Thursday Thirteen: 13 ways to help children who are being abused
April16
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- Explore any and all abuse you have experienced, how it has affected you, and how to deal with it, so that you can share what has worked for you. There are great books, therapists, and 12-step programs that help with this, mentioned all over this site.
- Learn as much as you can about the effects of abuse so that you can recognize abuse and help them understand how abuse works. There are also a lot of articles here about that!
- Learn as much as you can about how to heal the effects of abuse so that you can guide them to helpful resources and new coping skills. Another specialty of this website.
- Get support for yourself in dealing with the emotions and logistics of supporting kids. It can be a very confusing and triggering process. You may have to deal with friends or co-workers who don’t think you should be reporting abuse or talking to children about abuse, or parents who are angry that their abuse has been exposed. Or you may experience fear (warranted or unwarranted) that this will happen, or fear that just talking to the child about abuse will traumatize them. Getting support from a therapist, wise friends, or people who have been through this themselves, can help you deal with these issues and stay balanced.
- Learn about your local department of CPS (child protective services, or whatever agency is supposed to intervene in abuse cases in your area) so that you know how they are likely to respond to reports: overreact, provide helpful resources, ignore all reports about children who aren’t actually tied to a pile of lit dynamite at the time, et cetera. Even if they are likely to ignore you because they are understaffed, you are not a mandatory reporter, or your reports seem too vague, making a report to CPS will at least start (or continue) a paper trail that will make later reports more believable – or give the child some “proof” to investigate when they are an adult questioning how they were treated.
- Find out who is a mandatory reporter where you live. Some places have no mandatory reporting laws; in others (like Maryland), every adult is required to report any abuse that they suspect is happening. It’s good to know whether you are, what kind of abuse people are required to report (for example, only sexual abuse, or only if they know the name of the abuser), and what the process is. Because even if you are not a mandatory reporter, you can find out what happens when a report is made – and you can hold mandatory reporters accountable if you think they are not reporting abuse. (Many teachers and other staff members of schools, for example, don’t make reports for a number of reasons: they don’t get any training in what to report and how, they are actively (and illegally) dissuaded from reporting parents for fear the school will lose money, they are afraid of getting in trouble, they don’t recognize abuse, they are afraid of accidentally getting the child in trouble….)
- Go through foster parent training so that you can learn about how abuse specifically affects children and what local resources they recommend. (For example, it can interrupt the cognitive process of learning how to read and delay it quite a bit – but then again, it may not.) In many places, the county foster agencies are woefully underfunded and dysfunctional, and the slack is taken up by private agencies; it’s a good idea to call around and ask different agencies what kind of training they provide, what it involves, how long it takes, and whether you can do it if you are not certain you want to foster a child.
- Go through foster parent training, get certified, and provide short- or long-term care for children who are removed from their abusive homes. This can be tremendously rewarding. If you are interested in adopting children, I think that foster-to-adopt is in many ways the best option: you get good training in supporting the child, you have access to great resources for the kid, and you and the child get financial support (and, ideally, a community of support as well).
- Talk to children about what abuse is, some of the things that qualify as abuse, and particularly, that it is not okay to yell at them, hit them, et cetera. I find it helpful to define abuse as things people do to you that are Not Okay, and give examples like hitting, biting, and bullying – if possible, examples that include both “normal” things that happen to kids at school and things that you know or think are happening to them at home.
- Ask them about abuse that you suspect is occurring. Let them know that it’s okay not to tell you about it, and that you will be there if they want to talk about it later. If they deny abuse that you know or are pretty sure is happening to them, it’s okay to let them know that you still believe it’s happening, or to tell them that it’s okay to say it’s not happening and that you’ll keep asking. I know it sounds weird and pushy, but for many survivors I know it’s some of the best support they got when they were growing up.
- Volunteer for, or donate money or wish list items to, organizations that help children. All child-related organizations are good for this (with possible individual exceptions). I mean, you could support a library and be helping children who use books to escape their abuse. You could even donate books which help children deal with abuse. There are also more abuse-specific organizations, such as Court-Appointed Special Advocates for children (warning: that website talks!) and the United Nations Children’s Fund.
