Penn State to our State
Penn State to our State by Daniel M. Monfried
I write to you today on the heels of the horrific revelations only now surfacing at Penn State University. As we all sit at our Thanksgiving tables with those we love, I hope that you will not shy away from discussing how a trusted and beloved coach could hurt these young children that trusted him so explicitly. I am confident we share the same feelings. Disgust. Heartache. Sympathy.
If you feel as I do, that sexually abusing a child is the most horrific thing that could happen to a family, then you must know that it happens right here in our own great state of New Hampshire every day. It’s not just a remote phenomenon, a one-off tragedy at a school 1,000 miles away. It is an everyday occurrence in our backyard too.
The numbers are jaw dropping. It is estimated that one in four girls and one in six boys will be abused before their 18th birthday. Think of that in terms of a classroom at your child’s school: If there are 30 kids, six of them are likely to be victims of abuse. Most will never tell their story.
My name is Dan Monfried, and I am the President of the Board of the Granite State Children’s Alliance. You may know us locally as The Child Advocacy Center. Our organization deals with the aftermath of a child being abused. We talk to the child after an attack. We work with police, child protection workers and prosecutors to pursue justice on their behalf.
Let me now introduce you to Melanie Sachs. Melanie is a junior at Keene State College. She is beautiful. She is confident. Seven years ago, she walked through the doors of a Child Advocacy Center – a victim of sexual abuse when she was just 12 years old.
Melanie walked into the interview room at a Child Advocacy Center in 2004 – she was terrified. The smiling face of a young woman (the forensic interviewer) who greeted her represented comfort and reassurance as she revealed a secret no child should ever have to keep. Melanie now reflects that the interviewer represented ‘freedom’ from her secret. As she left the Child Advocacy Center (CAC), Melanie picked out a teddy bear (as is customary at the CAC) and clutched it tightly. She still carries that bear, tattered and torn, to this day. It reminds her that what happened wasn’t her fault. That the abuse she suffered doesn’t define who she is. That she can go on and live an amazing life… do amazing things.
For a moment, close your eyes and imagine that this little girl with the teddy bear is your own daughter. I want you to imagine the joy of her first smile, of taking the training wheels off of her bicycle for the first time or watching her first dance recital. Now, I want you to imagine the heartache and anger of learning that someone has harmed her and changed her life forever. I want you to imagine the challenges she’ll face, and what her future will be like.
As all of us recoil in horror at the latest news coming out of Penn State University and the Second Mile program, here in NH we are sadly reminded of the importance of the Child Advocacy Center. The CAC provides an outlet and a voice to the most vulnerable among us…our children. We cannot help asking ourselves whether things might have been different for those young boys at Penn State had they had a resource like the CAC to lean on.
Each year, more than 2,000 young girls and boys walk through the doors of CACs across New Hampshire, a number that sadly continues to grow. Even sadder is the statistic that only 10% percent of victims actually come forward to tell their stories. If these numbers bear out – and we know they do – it means that more than 20,000 children are physically and sexually abused each year in our own backyard.
Now I want you to close your eyes one more time. I want you to imagine your county or your state without a Child Advocacy Center. I want you to imagine a place where there there isn’t a reassuring smile to greet children who’ve been abused, to help lift the burden off their fragile shoulders; where there isn’t someone to hand those little girls and boys a teddy bear for their bravery.
Prior to the CAC, this meant that children were often interviewed up to eight times about the horror of their experiences – in the metal-grated, blue-lit backseat of a squad car, on video camera by social workers, in a prosecutor’s office, and finally in a courtroom, sometimes facing their attackers.
The CAC provides a calm, peaceful setting where the child is interviewed only once by a trained professional, with police, social workers and prosecutors listening and processing the information in a separate room. CACs nationally have been proven to raise successful prosecution rates by 40 percent. Here in New Hampshire, they save us roughly $2.6 million each year across by streamlining the process and emphasizing a cooperative approach between law enforcement and child protection advocates.
This problem isn’t going away. Neither can we. We need you. We need your energy. We need your voice so that other little children like Melanie Sachs can regain theirs.
Daniel M. Monfried is President and Chief Operating Officer of R.J. Finlay & Co., a construction, real estate and building materials firm in Milford, and President of the Board of Directors for the Granite State Children’s Alliance, formerly known as Child Advocacy Center of Hillsborough County.
Published in the Union Leader November 30, 2011
