In 1983, President Ronald Reagan declared April to be Child Abuse Prevention Month. Proclamation No. 5039 stated that child abuse and neglect “continue to threaten the lives and health of over a million of our Nation’s children. Their physical suffering and emotional anguish challenge us, as parents, neighbors, and citizens, to increase our attention to their protection and intensify our efforts to prevent their maltreatment.”
Right now, because of COVID-19 and social distancing, children who are at-risk for abuse are in an even more precarious situation—the main sources of identifying possible cases of abuse are schools and doctor’s offices; measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have basically eliminated this front-line alert system.
Many children are now sheltering-in-place with the people who abuse them.
Our Intact Family Services program is working hard to keep these children safe. This is just one of the reasons why the work we do at Hephzibah is so important. Families are referred to the Intact Family Services program when an instance of neglect or abuse is investigated and confirmed by DCFS but the abuse or neglect does not pose a danger great enough to merit removing a child from their home. Hephzibah has over 60 families currently in this program, many of whom were struggling with poverty, homelessness, addiction and mental health problems before COVID-19.
Working with families at risk and keeping children safe in unstable environments is complicated work, especially during a pandemic. Hephzibah case workers are still going into homes to assess children at risk and maintaining contact with families; they are following all safety protocols as they enter people’s homes and when possible, they are meeting families in parks and outdoors.
Our Hephzibah team is doing everything possible to rally resources for children and families in need – helping with rent, food, and gathering whatever these families need to provide for their children and reducing some of the stressors that can lead to abuse.
Monique is a single mother of three children under ten years old and one child in high school—she had been working as a waitress until social distancing made her job obsolete. She’s receiving unemployment insurance, but the amount she receives barely makes a dent to cover her family’s monthly living expenses. She was also unprepared to pay for WIFI and a chromebook so her children could participate in their schools’ e-learning programs.
“Hephzibah helps families with emergency finances for rent, food, utilities, and even things like chromebooks,” according to Julie Dvorsky, Director of Family Based Services. “We’ve purchased more grocery store gift cards this past month than we ever have, as families are struggling to provide food for their families.”
The work that we do has a dramatic effect on families like Monique’s. “I didn’t know how I was going to help my son finish his high school work,” said Monique. “I and was going to have to choose between paying rent and getting him a computer. So when my caseworker said that Hephzibah could get him a new computer I almost started crying.”
In addition to providing necessities and emergency support for families, Hephzibah is also connecting families to therapy, drug and alcohol recovery programs, domestic violence support and whatever resources they need to keep stressors in check. We are doing everything we can do to help stabilize families and keep at-risk children safer.
We are proud of the work that we do and grateful when parents like Monique are able to provide a safer and more stable home for their children because of our support.