Raising awareness about child abuse

Driving through downtown Reno, hundreds of pinwheels can be spotted from the street. Each pinwheel represents one reported case of child abuse. April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month and local organizations that seek to raise awareness about child abuse planted pinwheels on Friday as part of the ‘Pinwheels for Prevention’ program.

“Over 6,000 cases of child abuse were reported in Washoe County alone last year,” said Phillip Ulibarri, coordinator of Nevada’s child abuse prevention awareness campaign through the Washoe County Health District. “These pinwheels put a number in peoples' heads of how many children are affected by abuse every year. I’ve also heard some professionals say that this figure (6,000) only represents half the amount of children who are abused because so many cases go unreported.”

There are between 17 and 20 communities around Nevada participating in the Pinwheels for Prevention program. The Children’s Cabinet and Child Assault Prevention program are two organizations that are helping with the efforts to increase awareness about child abuse in the area.

“The Children’s Cabinet wanted to be the first agency to help with this year’s Child Abuse Prevention Month activities because one of their core beliefs is that each child has the right to lead a healthy, safe existence,” Ulibarri said.

The awareness campaign was just as important to The Children's Cabinet.

“As a family resource center, we work with thousands of families with a variety of issues and child abuse is one of them,” said community education coordinator for the Children’s Cabinet Laura Marineau. “Setting up the pinwheels is important because often we become desensitized to the conditions of families in the community. This provides a chance for people to ask questions about what organizations like ours do and help people to remember that there are a lot of issues people have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.”

Officials said that the number of reported cases of child abuse has increased as state population has grown.

“I can say that Nevada has been deemed a very high risk state to raise children in,” Marineau said. “We have some of the most reported cases of child abuse in the country, high suicide rates and high rates of teen pregnancy.”

Marineau said this could be attributed to the lack of “good support systems in some areas.”

The Children’s Cabinet has implemented the Safe Place program, which is for kids who do not feel safe going home. In an effort to decrease incidents of child abuse, the organization has staff on hand 24 hours a day who can take care of children who do not feel comfortable with their situation at home.

“We do our best to help on all angles of the problem,” Marineau said. “We know that domestic violence is an issue, so we started a parenting class for parents who are living that problem.”

Marineau teaches parenting classes at The Children’s Cabinet and said that “we do our best to give victims of child abuse the help they need and we try to help their parents.”

The Child Assault Prevention program (CAP) is also helping with the Pinwheels for Prevention program. “We present 450 workshops every year, which represents about 10,000 students,” executive director of the CAP program Rebecca LeBeau said. “We talk to them about stranger awareness, strangers on the Internet and explain how people that they know and love can sometimes either sexually or physically abuse them. We then tell them who they can go to for help, including their teachers and police officers.”

CAP is a federally mandated program, meaning that schools are required to teach it.

“(Pinwheels for Prevention) is important because it gives counselors the ability to speak more openly about child abuse and we’re having students also make pinwheels so that they can learn more about child abuse.”

The pinwheels made in local elementary schools will be displayed at the Tune into Kids Fair on Apr. 25 at Idlewild Park.

“Each pinwheel should be a reminder to everyone who sees it that they have a responsibility to call in suspected child abuse,” Ulibarri said.