They might feel they have no voice. And when they are able to have the courage to speak up and tell somebody about the abuse that has happened, It’s important that we listen to them and address their concerns, whether that’s medical, mental health. The most rewarding part of my work is helping families through a difficult process. When they come to our child Abstasy Center, they’ve gone through a very traumatic experience. The children and the families have either just disclosed sexual abuse or physical abuse, or, it just happened. So there was a recent funding, it was a large amount that Mako was able to award us, and we’ve been able to use it to building an infrastructure to build a mental health suite, a space that is therapeutic for families and their children so that they feel safe and comfortable. Our office has felt that it’s important to address the needs of our children beyond the prosecution. Unfortunately, health services are, there’s long wait lists. And by having the program that we have at Middlesex, it will be able to give short term traumatic stress intervention to help children and families recognize and reduce stressful situations or reactions and for their parents to also be there to recognize how to address those concerns. And that short term intervention that Middlesex will be implementing will also bridge the gap between services the child will seek in the long term. So we’ll be able to, before they get long term services, we’ll be able to give them some short term intervention to help them. Sometimes a child that we’re working with or the child that is at home seems to be okay, but trauma, comes in waves. I feel like, it may happen, especially when a child hits puberty, if the abuse has happened when they’re younger or when they have started to have relationships. I personally have had a long term relationship with a family that I’ve known for about twenty years. MACA has been an incredible program. It’s been able to recognize different issues that the Children’s Abstasy Centers in Massachusetts need to address. They realize the different situations that have happened to children that need to be addressed through funding. MACA is incredible at their partnerships with different agencies, different state agencies, different district attorney’s offices, forward thinking and finding out what’s happening across the nation and bringing those ideas to, Massachusetts and letting us know so that there’s something that we can implement as part of our job.
We have to address this and say, no, these issues do take place. When we talk about child sexual abuse and crimes against children, we’re talking about a public health crisis. And the only way in which any other public health crisis has been resolved is by talking about it, by taking a community approach, by looking at this as a society and saying, we need to do something to make a change, to impact this. The work that we do, unfortunately, hasn’t slowed down. Knowing how we can do our work better, how we can provide clearer services, how we can become more trauma informed, how we can support survivors, how we can assist with an investigation better, how we can connect children to supportive services that can hopefully help reduce some of that trauma that they’ve experienced and to ensure that not only our staff, but those professional partners that we work with have the most up to date, current, cutting edge information by talking about it, demystifying it, we can start to make a change. When we talk about recovery, we know that more than ninety percent of child victims of sexual abuse never disclose. And so those one in ten children who do disclose, they have that courage, they find that strength, they have that network, or somebody was paying attention, we can work as children’s advocacy centers to provide that early intervention in a child friendly way, to let that child really take control back into their lives after being disempowered and starting that process of healing. Early intervention, early recognition is that starting point, because then we can take away that stigma that they can’t talk about it. We can take away the mystique of these issues, and we can really bring these issues to light and move forward with trauma informed care and treatment. So just because something has happened to them, it does not determine the outcomes that they have in their lives. When we talk about the challenges of our work and how many individuals are impacted by adverse childhood experiences and abuse, the numbers are staggering. And so as a training professional, as a community educator, we need to be mindful of that when we go out and we’re talking about this difficult work, that no matter your crowd size, no matter whether it’s a small group of community members or professionals, statistically, there’s a survivor in the room. It’s important to support MACA because MACA supports us in a way that we can’t necessarily advocate for ourselves. The Children’s Advocacy Centers across the Commonwealth are all different. We’re standalone nonprofits, we’re government, we’re parts of district attorney’s office. We’re part of medical centers. And the the ways in which we can do our work and advocate, for our work is is different. And MACA gives us a voice that sometimes we can’t collect, and bring together for for one mission or one goal. And when we have somebody who can champion those issues that we’re seeing, in our centers and bring them to that statewide level, it it just allows us to to unify and do our work in a better way.
