It’s a story we’ve heard too many times. A broken home that’s abusive and a fatherless kid gone wild as she tries to find herself in a world filled with pain and disappointment. In my mind there are at least two very disturbing issues surrounding the former Governor of New York. One, this girl is old enough to be his daughter, and two, Elliot Spitzer is part of the billion dollar sex industry that exploits and abuses orphans, the fatherless, and the oppressed. And he was supposed to be the watch-dog protecting young girls like this? Sickening. Read the article from the Children’s Rights Council

Governor Spitzer’s resignation and public disgrace demonstrates two kinds of stress commonly ignored in this high pressure world of electoral politics.

1. The young woman Kristen, an aspiring singer who turned to prostitution and became the provider of services for “Client #9”, comes from a broken home. She has never known her father, and her mother and stepfather have been verbally and possibly physically assaultive. She considers herself to have been an abused child.

“What happened to Kristen”, said David L. Levy, an attorney and head of the Children’s Rights Council, a 23-year-old non-profit organization, and Dr. Rona Fields, a psychologist and CRC spokesperson. “is all too frequently the biography of prostitutes, drug addicts and dealers and alcoholics”.

Good Parenting is not an accident. “While parents who do not get along with each other have good reason to get divorced, the children of divorce need contact with both parents unless one or them is abusive and/or kidnaps the child.”

They add: “More than 80 percent of convicted felons were raised without a father.” When a child is raised in a situation of abuse and argumentation, the children have two strikes against them.

Fields and Levy point out that “When courts dissolve marriages there is even more reason to provide parent education for both parents and develop a modus vivendi that allows the child or children of the marriage to know and be loved by both parents.”

2. The stress imposed on candidates like Gov. Spitzer can and often do lead to addictive disorders that become public scandals.

Often these are appropriately treated through intensive residential therapy followed by out-patient care. Most current health insurance programs do not provide this for ordinary people, although the Congressional system does provide these benefits for members of Congress. The current Mental health parity bill passed by the Senate and the House is currently in committee and needs to be enacted this year.