Hanna Roth knows child abuse and hopes to end it through her nonprofit organization based in Madison, the Rainbird Foundation. She wants to put an end to stories like that of one 2-year-old Kenosha girl.

The toddler arrived at an Intensive Care Unit covered in so many bruises doctors stopped counting at 68 – there were simply too many, Roth said. The girl’s mother, the mother’s boyfriend and the mother’s sister – all three with her during the beating – had varying stories regarding the bruises’ origins.

When the case finally went to court, a judge removed the girl from her mother’s custody to live with her father. But what the district attorney did not do was prosecute the mother.

“Those three adults walked away scot-free because there was no ‘evidence,'” Roth said. “I don’t know how many bruises it takes to prosecute.”

The verdict was all too familiar for Roth, who comes from a severe background of abuse herself. She sees cases like this all the time, and the painful frustration is twofold. Not only is a child being beaten, but the child’s abusers are not being punished. In many cases, the child does not make it out alive, Roth said.

In cases where the child does live, the consequences of being abused can last a lifetime. Child Welfare Information Gateway, a resource created by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has compiled findings from research regarding these consequences.

According to the service, effects include impaired brain development, reduced learning capacity and antisocial traits. While 80 percent of abused children can be diagnosed with at least one psychiatric disorder by the time they are 21, they are also 11 times more likely than non-abused children to be arrested as a juvenile.

Perhaps most disturbingly, University of Minnesota social work professor Jeffrey Edleson, who has worked with male abusers for more than 30 years, estimates that 75 to 95 percent of the men in his “batterer intervention” groups were abused as children.

Child abuse is often a generational cycle, but sometimes the child comes out relatively unscathed, motivated not to repeat the harmful actions of their parents, Edleson said. Roth exemplifies that exception.

Edleson and Roth both indicated insufficient funding is the bane of the entire child welfare system. Edleson primarily researches children’s exposure to domestic violence. Even being exposed to domestic violence, without actually being beaten, can produce consequences for the child, according to Edleson.

To combat this, Minnesota’s Legislature added exposure to family violence to its definition of child abuse and neglect in 1999. Edleson said the state’s child welfare system saw a 50 percent rise in reported cases because of the law. But without any additional funding, the caseload completely overwhelmed a system already struggling to serve the cases of direct abuse being reported. The state repealed the law nine months later.

Wisconsin’s definition, according to Child Welfare Information Gateway, also does not currently include exposure to domestic violence in its definition of abuse, even though studies have shown it to be harmful to a similar degree.

“The sad part is that all those children are out there, and people knew about them,” he said. “But then they repealed it, so now people don’t even have to report those kids. But they’re out there, and they’re not getting services they need.”

Since creating the Rainbird Foundation in Madison two years ago with co-founder Elisabeth Norton, Roth devotes most of her time to preventing and putting a stop to child abuse. Rainbird focuses on raising public awareness of child abuse and generates money for underfunded organizations operating under the same goal.

Rainbird fills a niche in the fight against child abuse by raising the money necessary for organizations to function. It does not provide services directly to victims, Roth said, because there are already other well-functioning local and national entities doing that – some just do not have the business know-how to effectively manage their financial programs.

“We don’t need to be doing what other organizations in this city are doing well,” Roth said. “We need to … support these organizations that are already doing great services.”

A business coach by day, Roth is able to rally her organization in successful fundraising schemes. In its newest project, Rainbird will strive to generate grassroots support through low-commitment campaigns that can reach large numbers of people. She calls it the MOB project, an acronym for “mobilization of birds,” to match the foundation’s avian theme.

Roth modeled the initiative after organizations like MoveOn and Change.org, which circulate petitions online, enabling people worldwide to contribute easily. Like birds in a flock, Roth hopes to see small donations from many people add up to something huge.

“It’s easy, doable, with a small amount of time commitment,” Roth said. “The sort of actions that get lots of people active or aware about an issue. That’s what the MOB unit is being built to do.”

According to Roth, the support and awareness Rainbird generates also aims to hold officials accountable for their actions relating to child abuse cases. She said the daily reality is many victims and perpetrators slip through the cracks of a “broken system,” as in the Kenosha girl’s story.

It is a global problem that Roth experiences on an individual level every day, and her frustration manifested itself in a pile of shredded napkins left on the table in front of her after an interview with The Badger Herald. She recalled an incident while she was working in an elementary school. A third grader drew a picture for Roth depicting the child’s parents’ abuse. “Please help” was scrawled in crayon.

“It didn’t surprise me,” she said. “But it broke my heart.”