Today's guest is Melanie Blow The COO for Stop Abuse Campaign, an organization that works to prevent adverse childhood experience.  We will be discussing preventing adverse childhood experiences through education and policy reform. 

We hear her story of why preventing child abuse is important and how her own trauma led her to that mission and why it took her so long before she felt comfortable sharing about her own personal her abuse.

Melanie shares how the statue of limitations hinders abusers from being prosecuted and how it takes over 20 years before the average sex abuse victim shares their story.

Stop Abuse Campaign wants to spread the message about this topic, which isn’t often publicly discussed.

The big challenges regarding child abuse is funding and political issues.

California is working to reform the statute of limitations.

She shares why and how a variety of organizations are looking to stop child abuse reform, which makes changing the statutes of limitation challenging.

The current legislation makes it difficult to reprimand abusers. Stop Abuse Campaign and others are trying to change the laws to make prosecution against child abusers easier for victims.

The reason changing legislation is so important is because it shapes people’s perspective about how bad an action is.

Some causes of child abuse include an adult's personal experience with trauma.  This trauma causes massive ongoing damage that harm their physical and mental health later on in life.

There is a lot know about how to prevent other types of abuses such as physical, emotional, mental abuse, neglect, growing up in a home with people who are addicted to drugs or has a mental illness. There are home visiting programs that have been around for 40 years which have numerous longitudinal evidence on how these programs prevent mothers from becoming abusive or neglectful. They are able to break the cycle of poverty and generational trauma and violence.

There are reasons why people are unaware of these programs. The general consensus is to blame, shame and demonize abusers Instead of working to understand and solve the issue. Also there is a perception that child abuse is such a big issue that it’s not preventable, which is not true.

Another challenge in getting these programs implemented is the conversation about creating policies to spend the money to help.

The biggest common risk factors behind the causes of non sexual child abuse includes your own trauma history and the amount of stress you experience as a new parent. Stressors like homelessness and poverty.

Those with significant trauma history have issues bonding with their children and forming healthy relationships with adults in general. Taking a personal inventory of your trauma and how it effects you can be a challenging thing to do.

There isn’t a lot of information about how trauma impedes your ability to create relationships.

These two factors are what screening tools utilize to identify the risk of child abuse.

The inability to create relationships is something that was helpful during the time of abuse. To be able to detach oneself from the experience but it eventually creeps up in other relationships which makes connecting to others difficult.

Now diving into the solutions, Stop Abuse Campaign work to change public policy such as universal access to maternal home visiting.  They are working to establish a pilot in New York State where every single family who is eligible will have access to these services.

These services also save money due to the reduced rates of Child Protective Services reports and action. Reduced cost of educating kids, who now do not need special education services because the issues was addressed before it became a bigger problem. There is an initial outflow of cost that people are worried about and scarred of.

For every $1 spent a $1.15 is saved, which saves quite a bit when talking about millions of dollars.

Once a high risk parent is identified, they receive home visits. The mother is often the main point of contact and will stay in the program 3-5 years. They work to set life related goals for mom such as getting out of poverty, obtaining mental health services, etc.

A key component of this is about showing mothers what to do, not just handing off a pamphlet. Have mom hold a baby for an hour which can be uncomfortable for some new mother’s.  To show mothers how to be a mom, which wasn’t something they were ever shown.

They work to support parents on learning about child sexual abuse. Change the culture of how parents look at this topic. Parents do not want to go through classes about how to prevent their child from being abused even though there is funding providing that education. It’s a scary and hard topic to discuss.

They continually educate legislators in the New York senate. Year after year they are signing up more legislators to work to change the laws in place. Facilitate town hearing about it in New York. They help launch the Brooklyn Bridge Survivors Walk which allows survivors of abuse to come together in a public setting and connect to others who experienced the same thing. They also have a petition signed by 86,000 people from New York and 80,000 people from Pennsylvania regarding statute of limitations reform.

These petitions can make an impact on legislators.  Especially when it show  legislators that people are paying attention to what is going on and paying attention to them. With all this work Stop Abuse Campaign is also creating a safe space for people to connect to when they feel scarred and don’t know what to do.

If you have trauma, understand it’s not your fault, it can be overcome and you can have a good life.  Start figuring out how you are not safe, what is something you need and what should be done to get it. There are a lot of good trauma specific treatments, which people don’t realize.

For those who want to work on the mission to stop child abuse; find some way to share your own story, comment on articles, sign petitions, register to vote, vote on local/state issues, learn who your legislators are, email legislators and ask them to support causes.

Final Takeaways Childhood trauma is a huge cause of the many issues in this world we can prevent. We have to become public policy warriors and guardians.

Stopabusecampaign.org

Music by Blazo, Introducing