- Speak up when you see someone being abused. Of course, we’ve already talked a little about this recently. There are a wide range of ways to do this: you can say something to the child afterward; you can say something to the parent at the time; you can ask if they need help or offer some kind of support to a parent in meltdown; you can call the police and/or CPS; if it’s in a store, you can talk to store management, security, or customer service. Learning to do this is a process; we’ll talk about that here soon. For the moment, know that it is also okay to feel unable to do anything. You are not that child’s savior, and this is not the only time you or someone else will be able to do something that helps them.
- Learn about the laws in your area – what they say about abuse, where they need to be changed or expanded, who is working on that, what upcoming bills you might have that are related to child abuse…. For example, in California (and plenty of other places) the penalties for sexually abusing your own child are much lighter than for sexually abusing an unrelated child, and the definition of sexual abuse is extremely narrow.
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I’m the grandmother of a 4 year old being neglected. It’s very hard because it does bring up flashbacks and memories of my childhood. I tend to become very very angry with the mother and very frustrated with the system. Grandparents have very little (read: none) rights in this state. Our child protective services does nothing unless TNT is attached to the child and even then they sometimes don’t respond til after the fuse is lit and, after all, this is “just” neglect and not physical abuse. Very serious TT but a necessary one.
wow I always wonder if someone gets reported are they better off in Foster care ?
A sad reality in todays world. I am a survivor, today I will celebrate. Thanks for bringing awareness to an extremely sensitve topic. Happy T13!
Perhaps you could mind your own business unless you are sure. Not every family is as perfect as yours but that don’t mean abuse is taking place. The foster care system is far more dangerous a place for children to be then what half of what you self-righteous hypocrites consider to be an abusive home. The system is far more likely to destroy these kids. So stop glorifying a severely broken mess. And start helping families to overcome these problems.
I think if you re-read the comments and the above post, you’ll see that nobody here is glorifying the foster care system, or that they have perfect families, or that the only way to deal with suspected abuse is to take kids out of their homes. The kinds of abuses you describe in your blog are the reason that I suggest here that:
* People should consider offering support to the kids or the parents as a major option. Supporting the kid in whatever way you can is a major and growing topic on this blog, and a much more consistently helpful option than reporting abuse.
* People should find out if reporting abuse to the authorities in their area is likely to get the children taken out of the home, or what else the authorities are likely to do – so that they know if the authorities’ reaction is likely to be appropriate to whatever abuse is occuring, or if it would be much better to do something else. Where I live, the kid basically has to be on fire to be taken away, and they get placed right back very quickly most of the time even then. Around here, making a report is just creating a paper trail that might eventually get someone to go tell the parents to shape up. There are counties where even the suspicion of abuse gets the kids immediately placed elsewhere. It varies very widely.
* If people are interested in becoming foster parents or getting training in supporting abused children, they go to a private foster family agency and research their local agencies first – because county foster care in particular, and foster care in general, can be a badly-supervised, badly-trained crapshoot in which abusers can end up getting free access to tons of kids. It can also be real salvation for some kids. It’s a crapshoot, not an automatic ticket to hell. And most of the time, it’s not a permanent situation.
They’re really terrible with neglect here too. I don’th ave custody of my kid, and he’s been the victim of neglect many a time. Unfortunately it’s a lot harder to prove or demonstrate a negative, and people don’t really understand the effects of neglect the way they understand something like a black eye. I guess we just have to continue to try to learn and educate others and give these kids as much support as we can. The nice thing about neglect (if there is a nice thing) is that there are usually a LOT of things we can do to provide support for the kids emotionally, by giving them the things their parents are neglecting (therapy, toys, love, whatever), letting them know that it is not okay to neglect them, and helping them learn healthy coping skills and love for themselves. In a way, we have an edge as abuse survivors because we can think about what we wish our parents or other supportive adults had done for us.
