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Stop Child Abuse Now (SCAN) of Northern Virginia
April 1, 2004
Thank you, Tom, for that warm introduction. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen-Allies in Prevention, every one of you.
I am very happy to see all the distinguished allies who have made time in their schedules today to attend this event. First Lady Collis, state Senators, General Assembly members, members of the Board of Supervisors, SCAN Board members and Diane Charles, SCAN's Executive Director, professionals from child welfare and the courts, the distinguished award recipients, whom I congratulate-and of course, my good friend Maxine Baker, President and CEO of the Freddie Mac Foundation, which is sponsoring this event. It's a privilege to be in such good company.
Now most of you - especially those of you who have children - may be aware that today is April Fools Day. This can be a great day for kids, and grownups have made it the occasion for some wonderful hoaxes over the years. In 1985, Sports Illustrated carried a straight-faced profile of a New York Mets player named Sidd Finch who could throw a baseball at 186 miles an hour. Unsuspecting readers may have been tipped off when they saw the byline of George Plimpton, who had been known for such shenanigans in the past. In 1997, Russia's TASS news agency reported that an alligator had hatched from a quail's egg aboard the space station MIR and bitten a US astronaut. Quite a few folks bit on the news release-at least for a while. And even those who saw through it right away enjoyed a chuckle.
So, since April 1 is also the first day of National Child Abuse Prevention Month, I thought of beginning my remarks with some kind of an appropriate put-on. But, do you know what, folks? There is absolutely nothing funny about child maltreatment.
I know of only two good things about it: first, that it can be prevented; and second, that sometimes, when it's too late to prevent the harm, children can heal. Their resilience is a miracle-though it's not one we can afford to count on. I want to share another "story" with you that speaks to that resilience.
One spring day, a little boy alone at the park was attempting to amuse himself by throwing balls up in the air and trying to hit them. As he tossed and swung, he kept up a running commentary to himself: "I'm the best hitter in the whole world! I'm better than Sammy Sosa! I'm better than Derek Jeter! I'm better than Barry Bonds!"
After a while, though, when he kept swinging and wasn't hitting any of the balls, he paused long enough to rethink his situation and then changed his patter as he threw the ball in the air one more time, only to miss once again. "I'm the best pitcher in the whole world! Nobody can hit what I pitch. I'm better than Roger Clemens! I'm better than Kevin Brown! I'm better than Kerry Woods! I'm going to pitch a perfect game today!"
I see this as a story of the resilience that they and we must show every day in our work-our work with individual children, matching their resilience stride for stride-and and our work in Northern Virginia and Washington as advocates for our issues and our cause! The sad reality is that too often we count on their resilience to make up for what we don't provide them-the full array of services that they and their parents need to be reunited or to determine at an early point in time that these children will not be able to return home. Instead, we need to fulfill what we are charged with providing for them and then watch their resilience and the assets they bring lift them even higher-just as we would if they were our own children.
So, how do we do that? As you and I both know, overcoming the trauma of abuse, or the damage of neglect, takes concerted effort by an array of individuals and institutions. Preventing it also requires collaboration. If there is one thing the child welfare community has learned in recent years, it is that we cannot go at it alone.
What this system can do alone, within its legal mandates and the funding constraints that seem to challenge us more each passing year, is often too little and too late. Effective prevention and effective intervention are only going to happen in a community where responsibility is shared.
That's why it gives me great satisfaction to look around a gathering like this. We don't have all the necessary allies here, but we have a great many of them. And each of us has stories to tell and passion to share that can help bring in more allies and then still more who respond to their passion, until we reach a tipping point. That is your assignment, folks, going out of here today and every day. Each one, reach one.
The Hopi Indians have a proverb: "The one who tells the stories rules the world." Those of us who are passionate about helping children are not out to rule the world, but we are adamant about changing it. At the Child Welfare League of America, we have given one title to our strategic plan and several other guiding documents: Making Children a National Priority. It saddens me to say so, but children are not a priority for the United States of America in 2004. Making children a priority will require a dramatic change.
In setting out to create that dramatic change, we decided that the first thing we needed was a vision. We summed up that vision in a document we call Making Children a National Priority: A Framework for Community Action. It links our local, state, and national agendas and it sets our course for the years ahead: working one community at a time, while at the same time working to change the big picture at the national level.
