Detecting child abuse early can prevent escalation

There can be no more innocent being than a baby 6 months old or younger, so it’s hard to fathom that physicians and hospital personnel should require training to help detect when infants have been abused. But because such tragedies do occur, it’s good this training is available and is being expanded.

Entirely dependent on their caregivers, these babies of such tender age cannot intend to misbehave or do much more than express discomfort when they are hungry, wet or tired.

And they can cry if they are hurt.

It is sobering to acknowledge that as many as 90 abuse-related injuries are detected each month in babies this young in Ohio, but that is what six pediatric hospitals across Ohio, including Nationwide Children’s Hospital, said this week they are finding.

The good news, if it’s even possible for this to have a positive side, is that the hospitals and others they are helping to train are detecting injuries that could be precursors to moreserious abuse at a point when intervention might provide much-needed help and support. Harm that is being identified as “sentinel injuries” for abuse includes bruises, fractures, head or abdominal injuries, burns and oral or genital injuries.

The abuse now being detected is 50 percent more than was being seen in 2015 — not because it is occurring more frequently, experts in the field believe, but because more and better-trained medical personnel are looking for it. A $1 million grant from the Ohio attorney general’s office funded a collaborative project to help detect the red-flag injuries with better diagnostic tools and processes including psychological assessments of caregivers.

Child abuse can stem from causes including poverty, substance abuse and family history. The blessing of detecting abusive environments early is the opportunity it provides to help prevent recurrences. How effective the intervention ultimately is will be shown by a reduction in the 30,000 cases annually of child abuse in Ohio. Even one is too many.

Nationwide Children’s Hospital embraces a broad view of health, and Columbus is better for that expansive perspective. One of the ways this plays out is via the hospital’s involvement with the nonprofit Community Development for All People on a shared Healthy Homes initiative to improve the availability of affordable housing in the neighborhood mostly south of the hospital.

The project has renovated or built 128 homes in the past several years and now is looking to expand east and north to the Driving Park and Livingston Park neighborhoods.

The idea is to get ahead of market forces to ensure a good mix of affordable homes remains in the area as some nearby housing stock begins to be priced out of the reach of most residents.

Homes in the Old Oaks neighborhood between Driving Park and Livingston Park have commanded more than $300,000 in recent sales, while the median value in those neighborhoods is about half of the citywide median of $150,000. Household income in the area, at $25,175, is just above half the citywide median of $47,000.

Decent affordable housing is a critical factor for a healthy community, and it has been lacking in Columbus. Growth in collaborations like the Healthy Homes initiative serves more than just the immediate neighborhood. Enjoy cartoons by Nate Beeler at Dispatch.com/opinion/beeler

Whether President Donald Trump can pardon himself is an “open question” in the same sense that it’s an open question whether the moon landing really happened. Yes, there are those who dispute even one of the best-documented scientific achievements of all time. And no, the question has never been settled in court. But that’s because there’s never been any need to do that.

Yale Law School grad Josh Hawley, who as Missouri attorney general is the state’s top lawyer, insists that this is an “open question” since “courts have not said one way or another. But I get where the president is coming from” in claiming he certainly does have that power. Hawley said Robert Mueller’s investigation into potential collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russians meddling in our election “has gone on way too long and cost way too much.”

As Sen. Claire McCaskill’s leading challenger, Hawley may just be keeping up with his primary opponents or angling for another presidential fundraiser. Politically, this may even be the right move in Trump-loving Missouri.

As a legal matter, however, Hawley is not right. It seems inconceivable that he isn’t sure whether the U.S. Constitution framers intended to put the president above the law. President Barack Obama was dubbed a king for his supposedly power-mad use of executive orders, though he signed slightly fewer than George W. Bush and many fewer than Trump is on track to autograph. Hawley frequently spoke out against presidential overreach during Obama’s tenure.

But after Trump’s tweet about having “the absolute right to PARDON myself,” Hawley weighed in with a direct quote of the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who said Trump’s ability to toss out his own guilty verdict is “an open question,” not yet settled by the courts. Maybe they’re confusing our founding document with what Richard Nixon told David Frost: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

Fortunately for our democracy, that has not been a widely accepted view in this country. White House lawyers told Nixon that wasn’t an option under “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.” Laurence Tribe, a constitutional-law professor at Harvard, Richard W. Painter, chief ethics counsel for George W. Bush, and Norman Eisen, chief ethics counsel for Obama, wrote in The Washington Post that the Constitution “specifically bars the president from using the pardon power to prevent his own impeachment and removal. It adds that any official removed through impeachment remains fully subject to criminal prosecution. That provision would make no sense if the president could pardon himself.”

The opposing view, that the fact it’s not spelled out that the president can’t do that means he can, is a pretty long walk around the barn. Take it from a former farm boy: “If I were president of the United States and I had a lawyer that told me I could pardon myself,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican, “I think I would hire a new lawyer.”

We would love to hear Hawley show even a smidgen of the executiveoverreach concern that so troubled him under Obama.