Rock, you are right on so many levels, but have missed a couple of things. (Don't take offense, I am just adding to your argument.)

The President has been talking about the issue and is setting up an infrastructure to take action.

1) Obama set up an Office for Urban Affairs, where most Blacks live. He is the only President of late who actually lived in an urban setting before moving to the White House. Michelle was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. He knows something is amiss within Black communities.

2) He set up an Office on Women and Girls, mandating it to assess all agency directives for impact on America's women and girls, including Blacks and Hispanics.

3) He is working to strengthen the Nurse Home Partnership, a program that has nurses and social workers go directly into homes to help teach parenting skills -- something sadly lacking in too many Black households -- and make referrals for appropriate services.

4) Obama regularly speaks about personal responsibility. Despite what too many Black grassroots and elected leadership have espoused for decades, we cannot on the one hand blame racism for all our problems, then on the other hand (and with a straight face) depend on the same so-called racism, and a variety of other stake-holders, to save us from ourselves. (What is Sharpton asking for, that educators remove at-risk Black children from their homes/ communities/ dysfunctional culture so that they can get an education?) At a certain point, we will have to take responsibility. Blaming and depending upon others, while turning a blind eye to what we do to ourselves, is a bad, dysfunctional habit. The lack of honesty and open minded critical analysis does not help.

I will be posting soon on education and the behaviors of females as well as how females are (mis)treated in Black communities which is the foundation for the dysfunction.

For a taste, see my post on the missing 12 year old. It's the tip of an iceberg.

I will leave you with this:

Last September, yet another 10-year-old was shot on the streets of central Brooklyn. (People would be surprised how many Black children are shot and live, carrying bullets in their bodies, and the psychological damage, with them to school. It is as if our children are collateral damage in a suicidal/ fratricidal war.) Anyway, I wrote an opinion piece for Our Time Press called "Ladies, Stop Giving ___ to Criminals, Please!" -- it being vajayjay. My point was Black women can and do decide who they get with; if criminals really want Black women who establish non-negotiable standards, they will stop causing the violent crimes that negatively impact our communities. The added benefit being Black women would not risk breeding more criminals. (I know this is not politically correct, but I have a uterus. I decide whose child I gestate and bring into the world.) Less than 24 hours after publication, multiple threats were delivered to me. The problem was I was "interfering with criminal access to vajajay,"  something that "is becoming harder to get." I was told to beware of "crazy criminals", who "carry illegal guns with them at all times, even to booty calls." My question was, and still is, why does a male need to take a gun to booty calls-- is the male going to shoot the female after he shoots her?  The saddest part is the conduit most of the threats came from. Never was it considered that I was advocating against street shootouts where children are victims.

(Incidentally, while talking about the article, several women told me they only date criminals. When I asked why, they said if they didn't, there would be no one to date.)

When unfettered access to vajayjay is more important than the safety of children -- our gateway to the future -- we have a serious cultural problem. And a Black female like me is not supposed to even talk or write about it. This intimidation of females has been going on for decades within Black communities and is just one of the reasons we cannot come near solutions to problems we cause for ourselves.

Rock makes some good points.  Consider the disproportionate (and I mean highly disproportionate) numbers of minority citizens who are on Public Assistance (i.e. welfare) in the city.  Most who are in the PA system, living in shelters and otherwise, get very little *real* help from the city.  Instead of being given guidance to turn their lives around, the system perpetuates itself and those who end up on PA, *stay* on PA.

If Rock is elected to the city council, what does he do about the issue of single women in his district on public assistance, who clearly have had great difficulty even taking care of themseles and keeping a roof over their head, yet turn around and get pregnant?  Yet no politically correct politician in office is going to tell such a woman the truth-- that if she is in the shelter and has been on welfare for a long time, there is no father around, and can barely take care of herself, that she should either have an abortion or put the kid up for adoption.   No politically correct politician would dare suggest that.  No politically correct politician would dare say a word to a woman living in a shelter who won't use birth control and keeps having kids when she can't pay her own rent or buy her own food.  This is part of the problem.

So you have children who are born to single mothers in shelters and grow up in shelters on PA and know no other way of life.   Just yesterday there was an article in the Times about how the Bloomberg Administration is starting to ask those living in shelters who have jobs pay some rent?  This is a highly debatable issue and may not even be a good idea.  But the story quotes a single mother who lives in a family housing shelter with her nineteen year old son.  Her son is nineteen, he is a man, and yet he may know no other life but the shelters and public assistance.  He is the type that is likely to be in and out of the Public Assistance program and this or that shelter for much of his life. 

I have volunteered at mens shelters in the city on occasion and they are full of mostly single black and hispanic males who have been on public assistance all of their lives in one form or another.  Many had been raised by single mothers on public assistance, and many others had parents who were in and out of jail and had thus been raised by one grandparent or another.  There were plenty of men I saw who had been paroled from jail straight into the homeless shelters.  They get out of jail and are taken by the busload directly from the prison to the shelters.  Where they stay cashing PA checks and foodstamps, unable to get jobs and the city not helping them to get jobs, until they get tired of those meager benefits and go deal drugs or rob a store, get caught and end up on the bus right back to the prison.  Where they will stay until they get let out of prison two or three years later and are bused right back to the shelter to start all over again.  I saw men in their thirties who had teenage kids of their own that they never saw because they themselves had been shuttling between prison and the shelter for years.  Some freely admitted they did not know how many kids of which they might be the father. 