When there are allegations of child sexual assault, it requires the response by law of a lot of different people. There are folks that have to make sure that that child is safe at home and being properly cared for, then there are folks to, decide if a crime had been committed. It’s important that the experience for the child is as trauma informed as possible. And one of the best responsibilities I have is going and telling people about this great work and saying it costs money. And so we happily meet with our legislators either on a state level or a federal level and say this this response is second to none and it deserves a strong investment from the Commonwealth. So MACA is in a great position to promote the best interventions to stop abuse and to put children on the road to recovery and a great life. One of the ways that we do that is to make sure that we are keeping that latest and evidence based work at the fingertips of of those doing work in the field. We feel that in order to really address child abuse, we have to make it everyone’s problem. It is a critical topic for everyone to be aware of. And so when we talk about children’s advocacy centers with the general community, I often say that phrase, it’s the emergency room that you want state of the art care in your neighborhood accessible that you hope you don’t have to access. Healing of children is everyone’s responsibility, and I hope that it doesn’t affect individuals. But when it does, we know that it takes everyone to not only identify child abuse when they see it, but be part of the conversations to stop it. There are many ways that, folks can support the work. It is, important that folks show their support through money, that you make a donation to the Massachusetts Children’s Lions or your local children’s advocacy center because that money is gonna be very, very well spent. All of our centers operate off grants, and those grants can run dry. We often find that the funding that goes to the CACs, the Children’s Advocacy Centers, is spent to the dime and that doesn’t leave folks a lot of wiggle room to expand programming, to make sure that they’re able to provide the other things that go along with a child informed response. Making sure that, the house or the facility is properly cared for so that their work is well funded, and they don’t necessarily have to worry that their grant isn’t going to fund all of the work for the year. Some people are in a really well resourced part of the state, others aren’t. So with that support, you’re supporting our work to help the whole landscape of children’s advocacy centers. And that allows us to maybe sit down with that center and strategize with them. Talk about a way of envisioning your center in five years. What do you need to do that work? So an investment in Mass Children’s Alliance ensures that we’re available for centers across the state and that we’re able to fine tune the work that we do with them depending on what their need is. I feel particularly privileged to be able to see our work come to fruition, talk about ideas or to see ideas that were floated a decade ago actually being turned into practice, turned into the way we respond. And for me that shows that hardworking people, dedicated people actually can make things happen, not just in the moment, but changing the culture in our state, changing the way we respond to children, being able to capture those what ifs, I wishes, and making them happen.
We want to meet families where they’re at. It is very hard. We meet families when the most horrific thing has happened and to reconcile and understand that either their child was abused or that their child could have done something that was not okay. I am a bilingual clinician. I speak Spanish and there is a lot of trauma in the community. When it comes to child sexual abuse, there’s not a lot of bilingual clinicians, and the wait list for services is huge. We have an intervention that we implement at our CAC, and we’ve been doing it for a number of years. And beginnings are challenging, but we’re doing it. And, I know that there are many children and many parents that feel supported because of the training that we have received. When we think of child sexual abuse, it’s overwhelming. But to know that I am impacting one child and one family at a time, it’s huge. So being able to instill hope in a child or a caregiver or a mom or a dad, and to help them see their child, kind of smile again and be a child again after something horrific happened to them, it’s huge. So I want to make sure that I’m part of it and I am so honored that I can lead a team that can do that. In the state of Massachusetts, MAGA is bringing training for mental health professionals to implement an intervention in problematic sexual behaviors, cognitive behavioral therapy, or PSBCBT. And our center has been doing, this training for quite some time. And I am so glad that there are other CACs and other mental health places that are doing this kind of training, because the reality is that there’s a lot of children that need help and we need other colleagues to get trained. And MACA is giving us that opportunity and has given, other professionals in the state to receive that training. I think as a state, we need to make sure that we have a comprehensive approach when it comes to handling cases of problematic sexual behaviors. I would say that Massachusetts Children Alliance needs support because the children in our community deserve that support. And we do this for the children. And we want to make sure that we help little ones and not so little, to have healthy lives and healthy development. And we want them to know that there is help out there and that we’re ready to help them and serve them. So when we support MACA, we’re also supporting the children in our communities.