How You Can #dropsomeknowledge about Child Abuse PREVENTION

There’s a lot of talk nowadays about the dysfunctions in Arizona’s child safety system. Right now, there are over 19,000 kids in foster care in Arizona – over 40% are under age six. Our Department of Child Safety (DCS) is overwhelmed by the number of calls that come in every month requiring investigation. Their professional caseloads are catastrophically high, making it difficult for each worker to devote the time and attention each individual case needs. This also leads to huge employee turnover, requiring the department to hire and train new workers on a constant basis. That’s costly.

DCS constantly needs more resources to be able to tread water – to help the kids that are brought to their attention attain their most basic need: safety. Begrudgingly, our government hands over that money. Most of us agree that the primary responsibility of the government, after all, is keeping us safe. We can’t just leave a three-year-old kid duct-taped in a trash bag in an apartment closet (an extreme and rare example, but you get the point).

But we can’t sustain the growing influx of kids coming into the DCS system. We can’t keep on needing to put more and more money into intervening when a child is unsafe. We need to invest money in preventing kids from being in unsafe environments in the first place.

How the heck do we do that? It’s harder to think and talk about prevention than it is about intervention. It’s easier to count the kids that we’re saving rather than the kids that we’ll never see in in a tragic news story because they’ll never need to be saved. The result of prevention is measured in the intangible absence of something rather than its blaring, desperate presence.

It’s also challenging to put aside our own feelings of anger (perhaps directed at parents), frustration (perhaps directed at the government) and resentment (perhaps at society in general) in order to wholeheartedly commit to help children. But if you’re ready to try to do that, and help shift the conversation to prevention, here’s a few arrows for your quiver:

·        The definition of child maltreatment: child maltreatment is a broad category that includes child abuse (physical, emotional and sexual) and neglect (physical and emotional). Some people hear “child maltreatment” and assume it is less serious than abuse and neglect. It actually encompasses both.

·        What prevention is: Some people think that prevention is calling the DCS hotline to report suspected child abuse. That’s actually intervention. Prevention is about abuse and neglect NOT happening in the first place. Preventing child maltreatment is about applying wisdom and knowledge of what we know works.  Programs that are proven to strengthen families and give them the tools to manage the stresses of life and parenting- like Healthy Families, a parent mentoring program- these are the things we need to invest in now to prevent child maltreatment and reduce the huge cost to society later on.

·        The root causes of abuse and neglect: VERY simply put, unmanageable parent stress = child maltreatment. When a parent or caregiver cannot handle their own stress because of lack of access to what they need, child maltreatment is likely to occur. When parents have access to what they need to cope with stress (social connections, knowledge of parenting, access to basic needs when they have a crisis, etc.), child maltreatment doesn’t happen. Many people can understand the root causes of child maltreatment, like a lack of mental health services, lack of resources like affordable child care, lack of health services, etc., but people do not usually think of bolstering these kinds of things as a means of preventing child maltreatment. We need to highlight, italicize, and underline the need to sustain these basic services that promote health and safety as a solution to child abuse.

Talking about prevention in the face of a crisis needing intervention takes intelligence, courage and resolve. It’s about putting aside our own anger and biases and wholeheartedly committing to the health and happiness of children- not just the ones that need saving now, but all of them. We know what works. Let’s work towards an Arizona where kids are unencumbered by trauma – where they can be kids.