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SafeSpace is a children’s advocacy center in Hood River that serves five counties in the Columbia River Gorge. It offers an array of services, including forensic interviews, medical exams and psychological counseling, to suspected victims of child abuse, maltreatment or neglect, as well as their family members. The organization also accepts referrals of suspected child abuse cases from the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Police Department.
As reported previously by Columbia Gorge News, SafeSpace is holding an open house for community members this Wednesday at its new facility in Hood River, which it moved into in January. Executive Director Beatriz Lynch says the new space will allow the center to double its caseload and reduce wait times for children and their families. It will also include a new pediatric mental health care clinic for which funds are being raised to open this summer. Lynch joins us to talk about SafeSpace’s expansion plans amid a growing need for its services.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. SafeSpace is a children’s advocacy center based in Hood River that provides a broad array of services to suspected victims of child abuse. It serves young people on either side of the Columbia River and all the way down into Wheeler County. As reported recently by Columbia Gorge News, SafeSpace is holding an open house today starting at 4 pm at its new facility. We thought this was a good time to hear about the work they do and how it’s evolved over the years. Beatriz Lynch is the executive director of SafeSpace and she joins us now. Welcome to the show.
Beatriz Lynch: Thank you for having me.
Miller: What is a children’s advocacy center?
Lynch: A children’s advocacy center – we’re one of 24 across the state of Oregon and probably thousands across the nation. It’s a place where when a child has been victimized by child abuse, either suspected or has had some disclosures, the child comes to a children’s advocacy center. And all of the professionals that need to know what happened – law enforcement, Child Protective Services, medical if they need a medical exam – all of those people are here instead of the child having to go to all of those individual places to tell them what happened. Before we existed, the child would have a disclosure, Child Protective Services would be called, sometimes law enforcement would be called, and each of those caring people would ask the child “what happened to you, honey?” And so the child would have to tell them all of these different people their story. And after a while, it seemed like nobody was believing. “I keep telling these people what happened and they keep asking me over and over again.” And sometimes the child stops talking after a while. And it’s also re-traumatizing, having to tell their story over and over again, especially to professionals, to law enforcement. As adults, when we’re talking to police officers, we get anxious. I can’t imagine what a child’s feeling when they have to do that.
Miller: But even still, is it the case that a child would end up talking with some number of different people at your center? The forensic interviewer and maybe a doctor, maybe law enforcement?
Lynch: What happens at the child advocacy center is we have forensic interviewers, and they’re specially trained to talk to children, to elicit the story coming out of their own words using their own language to describe the abuse. Those interviews are recorded. All the people that need to know that information are able to watch and hear it in real time in another room, they are all taking notes, they are able to hear the child. And there’s a recording, so if they need to go back and relisten or clarify something, they can go back and listen to the video instead of having to ask the child over again.
Miller: To the extent that this process could ever be easy, it’s much faster and much more streamlined than the past model?
Lynch: Yes. All of these things are done here. We’re also a medical clinic, so we have doctors that are able to do the exams here on the premises instead of taking the child to the ER, or having to figure out if their own private practice doctor can see them. And these exams are very specialized. They’re much more lengthy because our doctors are specially trained to ask those follow up questions, to really see if the explanation really coincides with the injury that the child has. So they’re very specialized. And again, those are done here instead of having to send the child somewhere else.
Miller: Your center has been around for something like 15 years. How has the need for your services changed over that time?
Lynch: I don’t know if it’s changed. What we have done is we are now just getting to the standard of care for child abuse in our area. Before 2009, if there was a child that was suspected of child abuse, they were going to the police department and being interviewed by an officer in one of their interrogation rooms. That’s so non-trauma informed care at all. They were going to the ER. If we were able to get them into a child advocacy center, they were traveling to Portland or to La Grande, sometimes to Bend, much more travel and much more cumbersome for a family, and especially for children. When they’re ready to disclose abuse, they’re ready now, not two weeks from now, not having to travel four hours round trip to talk to somebody.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the kinds of cases that you respond to?
Lynch: We do sex abuse, physical abuse, neglect, witness to domestic violence. I think those are the big major ones. Human trafficking has really been something that the state of Oregon has been working on, and maybe throughout the country. We’re really looking at what human trafficking looks like. Our service area is right on I-84, and we know that this is a big corridor for a lot of things, drugs and human trafficking. So we are just now beginning to look at that and look at the kind of cases that we see. We used to call them chronic runaways. And we’re looking at those going “I don’t know if you’re just running away to run away. Because you show up a few days later with a new pair of shoes or a new phone.” So we’re suspecting that a lot of those cases are probably being trafficked as well.
Miller: Are you relying on, say, somebody at a gas station, or other people who maybe we wouldn’t think of as classic mandatory reporters to be your eyes and ears?
Lynch: We would love to be able to train our entire communities to be on the lookout for our children. One of the things that we’ve added in the last couple of years is the prevention department. We go out and talk to community partners, community service agencies that serve children. But my goal is I would love to train the cashiers at Safeway because they see families coming in, and we want to give them the tools to, if you suspect something, say something.
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With child abuse, a lot of people go “I don’t want to get anybody in trouble, I think this may be happening, but I don’t know for sure so I don’t want to say anything.” We want to let the community know: it’s not your job to know that. There’s a whole team of investigators. But you could be the one that prevents something. If nothing’s going on, great. We love seeing those cases where the child fell off his bike, the injury coincides with that, there’s no abuse. We love seeing those cases because there’s no abuse there. But our community is looking out for our kids.