This document begins by inviting readers to imagine an America where every child can succeed. To imagine what this great nation could accomplish if the well-being of ALL its children was truly a national priority. To imagine what could happen if parents, kin, professionals, citizens, and governments worked together to support and strengthen, not some, but ALL of our children and families.
The core of the Framework is a statement of the five universal needs of children. They are:
- The basics, such as food, clothing, shelter, and education
- Nurturing relationships,
- Opportunities to succeed,
- Safety from harm, and
- Healing, when harm has already occurred.
Though we don't always think this holistically, the first four items on that list all add up to prevention. When children and families have what they need for a decent life, the likelihood of abuse or neglect is sharply reduced.
Now, obviously, no one family or one system can meet all of these needs for even one child. Child protection systems certainly cannot, as I said earlier. It takes wide, deep, and coordinated collaboration at many levels. It has to be a community priority. And because we see pockets of excellence around the US where systems have come together, we know it can be done.
CWLA's Framework monograph contains many examples of such collaboration. Our Community Implementation Guides, the first of which was just released this spring, provides the tools communities need to engage the necessary parties, plan sustainable improvements, and carry them out.
Let me tell you about just a few of the successful community collaborations that have come to our attention.
- In rural Maryland, the Caroline County Family Support Center serves high school dropouts, pregnant and parenting adolescents, low-birthweight babies and their parents, preschoolers, and unemployed or underemployed adults at one comprehensive location and in their own homes. Child care, adult education, and health education and referral are among its services. Parents are equal partners, sharing in policy and program development and comprising more than half of the active governing board. The children and families who use the center all have health care coverage and regular care; many have obtained good jobs or gone on to college; and not one is known to have been involved with the child welfare system.
This family support center is one of a network of such centers in 19 Maryland counties maintained by a CWLA member organization called Friends of the Family. Funding comes from the Maryland Department of Human Resources, the US Department of Health and Human Services, foundations, corporations, and individuals. In Caroline County, the Board of Education is a primary sponsor of the center.
- In California, the San Diego Children's Hospital Family Violence Program is a solidly established partnership among health care providers, mental health services, domestic violence services, and legal aid. The program serves 120 battered women and 350 children every year by pairing each family unit with a two-person team consisting of an advocate and a therapist. The children are treated for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and receive preventive and therapeutic services. Their mothers receive free counseling, mental health services, and legal representation. Just six months after intake, the level of physical violence the women reported had dropped by 78%.
- One more example, not from our Framework, but predating it. You are all aware of the difficulties states are having right now in balancing their budgets. The Alaska Youth Initiative began in 1985 because of another budget crunch. The state could no longer afford to keep young people in out-of-state placements to meet their social services, mental health, or educational needs, so professionals began looking around for a way to bring them home. They learned about a new model called "wraparound." This had begun by moving children from large residential settings to small ones, but quickly evolved to a network of coordinated, intensive services that allowed them to at home.
With funding from the National Institute of Mental Health and a team approach that brought all the systems together, the state developed individualized plans. As a result, almost all of the young people-most of them with very complex needs-were able to return home and remain home. Vermont, Washington State, Idaho, and other states were inspired to develop their own versions. Wraparound Milwaukee is one highly successful adaptation.
Our Research to Practice Initiative and our Framework team have been gathering community collaboration stories from all over. When I hear these stories, I'm always impressed by how varied they are. No two of them follow the same pattern. The impetus for change may come in one case from the mental health system and in another from the schools. It may come from a corporate executive, like Success by Six, or like the great things John Proctor did for Cincinnati while he was head of Proctor and Gamble. It may come from a religious community, or from a group of parents who want better lives for their children. No matter who takes the first steps, if they're going to succeed, they need partners. The wider and more diverse the partnership is, the greater the chance it will succeed.
It takes real collaboration and that is not easy work-a colleague once called it an unnatural act between two consenting adults!
Although each collaboration is unique, the successful ones have some elements in common. In addition to the five basic needs, our Community Implementation Guide lists five groups of people who must be involved and nine guiding principles for community action. The first principle is supporting families. And the first, most essential group of partners is parents, caregivers, and family members.
Families first! That may sound obvious, but it's often far from the case in agency practice. In state after state, the federal Child and Family Service Reviews are finding that agencies fail to engage families meaningfully, and fail to provide the supports they need to keep families together, in far too many cases.
