Enough Abuse Campaign Blog

Can do: Lawmakers urged to prevent child abuse

OP EDITORIAL appearing in The Charleston Gazette

Dawn Miller – Editor

January 13, 2012

When the news broke that children had been sexually abused and assaulted for decades under the noses of powerful people at Penn State University, it wasn't really a surprise to Jetta Bernier and her Boston colleagues.

It was 10 years ago this month that the public first learned of sexual abuse of children by priests in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. The abuse spanned decades and eventually led to resignations and imprisonment of those who were guilty or who had ignored it.


If Children's Hospital of Boston let prominent pediatrician Melvin Levine practice for years despite sexual abuse complaints, or if a staff member at a Cape Cod camp was allowed to abuse children summer after summer, why be surprised at the next example, Bernier asked West Virginia legislators and child advocates while in town this week.


"It tells us that institutions sometimes make choices to protect their reputations, to protect their key leaders, or to protect their financial assets, and those decisions are made on the backs of children," Bernier said.
She directs the Enough Abuse Campaign, a project Massachusetts Citizens for Children helped develop after the Catholic priest scandal. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control put out a request for proposals for how adults could prevent child sexual abuse, the first request of its kind by the CDC.


The Boston group got $200,000 a year for five years. They knew they couldn't cure sexual abuse in five years, Bernier said, so they concentrated on building local and state organizations that would continue to work after the grant money ran out.


They surveyed adults in their region and learned:

• Half the people said they would participate in trainings to learn how to prevent child sexual abuse.
• Two-thirds of the people already knew that a child was more likely to suffer sexual abuse from someone they knew than from a stranger.
• 70 percent believed adults and communities, not children, are most responsible for preventing sexual abuse of children. That number later rose to 93 percent.

They pulled together public and private groups and people from all kinds of professions. They developed accurate and clear training materials, and discovered they needed different curricula for different audiences.
They teach parents how to recognize and respond to various situations, but they will also coach any employer, youth service agency, school or other organization. They help groups assess policies and even to evaluate their physical spaces for safety.


Bernier spoke in Charleston this week at the invitation of Prevent Child Abuse West Virginia, a group urging the Legislature to invest $1 million to prevent child abuse and neglect of all kinds across the state.
As you have read in the Charleston Gazette many times in many forms, most of West Virginia's money available to deal with child abuse comes from the feds, and that system notoriously favors costly out-of-home care of children after abuse has occurred, almost to the exclusion of anything else.


A better way is to prevent child abuse from happening in the first place, to help parents who are able to be the kind of parents they want to be, to keep families together when possible. It's better for children, who show it in school and in their own health and in adulthood. It's better for families and communities, and it's better for the collective pocketbook.


The Massachusetts effort did outlive its federal grant. The three pilots are still going strong, and additional towns and communities have also organized. Last spring, with funding from the Ms. Foundation and Prevent Child Abuse America, New Jersey launched the program, and Maryland will do so later this month.
"West Virginia is considering embracing this effort," Bernier said.


After a recent training for parents in a low-income community, a child told her mom about a sexual abuse attempt by an employee in the large apartment building where they live. The mom and other adults knew what to do. The man now faces 40 counts of abuse involving other people who have come forward, and no longer has access to young people.


"That is prevention in action," Bernier said.

*Article with corrections