Well, there are several different aspects to that:
1. Honestly, sometimes the abuse a child is experiencing is so extensive that even another abusive family might be better. That’s pretty rare, but I know people who grew up in isolated places with intense ritual abuse pretty ingrained throughout the community, who were eventually placed in garden-variety (i.e.,not ritually) abusive foster homes, who found that being in the system and having access to people outside of the community they grew up in helped them start healing even if they were still being abused. I guess it can be like growing up with abuse and then going into an abusive workplace or abusive relationships – you’re still out of the hothouse environment of the abusive home. For some kids, even if they are still being abused and have the trauma of leaving their families, getting access to more resources (therapy, for example) and knowing that someone is at least trying to keep them from being abused can be very helpful. It’s still pretty shitty, obviously. But that’s a worst-case scenario all around.
2. Often kids are just placed in foster care temporarily; it’s fairly rare at least in my area for it to be permanent. And usually they still get visitations with their parents (supervised or unsupervised, depending). So it’s not like the dramatic media portrayals where every time kids are taken away they are thrown into the uncaring and brutal foster system for the rest of their young lives. Also, while it is really hard on kids to be taken away from their parents long-term, the reason it’s so hard for many kids is that they have spent their whole young lives trying to get healthy love and attention from their abusive parents, and taking them away is triggering. It’s not hard because they were so happy and loved AND THEN THESE MEAN PEOPLE TOOK THEM AWAY. It’s hard because they have to give up the illusion that someday they will be able to “be good enough” that their parents will love them. In foster care, people should be trained in how to support kids with these issues and help them learn about healthy attachments and attention and learn that they deserve and can have healthy love and attention.
3. HOWEVER, the foster care system is a total crapshoot. The quality of the foster care in a given area depends very, very heavily on the quality of the foster family agencies. County agencies tend (not always, I assume) to be terrible – tied up in dysfunctional bureaucracy with overworked staff and little understanding of the effects of abuse or how to deal with abuse issues, Themore people in a given area understand about abuse and recovery, the better-trained and better-chosen and better-supervised foster families in that area will be, and the more resources and support the kids will have. So there are a wide range of possible experiences, from being placed with total strangers who abuse you and have other abused kids acting out to abuse you further, to being placed with people who totally understand what you are going through, know how to support you and give you the love and boundaries you haven’t received at home, help you form healthy attachments, and get you the resources you lack around school and health care and emotional development and stuff.
In a HEALTHY system, foster care helps both the parents and the kids deal with abuse and start recovering from it and come back together with better skills and resources so they can heal together. Unfortunately, that depends on there being a healthy system available- and on the parents being willing to confront their issues and do that work for their kids.
Yay celebrating! I think celebrating ourselves is the most important part of recovery. Man, no matter how much I write here, I always find more I need to write about
Thanks for your post.
A sadly useful post. I don’t understand abuse of any kind. Yes, I know it exists, and I know people can be twisted – I just don’t understand why it exists.
Holly
http://theabundanceplace.com
I guess it exists because it’s really self-perpetuating. A lot of people don’t mean to abuse others, don’t even realize that they’re doing it – their boundaries were just so messed up from their own abusive childhoods that they unthinkingly violate the boundaries of others. And often, the abusive behavior we grow up with seems so normal that the fact that it is abusive and harmed us is invisible to us, at least for a while. I think that things are getting better and better, slowly – and that it’s hard to tell that things are getting better, sometimes, because we’ve finally gotten to a place where people are noticing all the abuse and what it does to people and the more we notice it the worse it looks!
Thanks for your blog! I think it’s really brave and it’s wonderful to see more people sharing their experiences.
That’s a very useful and thought provoking post and series of comments and replies. It seems to me that here are some very grey areas that need progerly defining so that misunderstandings don’t occur.
Yeah, and they’re areas that the legal system and social services are, sadly, somehow particularly ill-equipped to deal with.
I think the way we currently deal with abuse is insane and backwards; we have laws that use very narrow definitions of abuse and underfunded agencies that (1) want very clear-cut evidence of abuse before they act, to cover their butts and (2) have very few tools to use other than “order the parents to attend parenting or anger management classes,” “order the parents to change their ways,” “take the kids away until the parents change their ways,” or “ignore what is going on because there are too many kids already in the system or it’s not blatant enough.”
