Over the past five years, sexual abuse scandals in sports have continuously been in the news. Whether swimming, tae kwon do, or most famously gymnastics, the variety of sports that have had such scandals point to a very uncomfortable truth that sports has inherent child protection issues, and that these unique vulnerabilities require unique prevention strategies to keep youth athletes safe. Courtney Kiehl, former elite gymnast, abuse survivor, and now an attorney and advocate for child victims a...
Aug 05, 2022•43 min•Season 4Ep. 13
In child maltreatment cases, while our attention is focused on the child and family in front of us, do we give any thought to the child protection system itself? What do we understand about how family separation was baked into the model for Black and Indigenous children right from the very beginning? And how does that play out today? Dr. Jessica Pryce, director of the Florida Institute for Child Welfare, joins us to discuss how it would change our work with families to center equity. To center c...
Jul 15, 2022•47 min•Season 4Ep. 12
This is a critical time for the child protection and Children’s Advocacy Center community to be allies for LGBTQ kids. Nearly two dozen states have considered anti-trans bills and some have made it difficult if not impossible for trans youth to receive gender-affirming care. In today’s One in Ten podcast, we speak with Al Killen-Harvey, president and co-founder of the Harvey Institute, about how child abuse professionals can better support LGBTQ youth and families. How can we ensure that child a...
Jun 24, 2022•48 min•Season 4Ep. 11
The 1998 CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study helped build public understanding of the consequences of untreated childhood trauma. All these years later, does this tool tell the complete story? In this panel discussion recorded at National Children’s Alliance’s 2022 Leadership Conference, we explore what ACEs can—and can’t—accomplish in terms of influencing public support for policies that benefit kids. How can ACE screenings be used (and misused)? And what’s next for...
Jun 10, 2022•52 min•Season 4Ep. 10
Justin Fitzsimmons, associate vice president at the National White Collar Crime Center, joins us to raise the alarm about the way in which technology companies, social media outlets, and online privacy advocates are now purposely pitting adult privacy rights against the protection and safety of children. Think end-to-end encryption is totally innocuous? What if that means that pedophiles can endlessly trade child sexual abuse images online with impunity? And how do we—as advocates for children—k...
May 27, 2022•46 min•Season 4Ep. 9
If you’ve ever worked anywhere near the criminal justice system, you know how heartbreaking it is when a case goes to trial and you have a clear disclosure and great victim testimony and really solid corroborating evidence—and the jury acquits. In a child sexual abuse case, what would make a jury hear all of that and still acquit? Tayler Jones-Cieminski and other researchers set out to explore that very question, especially one specific aspect of juror beliefs: the myth about the prevalence of f...
May 12, 2022•41 min•Season 4Ep. 8
Today’s episode is a conversation with author and survivor Stephen Mills about his recently published memoir, Chosen . For those who haven’t yet read his book, which we highly recommend, it recounts Mills’ abuse at the hands of a camp counselor over several years, and his long journey towards healing. While many institutional abuse cases involve boys, there are very, very few published accounts of male survivorship. And, if we’re to help boys who have been abused, then it’s critical for us to un...
Apr 28, 2022•48 min•Season 4Ep. 7
April is Child Abuse Prevention Month, a great time to talk about the way we message around child abuse and childhood adversities. The ways in which we’ve messaged about childhood adversity in the past may have served us very well, helping people come to terms with how important the topic is, the scope of the problem, and the lifelong impacts of it. But they may not be serving us very well now. What if, in describing the problem as enormous and making that the centerpiece of our messaging, we’re...
Apr 14, 2022•44 min•Season 4Ep. 6
Does America believe female sexual abusers actually exist? When we think about child sexual abuse, don’t we automatically picture in our mind a father, a stepfather, a Boy Scout leader, a male neighbor, a coach, or a priest? Our minds go there for a very good reason, and that is that 97% of convicted sexual offenders are, in fact, male. But we know that female-perpetrated child sexual abuse does exist. What are the sort of perceptions—and misperceptions—that abound around this? What are the myth...
Apr 01, 2022•48 min•Season 4Ep. 5
When we think about problematic sexual behaviors in youth, we often think of a neighbor child, or someone at school. Someone acting out in the community with a child of our own. But rarely do we think about sibling sexual abuse, which we think of as somehow very rare. As you’re going to hear in this episode, it isn’t. It’s not uncommon. Some of the most difficult cases we deal with at Children's Advocacy Centers are sibling sexual abuse cases. Mom and Dad come in, horribly upset. You have one ch...
