Beaten, starved, abandoned, sexually assaulted -- more than one million children suffer such abuse every year in the United States. Every day, six children die.

How can this happen? How can we stop the suffering? How can those who need help get help?

CNN's Linda Pattillo examines these issues in her four-part series, "Silent Cries."

Part One

How did children fare in 1997? It is only one year, but it tells a tragic story of how society is neglecting the issue of child abuse.

Part Two

Nationwide, an estimated 40 percent of all abused children were already known to the child welfare system which failed to protect them. Nowhere has the problem become more acute than in New York City, where despite an annual budget of nearly $2 billion, children continue to fall through the cracks.

Part Three

The number of children abused and neglected in America has more than doubled in the last decade, while public funding to protect children has stagnated. Most of the million cases of child abuse each year end up on the desk of the nation's child protective services caseworkers, who must make life and death decisions even though they lack the time, tools and money to protect children.

Experts say there is no greater risk factor for child abuse than a parent having been abused themselves either as a child or as an adult. One study estimates parents abused as children are 10 times more likely to abuse their own child. Yet little funding is directed toward preventing child abuse by identifying those parents at high risk.