My hope is that in my own work, here and elsewhere, I can help explore the grey areas, explain and define them where I can, and most of all advocate ways of helping kids that people can do on their own. Most survivors of any kind of abuse never experienced any kind of intervention by the authorities, and of course the experiences of those who did are mixed. But most survivors of any kind did have at least one adult in their lives who cared, who listened, who talked to them about what was going on, who offered support or helped give them tools for dealing with what was happening. We already know what works; we just have to articulate it and spread the word. And the best part is that if you’re just helping kids from that end of things, you don’t really need to worry whether what you’re helping them with really is an effect of abuse, whether you’re right about what’s happening to them, or what, because healthy attention and support are good for ALL kids.
Thanks for the suggestions of positive actions to take besides just generally feeling bad about the situation. I’m going to point my daughter here, as well–she works in a day care, and it’s a subject that’s come up more than once, and one she’s concerned about.
[...] Di, Danica, [...]
I really enjoyed your TT post; even more I enjoyed that you’ve dedicated your blog to this significantly important issue that often doesn’t get enough attention.
Kelly’s last blog post at their site, http://strbellysneetch.wordpress.com: Absolute best weekend.
aw, yay!
I enjoy it a great deal myself. It more or less stops me driving around mentally ranting at imaginary people about all these issues, because instead I can rant about it here
thanks, Darla! I’ve added a little link in the sidebar to a special page that has all the stuff that specifically talks about helping children and I hope to post more and more about it soon. There just aren’t enough days in the week sometimes to get it all out! Well, someday this will be my full-time job
Your blog is a wonderful service. I have included it in a link list of resources for the issue which I collect as reference for fiction projects that feature such situations.
I became sensitive to child abuse from an early age after witnessing at age 4 my toddler brother being shook like a rag doll by an aunt who then shook me by the shoulders while screaming in my face. Just two of the worst incidents I remember from that summer our aunt cared for us while our mother was ill.
Then at age 12 our parent became foster parents and the first foster baby arrived with a man’s hand print in dark purple on his cheek. I was appalled.
As an adult I have often suspected or even witnessed abuse and always felt my response was inadequate partly because I tend to freeze like a deer in headlights while in the middle of it. I once quit a baby-sitting job with four beautiful children I had fallen in love with because I witnessed abuse but I didn’t report it because they were friends and neighbors of a relative. I quit because I feared I would get blamed if ever someone else happened to report it. Those kids would be in their late teens and 20s now and I often wonder about them with guilt and shame and sadness.
The one time I did confront an abuser I ended up causing a rift between myself and several close family members because it was seen in our Fudamentalist Christian family as inappropriate to the max to interfere between a parent and child. esp a father discipling a child. I was seen as too sensitive because of my obsessive love for infants and tainted by secular psychology that ignores the doctrine of original sin.
Because of these and other incidents and because fiction and poetry are more my forte than non-fiction formats, I have translated my knowledge from research and experience into stories and poems. You might be interested in my poem : Why Purple Silence Answers Urgent Plight and my stories: Running In Circles, and Home Is Where the Horror Is. The latter, unfinished, I have been posting in serial snippets every Friday for over a month. The former can be found in my archives via the labels or a google of the blog. I am not sure how to make links in a comment form and many blogs refuse to post comments with links in them anyway.
I am having a hard time with the latest story because I detest writing the scenes that feature the abusive incidents. I get as emotionally involved in the scene as if I were witnessing it in reality. In fact I have a hard time writing scenes for any story in which the villain is on stage. Actually I can never create a pure villain I always ‘know’ too much about my characters and can see the inner wound of the wounder.
Beyond that issue is another which you might be able to advise me on. I worry about what is too explicit or too graphic in portraying an incident of abuse. Fiction needs to invoke all the senses and evoke emotions to be effective but on the other hand it is possible to cross the line into a kind of pornographic or voyeuristic representation that could have more of a salacious than salutory effect. I would appreciate any insight you might have on this.
I mustn’t forget to thank you for visiting my TT on bookstores last week. Sorry it took me so long to reciprocate.
Joy Renee’s last blog post at their site, http://joystory.blogspot.com: Thursday Thirteen #83