at school. Kids can only choose to eat from what is offered and available to them and I just see junk junk junk being offered up to kids and heaven forbid you leave it up to them to pick and choose at the grocery store and 99% of it will be more junk. Even with the food pyramid hammered into the kids at school, I feel the message stops there where it really needs to get to the person in charge of buying the groceries.

I see month after month Boy Scouts who really do know better pick and choose their camp-out menus and cookies, Pop-Tarts, sausage and doughnuts are always on their menues and MAYBE one bag of apples make to the camp out probably because the parent made them bring it. School lunches and vending machines are horrible pushers of bad choices and how is a kid supposed to have any opportunity for a good meal let alone learn good choices if the schools continue to push junk at them.

Child obesity is an epidemic and diabetes is a huge and growing problem so you want injustice??? Look no further and here is a good place to start…CDC link on childhood obesity

@janbb There’s probably more to it than just funding; after all, a couple generations ago the one-room schoolhouse was the norm for K-12, and they did a darn good job.

@Nullo true but when they went to get jobs at the civilian conservation corpse they didn’t need computer skills to compete for the job. Some schools have everything from indoor pools and bowling alleys. A few neighborhoods away a school might not even have books let alone chemistry or biology lab with equipment. When those kids go to community college and take chem or biology 101 they are at a disadvantage because they’ve never had a lab and had don’t know a beaker from a petri dish.

The Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti has a lot of material to choose from, and is a great source. It’s about how pressuring girls to be virgins does the same thing as porn – defines their entire worth by their sexuality. She talks about how the abstinence-only programs endanger our youth, dehumanize women, and seek to reinforce traditional gender roles. Since only white, middle-or-upper class girls (not women) can be considered pure, it also reeks of racism as black/hispanic/asian girls or lower-income girls (and, of course, women) cannot ever be pure no matter what they do. So to sum up – women’s rights, abortion, sex, racism.

You can’t find any injustice around those three incredibly broad subjects? Where have you been looking?

@Nullo No – of course, it is not just funding but a whole panoply of interwoven societal issues that can be explored.