There are many reasons for that, and some are beyond the agencies' control. And this is a day for celebration, so I don't want to focus on the negative. For all I know, Virginia does much better in this respect than other states. Let me just offer a reminder that all the work we do is about building strong families, and that, whenever possible, parents and other family members should be the first among our allies in prevention. Then, starting with them, we need to recruit many, many others, until we have truly made children a priority for the state of Virginia and the nation.
I brought along flyers for an event that can help you to attract allies during this month dedicated to prevention. Every year, CWLA sets aside a Friday in April-that's April 23rd, this year-to remember children and young people who have died as a result of violence. That includes both young victims of abuse and teens who are killed by guns or in car accidents.
We focus on children who have died for the benefit of those who are living. We recognize that stark grief can capture people's attention when sunnier stuff might not. In recent years, every state has been participating in some way, but we still have a long way to go. We'd like to see an observance in every community. Please get in touch with us if you'd like to hold a Flag Day observance where you live or work or worship. If you can't find the flyer, go to www.cwla.org
Now, we all know that the well-being of children and families is a shared responsibility. Nevertheless, the child welfare system, the courts, and elected officials are likely to be held responsible when something goes terribly wrong. Our jobs are very public and very demanding, and we do them under difficult circumstances. That challenge leads me to share two complementary thoughts that I would like to close with today, the first of which is actually a story.
A visiting lecturer was speaking to a group of businessmen and women on the subject of risk management-a subject that we're not unfamiliar with.
To drive home one of his points, he asked for a volunteer from the audience. He asked him the following question:
"Imagine that I have a huge steel I-beam here-25 feet long and 6 inches wide. If I put it on the floor in front of this audience, would you be willing to walk across it for $50?"
"Of course I would", said the volunteer.
"All right," said the lecturer, "now let's imagine that the I-beam is now 75 feet long and has been suspended high above the ground between the two sides of a gorge, with a 300 foot drop. Would you be willing to walk across that same I-beam for $50?"
"Of course not," said the volunteer.
Raising his voice dramatically, the lecturer continued. "Now imagine," he said, "that I am on one side of the gorge and you are on the other - and I am holding one of your children over the edge. If you don't come across the I-beam and get your child, I will drop him. Now will you cross the beam?"
The volunteer hesitated for a long moment before making his reply-actually, a question. He then said, "Which one of my kids do you have?"
I can tell by the laughter in the room that a good number of you who are parents have had "one of those days" with your kids!
I tell this story to make a very important point. You are unlikely to ever meet an individual who says that he or she does not care about kids. Politicians of every stripe are famous for kissing babies and wanting to pose surrounded by children. All of us truly do want the best for children on some level. But the way people express that seems to vary a great deal.
The man in my story was being asked a very clear question: exactly what steps are you willing to take to help a child? What kind of priority do children have for you when the going gets rough; when there are choices to be made? And his answer revealed what may be an even harder question-WHICH children are you willing to help?
The truth of the matter is that the vast, vast majority of parents would do whatever it takes to get across that I-beam; but as a society-perhaps through our benign neglect-we don't, and kids are slipping through the cracks and to one extent or another falling into the gorge!
Yet I want to leave you today with a reminder that despite this apathy-or benign neglect-good things keep on happening! Parents take advantage of a second chance and learn how to better nurture and protect their children. Young people are graduating from high school and college this month who would have dropped out years ago if you or someone who works for you had not provided an unforgettable interruption in their lives. I first heard that phrase from a New York school principal named Lorraine Monroe, who likes to call whatever point she's most determined to prove today "the Monroe Doctrine." One of her doctrines is that young people respond to adults who believe in them-not easily, and not at first, but over time, if you hang in with them. You've all seen it happen, because you're all believers. I, too, am a believer!
So I leave you with the challenge to continue "walking the I-beam" for kids…and to never stop being that "unforgettable interruption" in a child's life. I thank you for all that you do on behalf of children. And I thank you on behalf of all those kids who never had the chance to say thank you-or perhaps never even knew that a thank you was in order-as their life is better than it would have been because of the difference you have made in some quiet but profound way.
Good luck to you all…and congratulations again to the five wonderful awardees.
Thank you very much.
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