Miller: I remember hearing a fear early on in the pandemic that some children who are being abused at home might be less likely to get help or less likely to get out of abusive situations because they were less likely to be seen by teachers or other mandatory reporters. Did that end up happening?
Lynch: Oh yes, absolutely. The first few weeks when the schools went on lockdown and no kids were going to school, our calls dropped, and I think throughout the state of Oregon calls dropped like 70%. And the only thing that was happening was that children were behind closed doors. We do rely on our schools to be our eyes and ears for a lot of kids. So when they’re behind closed doors and they don’t have access to a teacher or other providers, they weren’t getting help. Those calls dropped. And that was the only reason, is that they were behind closed doors.
I remember during that time, Governor Brown talked about the domestic violence cases that went through the roof. Well, most of those houses also have children. And child abuse went through the roof too. What was happening is that we weren’t getting the calls from the school for a bruise. We were getting calls from the ER with broken bones.
Miller: Your catchment area includes four tribal nations and in-lieu fishing sites along the Columbia River as well. What’s your relationship like with Tribal Police?
Lynch: We are working really hard to build that relationship. About a year ago our Inter-Tribal Police came to us and asked if they could use our center when they came across child abuse cases. Our Inter-Tribal Police has historically been more of a fish and wildlife law enforcement. And there’s in lieu sites on along the Columbia River on both sides of the river that four tribes have access to: Yakima, Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Nez Perce. And those in lieu sites have been mainly for fishing. But what’s happened in the last few years is that more and more families are making those in lieu sites permanent homes. That comes with everything else that comes when you create a little community – your drunk driving, your domestic violence, and child abuse. So what Inter-Tribal Police has told me is that they’ve had to kind of pivot a little bit and do more traditional law enforcement. So they do run across some child abuse, and those cases will be coming to our center for an assessment.
Miller: So much has broken down societally and within families by the time your office gets involved. What does prevention look like to you? What does upstream successful action look like to you?
Lynch: I always tell somebody it’s not good when we’re busy because we don’t want to be in the business of being busy. That means more children are being hurt. So success would be that in 10 years we close our center, and say “we’ve done a great job, our kids are safe, we’ve beat child abuse.” That would be success, and that would be success everywhere. That’s a dream, and we’ll continue to hold that dream.
But what success to me, and prevention, is that we educate our public, educate our community about child abuse and what that looks like. Who to call when you have those questions because there’s professionals that can answer some of those questions, that can do those investigations. I don’t know if that answers your question.
Miller: It half answers it. I’m wondering what you have found works to prevent kids from being abused in the first place? What kinds of interventions work?
Lynch: The interventions work when people call in. So when we get a call from a school because they see a child with a bruise, or a child has said something that doesn’t sound quite right, if we can get those calls early on, we can do that intervention, we can stop that abuse, and provide…sometimes it’s just education. Sometimes parents, they’re disciplining their children a little bit too harshly or in the way that they were disciplined that is just not appropriate anymore. And so it doesn’t always mean that parents are gonna get arrested and kids are gonna be removed. Sometimes it just means that intervention where they can come in and offer some education, some parenting classes, that kind of stuff.
So that to me is success. We will probably always struggle with this. But as a society, we’re getting better on how to deal with it, when we do have children that have been abused, how to provide services in a trauma informed way, to provide maybe not necessarily punitive measures to the abusers, but sometimes just education. And that’s success.
Miller: I mentioned at the beginning that you’re having an open house today at 4 pm at your new facility, which is the culmination of the nearly complete capital campaign that’s been going on for a number of years. I say nearly, because the last piece which hasn’t been fully finished yet, is going to be a mental health clinic for young people. What was the idea behind that? Why add that to your list of services?
Lynch: As a child advocacy center, the full service of child advocacy is to provide that crisis therapy. As you can imagine, sometimes kids and families come into our center and they’re in crisis. Sometimes it’s the first time that the parent has found out that their child has been hurt. So part of that is to have that therapist there to help them through that crisis and maybe get them on the path to healing. And so that has always been a goal of this CAC, is to incorporate that mental health.
But what happened during our capital campaign, maybe because of the pandemic, is as we started talking to people about mental health, and especially children’s mental health in our area, kind of imploded. We are struggling to get the kids seen by therapists. We were able to secure a building that is bigger than our needs, and we said we need to do something. We have to figure this out. There’s been some tragic deaths happening from young people in the last year in our community, which for our community is kind of a crisis mode because we’re pretty small. To have three deaths of young people in our area is a lot.
So we are very confident that this is the right thing to do. We need to be able to provide some mental health to children. We have some wonderful community partners in our area that provide mental health services. And they provide it to everybody, adults, children and everything. Our focus is children. And I know that there’s long waiting lists for therapists for our community, mental health, all of those agencies have long waiting lists. If we can do something to alleviate some of those wait times for children to be seen and provide a service to our service area. Our focus is children. So that’s kind of where we’re at. We need to do this. I don’t think we have a choice. Our kids are hurting right now. We have to do this.
Miller: Beatriz Lynch, thanks very much.
Lynch: Yeah, thank you.
Miller: Beatriz Lynch is the executive director of SafeSpace Children’s Advocacy Center of the Gorge.
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