The observation room at Voices of Courage Child Advocacy Center is where law enforcement can monitor interviews with victims of child abuse while staying removed from the scene. Many of the center’s calls every year are made by teachers, executive director Melissa Birdsell said.
The observation room at Voices of Courage Child Advocacy Center is where law enforcement can monitor interviews with victims of child abuse while staying removed from the scene. Many of the center’s calls every year are made by teachers, executive director Melissa Birdsell said.
School is less than two weeks away, and with it comes an increase in reported child abuse cases.
There are as many as 25% more cases reported when school is in session than over the summer, but that’s not a bad thing, said Melissa Birdsell, executive director at Voices of Courage Child Advocacy Center.
She attributes part of the jump to how many calls are made by teachers and school faculty.
It’s preferable for teachers, or whoever sees signs of abuse, to report directly to the advocacy center’s hotline, Birdsell said.
“That person is the best reporter,” she said. “We don’t want that person having someone else do the report who didn’t hear the disclosure or see the evidence themselves. It needs to come from the person who was involved.”
Noticing a child suffering from abuse can get easier throughout the year, Birdsell said. As the year progresses, teachers get to know their students’ behavior better.
“There’s probably no one who spends more time with our kids for an extended period of time of day than our teachers,” she said.
Details like bruises or marks can be easy to spot, Birdsell said, but not all signs are so apparent.
“Those things are more obvious, but the less obvious things are behavioral changes,” she said. “So sometimes it does take us a little while to get to know the child and understand what their common, normal behaviors are, so that we can see when there’s a change in behavior.”
Sometimes a child’s attitude shifts instead. They could go from cheerful to moody or sullen, or from reserved to acting out, among other examples, Birdsell said.
“We don’t go looking,” she said. “Teachers don’t go looking for things, but they do have a responsibility to make sure that the kiddos that are in their care during the day are doing OK.”
If there are bruises, then extravagant explanations might be an indicator something is wrong, she said.
“They’ll make some exaggerated claim, and those are kind of clues that the mark didn’t come from the way the child says,” she said. “Or if it’s obviously like a handprint.”
When children lie about how they receive a bruise, it sometimes is because they’re instructed not to tell others how they were injured, Birdsell said.
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