Mar 11, 2022•36 min•Season 4Ep. 4
In recent years, how we look at the Olympics and elite sports has begun to change—driven by cases like that of Larry Nassar, the team doctor who for years and years got away with sexually assaulting and sexually abusing girls and young women. Marci Hamilton, the founder and CEO of CHILD USA, a think tank dedicated to child abuse and neglect, lead a case autopsy, conducted by subject-matter experts to find out how this was allowed to happen. And how can we prevent it from ever happening again? Th...
Feb 25, 2022•47 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Over the past 18 months, systemic and structural discrimination have received widespread—and, let’s face it, much-needed—media attention and public discussion. But what hasn’t had the same level of attention is interpersonal discrimination. The nasty comments. The othering. The exclusion—not at the hands of a faceless bureaucracy, but in our own communities, between individual people. Now, many of us were raised with a sort of “sticks and stones can break our bones, but words can never hurt us” ...
Feb 10, 2022•34 min•Season 4Ep. 2
Over the past two decades, and in many cases because of statute of limitations reform, many adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse have come forward to seek justice, disclosing painful memories of traumatic events from decades before. And while, thankfully, the general public has grown in its understanding of how and why abused children might delay disclosure well into adulthood, a question that frequently comes up in legal procedures is: How accurate and reliable are memories of events long ...
Jan 27, 2022•42 min•Season 4Ep. 1
We're all too familiar with the statistics and issues around child abuse in the U.S. But what do we really know about violence against children globally? Are there approaches other countries take that we should apply in our country? Are there successes we should emulate and pitfalls to avoid? And what would it mean if thousands of organizations working to keep kids safe really banded together and demanded government changes to better support families and protect children? Together for Girls, Nat...
Dec 26, 2021•48 min•Season 3Ep. 18
We’re always very careful to say that poverty doesn’t cause child neglect and abuse. And we don’t want to conflate these things or have people think that we’re blaming people for being poor. Yet we do know that poverty—particularly chronic and extreme poverty—can create an environment in which neglect and child maltreatment can thrive. Given that connection, could investments in anti-poverty programs actually reduce child maltreatment? This is a key question, especially given that rates of negle...
Dec 09, 2021•46 min•Season 3Ep. 17
In today’s episode, we speak with Dr. James Herbert, senior research fellow at the Australian Center for Child Protection, the first Children’s Advocacy Center (CAC) in Australia. Now, for those of us in the CAC movement or on multidisciplinary teams (MDTs), we sometimes take our work together for granted. The teamwork, the support—the conflict!—and the difficult decisions we make together to protect children. But imagine for a moment coming to that work completely fresh and as a research scient...
Nov 25, 2021•46 min•Season 3Ep. 16
When we first met Dr. Jane Silovsky years ago, talking about youth with problematic sexual behaviors, it was a pervasive myth in the Children’s Advocacy Center world that CACs could not serve these kids. Somehow they weren’t our kids, somehow they weren’t deserving of help, or somehow they just weren’t ours to serve. But 25% to 30% of our cases each year involve sexually abusing or acting out on other kids. To make any difference at all in that work, we have to serve these kids. This is meaningf...
Nov 05, 2021•43 min•Season 3Ep. 15
Our guest today is Dr. Maegan Rides At The Door, the director of the National Native Children’s Trauma Center at the University of Montana. Now, many of us know at least some of the historical trauma faced by Native Americans and Alaska Native families, not just the genocide of the past, but also the boarding school abuses of the very recent past. How does this impact children today? And how does racism, which is very much in the present, add to the trauma burden these children face? And how do ...
Oct 08, 2021•40 min•Season 3Ep. 14
When we think of military families, we rightly think of sacrifice and duty. But do we also think about resiliency, perseverance, and a sense of community? The unique sense of identity that comes with military service comes with a complex set of supports and struggles for service members. Dr. Stephen Cozza, a researcher and professor at the Uniformed Services University, joins us to explore the unique strengths and challenges of military families. What are the risks and protective factors that we...
Sep 16, 2021•48 min•Season 3Ep. 13
Nearly a decade ago, a coalition of national organizations including NCA began strategizing about how to end child abuse fatalities. We passed a bill that established a congressional commission, which issued a report in 2016. Now we're looking at the successes and challenges of that work. What's changed, or not, in five years? What about state reforms? Join us with Amy Harfeld from the National Coalition to End Child Abuse Deaths and reporters Lia Russell and Caitlin Andrews. Topics: 2016: The p...
