A conference was held in Wilson Auditorium on Thursday, Oct. 31 to raise awareness to one day put an end to child abuse. The conference was organized through a presentation of practices for professionals to better understand the process of identification, investigation, treatment, case management, and disposition of sexual abuse.
The School of Social Work, the Child Advocacy Group at the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office and Barbara Bonner, Clinical Psychologist and Director of the Center Abuse and Neglect (CCAN) in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, joined together for the conference.
“One of our goals is to coordinate all child maltreatment services across the children’s hospital, the department of pediatrics at the university level so that we are making a concerted effort to attain a simple focus,” said Bonner.
Bonner was the President of the Board of Counselors of the International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and President of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (ASPSAC). “I worked with victims for a long time and wanted to look at something that was more preventive,” said Bonner.
CCAN prevents the perpetrator from becoming a repeat offender through public education on the topic of child maltreatment.
“Adults tend to have done the behavior for much longer periods of time; it has become ingrained into their personality and character. But with adolescents, it has happened a couple of times and they don’t tend to have exclusive attraction to young children,” said Bonner.
According to The National Children’s Alliance, in 2011, 681,000 children were victims of maltreatment nationwide. In 2012, 18,227 alleged offenders among 262,000 were under age of 13 and 25,756 were between the ages of 13 and 17.
Franca Mancini, Director of Counseling and Psychological Services, said, “As far as why people abuse children, the reasons vary from person to person, but we often see a need to control others, so power is a big part of it. Often, the actors have a history of abuse themselves, so that is another possibility.”
CCAN is a nationwide organization that invites pediatricians, psychologists, child protection teams, law enforcement, and students to prevent this issue from occurring.
“It is much easier to intervene at the adolescent level or even at the child level and have those behaviors stop,” said Bonner.
The School of Social Work was approached by the Child Advocacy Group at the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office to conduct this event. The Child Advocacy Group is given a grant every year to provide training to multidisciplinary workers such as law enforcement, social workers, healthcare providers, and victim advocates.
Gina Ferens, mental health counseling graduate student, said, “I feel spreading awareness of child abuse is extremely important. While people may think it doesn’t occur as often today because more cases are out in the open, there are still too many instances that go unreported.”
Janine Vasconcelos, Coordinator of Professional Education of Social Work, said, “We are offering continuing education credits for our student graduates of the School of Social Work through the attendance of this conference for free.”
Vasconcelos coordinates the continuing education program for Social Work graduates currently working in the field. Through this program, social work graduates are provided the training needed to fulfill the requirements to receive their social working license.
Over 150 people attended the conference. This event was free for all University students and Monmouth County upon registration. The conference included a free lunch for the attendees.
At the conference, Bonner mentioned that when she first got into the field, she realized that there were tons of victims. Bonner asked the question, “What are we doing to stop it?”
