Reaching Out to Children Robbed of Their Trust : * Volunteers on the Orangewood home’s Child Abuse Services Team work to build bonds with kids who have learned to shut everyone out.

The 14-month-old girl lying on her back in the medical examining room had suffered multiple fractures in a sexual assault, and the adults around her were trying to determine the extent of her injuries.

No one knew who had done this to her or exactly how it had happened, but Marianne Gillispie was thinking only about the best way to quickly establish a bond with the little girl so she wouldn’t feel so alone.

The child was crying softly, but her body was eerily still for one so young. Gillispie knelt beside her and tried to make eye contact, but the girl’s gaze was frozen, empty.

She had withdrawn to some distant place and was allowing no one to follow.

Gillispie, a 43-year-old volunteer child advocate on the Child Abuse Services Team at Orangewood Children’s Home in Orange, understood that need to escape all too well.

Gillispie, who lives in Orange, says she was also a victim of sexual abuse when she was a child. She has written a number of poems revealing the devastating impact of abuse on children, including one called “Trust Me” that captures the way many victims shut out the pain.

Like the 14-month-old girl Gillispie tried to comfort, the child in her poem becomes so emotionally detached when she’s being hurt that she is unable to reach out when she’s offered help. She stops feeling and forgets how to trust.

Gillispie and the other volunteers on the Child Abuse Services Team are there to help abused children feel safe so they can trust again. And maybe even start experiencing childhood as it is supposed to be. Carefree. Joyful. And painless.

The CAST program was started in March, 1989, to reduce the trauma of sexual abuse investigations for children, many of whom are subjected to repeated questioning by various professionals in as many as 25 interviews--often in an intimidating environment.

“By the time they answer all those questions, they begin to doubt themselves, and we start to get inconsistencies in their statements and, eventually, a recanting of the story,” says Cathy Campbell, CAST director.

The CAST program makes it possible for about 50 children a month to go through a much less traumatic process handled by a multidisciplinary team trained to protect victims while seeking evidence needed for prosecution.

The questions are asked by a child interview specialist, who often sits in a tiny chair at the child’s eye level. The interviewer is briefed in advance by investigators trying to determine whether charges should be filed or protective custody should be sought.

In many cases, one interview is all that is necessary, Campbell says, because a two-way mirror enables investigators from various police and social service agencies to observe from the next room.

Campbell notes that it’s easier to get confessions from perpetrators--and thus keep victims out of court--after interviews conducted in this setting, because the children are more comfortable and therefore provide better evidence.

CAST, which is funded by private donations and public grants, now serves 10 Orange County law enforcement jurisdictions, and the rest of the county will be covered after a South County site opens in September, Campbell says.

James Marion, the deputy district attorney who coordinates criminal investigations as a member of CAST, says the program’s success is largely dependent on the child advocates who follow victims from waiting areas to interviews, medical exams and counseling sessions--wherever a child wants the comfort of their presence.

“This wouldn’t work without them,” Marion says. “They make the kids feel someone cares.”

About 80 volunteers spend four hours a week or more at the CAST complex on the second floor of Orangewood Children’s Home, a shelter where many of the sexual abuse victims needing protective custody end up.

The advocates greet the children as they arrive and spend most of their time with them in the waiting areas--one for young children, the other for teens--where careful efforts have been made to avoid an institutional atmosphere. The colors are soft and warm, and one room is full of toys for little ones, while the other is equipped with Nintendo games and videos for teens.

But the real warmth is furnished by the volunteers, whose role on the CAST team is special because they are there only to give--not to ask questions.

If a child wants to talk, however, they are ready to listen.

And they are trained to recognize signs of emotional trauma that other experts on the team need to know about. For example, one child drew a picture of a shark for Gillispie, then became hysterical when the volunteer suggested adding lines to show the motion of swimming.

“No, I can’t swim. I’m going to drown,” the child cried.

The incident worried Gillispie, so she alerted one of the CAST therapists who provide short-term counseling to help children through the investigation and court process. In therapy, it became clear that the child had been feeling helpless and depressed and needed some special attention.

Kay McKenzie, a Mission Viejo resident who has been a child advocate for about 1 1/2 years, said she is sometimes so affected by the pain she sees in abused children that she has a hard time letting go when it’s time to say goodby. She’d like to adopt them all to make sure they’ll never be hurt again.

The advocates are encouraged to seek some nurturing for themselves from CAST therapists after they’ve parted from a child with whom they formed a special bond or witnessed a particularly traumatic medical exam.

McKenzie sought that kind of support when she found herself in tears after standing by an autistic boy during a medical exam.

“I kept worrying that he was thinking we were torturing him,” she says. “I didn’t want him to be afraid, but he couldn’t understand what we were doing and I couldn’t get through to him.”

What keeps child advocates going in spite of such gut-wrenching moments is the awareness that they are able--even in a short time--to give a lot to children who have learned not to expect much of anyone.

Says McKenzie: “We give them some confidence and a sense of self-worth. They’re in a terrible situation, and it’s hard for them to talk. But when they’re here, they smile and play games. When something good happens around this bad thing, it helps a lot.”

Gillispie, who has been a CAST volunteer for two years, says the most important thing she does for the children is letting them know, when they do confide in her, that she believes everything they say.

After she was molested when she was a child, she tried to tell a number of adults what had happened but no one would listen, she says. The abuse started when she was 6, she says, and continued for about nine years.

She wants to help other victims “because there was no one there for me as a child,” she says.

But Gillispie had worked through the emotional fallout of her own abuse by the time she became a child advocate for CAST.

“I knew I was healed when I came here. You have to be to do this work,” she says.

Still, having been sexually abused herself gives her a special empathy with victims. Sometimes--especially after she’s had to hold a screaming, kicking child during a medical exam--she gets the shakes and starts crying after she leaves the room. But she’s able to put aside her personal feelings until the children’s needs have been met--perhaps, she says, “because in order to be a survivor you have to be tough.”

Gillispie says there are certain children with whom each volunteer becomes especially close.

“We all have a child we take home in our hearts and maybe even in our nightmares,” she says.

One boy who appeared to be suicidal when he was brought in for an interview became part of her nightmares--and the subject of one of her poems. When the 7-year-old arrived, he threw himself against the wall repeatedly, yelling, “I want my daddy! I want my daddy!” His daddy had molested him, but he still wanted to go home because, as Gillispie points out in her poem, “He feared the loss of family more than the abuse.”

The boy calmed down but never talked about his feelings with Gillispie. She knows she reached him at some level, however, because a week later when he came in for counseling, he ran into her arms as soon as he saw her.

She later wrote:

A small boy

deserted by his mother

was left in father’s care

. . . and violated

Until all that had been child

was consumed.

And all that remained

was powerless

to see the differences between

being loved and used.

This boy, Gillispie says, “probably will grow up never to trust anyone.”

But she learned to trust again. And she’s doing everything in her power to make sure other victims do, too.

“Trust Me”

I didn’t want to play his

game But he said “trust me . . . “ And shook my bones bruised my flesh made me feel bad So every time we played

the game I left myself And stood outside my body not seeing me--him, not feeling, it. Then some long time ago I forgot how to climb back inside how to feel anything, anything at all. So, I don’t hurt or feel bad or trust or love you--me--anyone Now you say “trust me,” and that you want to help How can I let you in

some place where I am not? --Marianne Gillispie