Aug 31, 2021•52 min•Season 3Ep. 12
Are we solving the wrong problem in child welfare? When you think of federal child welfare policy, maybe you expect a discussion of foster care and other post-abuse interventions. If so, this conversation with Jerry Milner, former head of the Children’s Bureau at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is going to blow your mind. Because after more than 40 years in child welfare, Milner's leadership of the Children’s Bureau turned a very, very different direction. He explored questions...
Jul 29, 2021•40 min•Season 3Ep. 11
Years ago, few Americans—even in the field of child abuse—knew or understood child sex trafficking. The media portrayed it as a problem “over there” someplace, far from our shores. Now we know that child sex trafficking is both a global problem and a local one, one that affects children and youth who come across our borders, and youth in schools right down the street. What makes children vulnerable to trafficking, and those who cross our borders especially vulnerable to it? How do we identify th...
Jul 15, 2021•38 min•Season 3Ep. 10
If you’ve worked any time at all, then you’ve worked in some place that was unhealthy. Maybe it was full of gossip and backstabbing. Or perhaps there was one disgruntled employee who just made the whole place miserable. Or perhaps you or one of your colleagues was bullied. Toxic workplaces take an emotional toll. They’re exhausting. Draining. Demoralizing. What can we do as leaders to create a healthy workplace culture right from the very start? How do we turn around one that’s developed some so...
Jun 24, 2021•46 min•Season 3Ep. 9
When the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study came out and proved the link between traumas such as child abuse and long-term negative health and mental health impacts, why did the public latch onto some results but not others? Why are people less convinced about the physical health impacts of ACEs than others? What role does political leaning play? And are we messaging some things that are harmful or counter-productive? We talk to Jonathan Purtle from Drexel University about how to make sur...
May 20, 2021•43 min•Season 3Ep. 8
Jenna Quinn was one of the first survivors to translate their experience of abuse into child abuse prevention public policy. Jenna was abused by a close friend of the family, someone known through the Christian school she attended. Her mom was a teacher, and her family very supportive, and yet Jenna, like so many others, became vulnerable to ongoing abuse because she didn’t know who, or how, to tell. And her school, like so many other schools, provided no abuse prevention education to kids or to...
May 07, 2021•45 min•Season 3Ep. 7
When we think about Alaska, we think of Denali, pictures we’ve seen, movies we’ve watched, the wonderful wildlife, and people still living on the cusp of the frontier. But what films don’t always show, and what books don’t always cover, is the incredible challenges of this environment: the high rates of trauma, the high rates of addiction, the high rates of suicide, and the high rates of child abuse. How do you help families identify the root causes of trauma and truly heal? We talk to Patrick A...
Apr 16, 2021•52 min•Season 3Ep. 6
Sometimes we forget that the medical response to child abuse as a discipline developed over our lifetime, and what was nascent 30 years ago is now a board specialty, like cardiology or oncology. For all the gains we’ve made in research and practice, though, there are still tremendous challenges in ensuring that all children who’ve been abused have access to medical care. Things like: Why is there such a scarcity of child abuse pediatricians? What can we do to increase the number of physicians wi...
Mar 25, 2021•43 min•Season 3Ep. 5
On today’s episode, “Engaging the Hope Within Us,” our guests are award-winning classical pianists and siblings Gregory and Deondra Brown of The 5 Browns. When we think of classical music, we often think only of the beauty of it, not also of the pain and vulnerability that it can express and evoke. The 5 Browns shook perceptions of the classical music world when they revealed that all three sisters had been sexually abused as children and sought justice in their case. This brave act shattered st...
Mar 12, 2021•49 min•Season 3Ep. 4
In today’s episode, we talk with Paul DiLorenzo, who’s worked in every aspect of the child welfare system over the past 40 years—as a writer, as a consultant, and as a case worker. This varied experience gives him a wealth of knowledge and information and truly unique insight into our field. One of his key insights has been around the relationship between chronic neglect and child sexual abuse. Now if you’ve been working in the child protection field for a while, you often think about it—yes, th...
Feb 19, 2021•40 min•Season 3Ep. 3
On today’s episode, we talk with Sasha Neulinger, director and producer of the award-winning documentary, Rewind , a film about his survival of abuse. Now for those listeners who attended our conference and watch party, you already know his powerful film. But for those who might be new to Sasha and his work, run, don’t walk, to your Amazon Prime account and queue up this great film. Now, some of you might be thinking, “After a day of dealing with child abuse, why would I want to watch the film a...
Jan 29, 2021•46 min•Season 3Ep. 2
