On Guard! : By Law, Students Must Be Taught How to Avoid Abuse

They sat there about as quietly as 30 third- and fourth-graders can sit, listening to the teacher explain that, although they were young and small, they had the right to be safe and strong.

They threw their arms and hands into the air like rockets when they knew the answers to questions, and the words tumbled forth like water pouring downstream.

Outside the classroom of the Santa Ana grammar school, the sun shone brightly as ever. It provided a sharp contrast with the darkness of the topic under discussion inside--child abuse, physical maltreatment, sexual molestation.

“Children your age have told me that people they know have hurt them,” Judy Shore told the youngsters, their faces freshly scrubbed, their clothes neat and clean. Perhaps some of these children, too, have been hurt by people who “put your hand in burning water . . . hit you so hard it left bruises or marks.”

Shore, who works for the Child Abuse Prevention Program, warned the children of sexual abuse as well, whether from strangers or from people they knew.

“We all need good touches,” she reminded them gently--pats on the head, a tap on the shoulder, a hug. But beware of “confusing touches” on the “private part of your body” that result in an “uh-oh feeling.”

If they receive a touch like that, they should tell someone they trust, Shore said. If the adult does not believe them, they should tell someone else. A little girl who has been wrongly touched “should keep telling and telling until someone does believe her.”

The quaint notion that schools are places where children learn only the three Rs is as outdated as the drills in which a generation of grammar school children crawled under their desks to avoid simulated death from atomic bomb attacks.

These days students are taught everything from how to socialize with other children to how to avoid drugs, as well as how to read and write. And by state law, they are taught how to avoid abuse.

In Orange County, the mechanism for that teaching is the Child Abuse Prevention Program, which since December of 1985 has put on its program for more than 200,000 students. Private and nonprofit, funded by the state, CAPP runs year-round, presenting classes to schools with summer sessions. But the big season starts now, as schools across the county reopen for class.

Although the program came in for some flak last year, educators and specialists in child-abuse prevention insist that it is badly needed.

“I have got to feel that the most damaged children that we see at the Orangewood Children’s Home are the sexual assault victims,” said William Steiner, executive director of the Orangewood Foundation. The foundation raised money to build the home, which shelters abused and neglected children, and works against child abuse.

“The kids that have a black eye or broken leg are upsetting to people who visit Orangewood,” Steiner said. “But what they don’t see when they visit is the kind of vacant stare of the kids who have been sexually abused.”

Sexual abuse “robs them of childhood. The long-range damage is far greater than physical abuse or neglect.”

Steiner said the number of children admitted to Orangewood who have been sexually abused has increased in recent years. The trend is also reflected in the number of monthly reports of abuse made to the Child Abuse Registry, which the county set up in February, 1975.

For the first 11 months, the cases of suspected child abuse reported to the registry averaged 130 per month.

Since then, the number of reports has more than doubled. In June of last year, there were 325 reports. In June of this year, there were 362 reports. Every month from February through June has seen more than 300 reports.

The Child Abuse Prevention Program is designed to prevent children from becoming statistics in the registry’s reports and residents of Orangewood.

Although aspects of the program have occasionally been criticized, academic researchers give generally high marks to the curriculum.

By nature it is impossible to measure exactly how many children have not been abused because they went through the program, executive director Nancy Dickerson acknowledged.

But she said that a San Juan Capistrano mother telephoned one school where children were being given the program’s course to say that the previous night she had heard a child giving the “special yell” taught in the class to be used when children feel themselves to be in danger. The woman investigated and found a resident of the apartment complex molesting a child. The man ran but was later arrested by police.

Dickerson said that in Buena Park, two young girls walking home from school heeded a man’s call for assistance in trying to find the keys he said he had lost in the bushes. But when he tried to grab them, they ran away and headed back to school, where they provided teachers with a good description of their assailant.

In addition, Dickerson has a sheaf of testimonials from principals at schools where the program has been offered. “I support your program and will recommend it to others with pride,” one principal wrote. “We hope you will keep us in mind when we receive our 1988-89 students,” another wrote.

A part of the program came under fire from some teachers at an El Toro school last year when a teacher there was charged with molesting five children. The teacher, Keith Milne, was acquitted after a jury trial in which his attorney linked the program to reports of molestation by the students.

Program proponents, however, noted that it was not until four months--and a summer vacation--after the program was given at the school that the children made their allegations.

One of the supporters of the program is Sheila Dobbs, administrative director of the Child Abuse Council of Orange County, which represents numerous organizations in the county working to prevent child abuse or help those who have been abused.

The program seems to have worked well in Northern California and in Orange County, Dobbs said. Still, “I don’t know that you can solve any problem in a classroom. There is no panacea. It has to be a multidimensional type of thing that comes from many, many areas. But in terms of awareness, (CAPP) has a role in being helpful.