One of the reasons I supported Obama was that I thought his election would give some of these men I saw in those shelters a positive role model and hope.  But to give them hope, Obama has to take steps to address the Public Assistance mess in this country.  We have to change this system that does not help these young men but simply creates revolving doors between shelters and jails and offers no real way out.  We have to change a system that facilitates an increasing number of children being born to single parents on Public Assistance, who then spend their lives trapped, growing up in a system that offers no way out.   

why I call on Black and Hispanic women to be more selective as to who they sleep with. All too many think they need a man, and have one, when the truth is they don't have a man if he dropped out of high school (50% dropout rate among Black males), voluntarily making himself unemployable (50% unemployment of Black males), and cannot take care of himself, much less his children.

One sad truth is too many families are formed as a direct result of tricking, which is why so many males don't know how many children they fathered. The predictably resultant "Oops, there it is" is not fair to the children born of these situations, the women, or society.

Yet another sad truth: far too many children are born to mothers ages 12, 13, 14, 15 (ask any middle school principal) -- ages where the girl is too young to legally consent to sex because young girls are incapable of negotiating the consequences of their actions. Worse, most of the babies born to young girls are not the result of puppy love, although some are. Most young girls are impregnanted by adult men, and they say so. Invariably, they say the baby daddy is 36 or 45 years old. You would think the adult males would know better. But they don't care and the rest of society and Black communities have to pay for the results of their sexual exploitation of children.

I have met many 32 year-old women whose oldest child is 17. Count back. The mothers were sexually abused and impregnated when they were 14, had the first child when they were 15. During those years the mothers tell me they struggled raising her children alone, on welfare because they dropped out of school after the first, not only, baby. Why have more children? Because they were too young to advocate on their own behalf. The first baby signals to the other friendly neighborhood predators that the girl is the community toilet bowl. That is why the young girls have babies by different fathers.

You would think grass roots leaders and elected officials would call for adult males to leave the children alone. I have asked grassroots leadership to have any rally, press conference, march against the sexual exploitation of children. Various, but not all, grassroots leadership (male) have told me "We can't do that. It would be divisive." Others are just silent, including some well known big mouths. It doesn't matter to them that children literally ask for help regarding this issue.

Last March 2008, a 10 year old Bronx girl was snatched off the street on a Sunday afternoon while she was playing in front of her home, taken to the roof, raped, and left there bloody and needing help. Several women, including me, asked male leadership for a march or rally in support of the girl. To this date no one has spoken out against the rape of that child. And that is not the only rape of children in Black communities.

Last Spring (2008) I counted the number of children who were victims of child sexual predators in Brooklyn by zip code of the offender. Results at that time: 904 child victims (most were girls) -- 495 were age 0-12 (one guy in 11226 had "actual sex intercourse" with a baby 7-364 days old); 255 victims were 13-15; the rest 16-19. Most of the predators were male and many had victimized multiple children. Guns, knives, fists, blunt objects, choking, drugs, and outright kidnapping were tools used to make the children submit. Most of the predators in Brooklyn were Black and Hispanic, and lived in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods -- Crown Heights/ Bed-Stuy, East New York/ Brownsville, and Williamsburg/ Bushwick. That was last year. Since then, more males have been added to the NYS Sex Offender Registry.

The children see everyone get in a hysterical uproar when a police brutality issue occurs. But they see no advocacy for them when they are sexually abused by men in their communties. They see that the only uproar against rape/ sexual abuse/ commercial sex exploitation of Black women and girls occurs when the perpetrators are white, leaving everyone with the message that these behaviors are OK when Black and Hispanic males do them. Such hypocracy!! And we wonder why children don't listen to adults. They know adults prey on them and don't protect them.

Sadly, this phenomenon is not just confined to NYC. It occurs all over the country.

I live with this Hell everyday..pregnant at 15 by a child-predator...Everyday I STRUGGLE with wanting to hurt my child-  even violently- when I see the face of the monster

It has virtually destroyed my life but some ped got a nut

When I was counting the child victims of Brooklyn sexual predators, I was sick to my stomach for weeks. (BTW, I only counted Brooklyn, child predators are in every borough of the City -- multiple hundreds of them.)

All I could think of was these individual children and their families going though the experience alone.

Sean Bell's fiancee was not alone; Amadou Diallo's family was not alone. Grassroots leadership made sure they were not alone.

Yet, the victims of child predators, perverts, and pimps in our communities are left alone. It should not be like this.

I must remind you that no matter how your child was conceived, your child is a bundle of LOVE. Your child is LOVE. When you read this, please HUG your child; he/she needs it.

There is HOPE. There are individual women who are working to form a circle of protection and wisdom around women and children who find themselves confronted with this type of situation -- no matter how much the males protect the predators.  It doesn't matter what they think anymore. Enough!!!

Keep reading, or follow me on Twitter. I will let you know the next step. We will need your opinion on how to help ourselves and the children and prevent future situations. Be Blessed.

This raises the issue of young people not using birth control.  The idea of pushing young kids, for their own protection, to be on birth control is radioactive.  A politician suggests anything like this and he gets accused of 'encouraging sexual promiscuity"  Lawmakers need to get past such stereotypes.  Any girl over the age of 13 living in the inner city ought to be on birth control.  They should be required to be on the pill for their own protection.  Condoms are fine but there are still too many communities and cultures within this city where males will consider condoms an affront to their masculinity.

 Yet many young girls are afraid to ask for the pill because of the stigmas attached to it.  Schools should be giving these out, and also making the 'morning after pill' available.  A girl who had a sexual encounter the night before, consensual or otherwise, should be able to go to her clinic at school the next morning and get the 'morning after' pill, no questions asked.

But that isn't the way it works.  These girls have been with guys who think they are too studly to wear condoms, and they *know* questions will be asked.  So they get pregnant instead...