“One of the strongest components of it, I think, is that children learn and are given support in knowing that their body belongs to them and they have certain rights. And they may seek out people they trust in asking questions. They don’t have to harbor that isolation, that feeling that they have no say-so in their own body.”

Both Dickerson and Susan Davidson of the Adam Walsh Foundation, which like CAPP is based in the city of Orange, said an important part of instructing children in how to avoid sexual abuse is telling them that there are times when it is OK to say “no” to adults.

“We don’t need to teach kids to say ‘no,’ they are born knowing how to say ‘no,’ ” said Davidson. “But we have to remind them that it is OK to say ‘no’ even though it’s an adult.”

The Adam Walsh Foundation runs programs similar to those put on by the Child Abuse Prevention Program, concentrating on private schools where CAPP cannot go because it is funded by the state.

Both the Adam Walsh Foundation and the Child Abuse Prevention Program hold sessions for parents even before the classroom part starts. Both also hold sessions for teachers to tell them what will be explained and what to expect.

Davidson explained: “We say (to the teachers), ‘This is what we are going to do, this is what might happen. Within 72 hours you might start getting some disclosures (from children saying they have been abused).’ ”

Davidson said most of the schools where her group works are religious schools. “For them to request us year after year . . . (shows) it’s a non-controversial program.”

One difference between the Child Abuse Prevention Program and the Adam Walsh program is that Walsh does not use a controversial part of the CAPP presentation to elementary school students. In that section, a CAPP worker posing as a child’s uncle first slips an arm around his “niece”--portrayed by another CAPP worker--then touches her on the upper thigh, and then touches her there again. The girl objects and says she is going to tell her mother.

Some teachers have charged that the skit is too vague and confuses children about the difference between “good touches” and “bad touches.”

But Dickerson said she thinks that “we are very clear” in defining a “bad” touch, “and we have not before had any misconceptions about it.” If an instructor “sees a kid struggling” with what is presented, she said, more explanations are offered until the teacher is certain the child understands.

And a tape prepared for instructors of the child-abuse lesson for third- and fourth-graders clearly shows the discomfort of the “niece,” who in one skit eludes further advances from her uncle by pretending to hear her aunt returning home. In the next skit, she tells the uncle point-blank that the touches make her feel uncomfortable and that she is going to report them to her aunt.

Joan Rullo, safety education program director for the Adam Walsh Foundation, which runs a variety of programs for children, said the only reason her program does not include the section on the “uncle” is a lack of personnel. Adam Walsh uses one presenter, Rullo said, and uses films rather than role players.

But though particulars in the child-abuse program may be disputed, the need for instruction is not.

Steiner said that in 1978, when he started working at the facility that evolved into Orangewood, 11% of the children admitted to the home had suffered sexual abuse. Most were teen-age girls.

Steiner said currently 23% of those admitted to Orangewood are victims of sexual abuse. “It’s routine to have children under the age of 10 admitted daily, even down to the age of toddlers,” Steiner said.

“And it’s boys and it’s girls. And the perpetrator is usually known to the family. It’s not some dirty old man in a trench coat in an alley.”

Still, Steiner and others cautioned that the increase in reports of sexual abuse of children may not mean that there has been a dramatic increase in actual incidents. Some of the increase is attributed to new laws requiring teachers and others having contact with children to report all incidents.

Another part of the increase may stem from “less fear of disclosure,” Steiner said. “You have more of these kids maybe willing to let it come out of the closet or talk about it.”

Dobbs agreed, saying that “sexual abuse has been here for a long, long, long, long time. The awareness and the reporting and the pressure and the mandates to report them have not been. So therefore the reporting techniques are more refined and the numbers look like more.

“How many we don’t know about is also a question,” she said. But based on the large number of adults who have been willing to step forward in recent years and say that they were abused as children, Dobbs believes that the number of abuse cases is high.

A nationally known expert on child-abuse programs, David Finkelhor of the University of New Hampshire’s Family Research Laboratory, concluded in a study last year that the programs were “most clearly successful” in persuading children who had been abused to break their silence, tell an adult and receive help.

Finkelhor’s paper, co-authored with Nancy Strapko, said that studies of two dozen child-abuse prevention programs showed that “children do indeed learn the prevention concepts that the programs teach.”

The Child Abuse Prevention Program and similar efforts tailor their presentations depending on a student’s grade. Preschoolers receive basic descriptions of “good” and “bad” touches. High school students discuss “date rape” and ways they would discipline their own children.

Jill Duerr, a researcher with the Family Welfare Research Group at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare, said that children younger than 5 sometimes have trouble understanding the difference between good and bad touches, but not older children.

A Family Welfare Research Group study published in January said that in the few years since it began, the child-abuse prevention movement “has become a well-recognized, accepted aspect of social reform.”