An Advocate in Words and Deeds

As a court-appointed special advocate for the Child Abuse Services Team, Marianne Gillispie has seen the worst of what people are capable of doing to children.

There was the 13-month-old sexual assault victim whose injuries included five broken bones. And the 15-year-old girl whose aunt witnessed the girl’s rape and did nothing to stop it. And the 7-year-old boy who was being molested by both his father and his uncle. And the two 13-year-old girls who were abducted off the street, gang raped and dumped back on the street.

“Sometimes,” Gillispie says, “I feel like running. Sometimes I feel like crying, and all of these are inappropriate around kids. So you cry in the car on the way home, or you beat the steering wheel a few times.”

Or, in Gillispie’s case, you write a poem about it.

“Truth of the Day: The Haunting Truth of Child Sexual Abuse” is Gillispie’s second book of poems dealing with the subject.

A collection of 24 poems, the new book deals with the children and the team of people they encounter as they go through the process--police officers, social workers, therapists, medical personnel, deputy district attorneys and volunteer advocates such as Gillispie.

“What inspires me mostly is that these children don’t always have somebody at home looking after them,” says Gillispie, 49, the mother of two grown children. “Parents will come and say, ‘Well, she’s just exaggerating,’ or they’re protecting the wrong person. Parents still sometimes think the kids lie about the abuse.

“They just don’t want to believe it can happen.”

Gillispie’s first book dealing with child sexual abuse, “Courage, Wisdom and Pieces of Heart,” was published in 1991. The poems in that one dealt with aspects of childhood molestation such as when adults blame alcohol for their abusive actions and the devastation it causes.

Superior Court Commissioner Frank Gould, then assigned to Juvenile Court, was so moved by Gillispie’s poems that he put up the money to have 1,000 copies of the first book printed.

Proceeds from the first book were placed in a Child Abuse Services Team (CAST) publications fund, which has provided the $4,000 to print 1,000 copies of Gillispie’s new book.

Gould remains a big fan of both Gillispie and her poems.

“Her poems have a very powerful meaning and message,” he says. “Reading her poetry, you can see the messages in there as to how a child who has been traumatized--or any person who has been traumatized or molested by a trusted member of the family such as a parent--is crying out for help.”

Gould says one poem in the new book, “Coyote Knows,” talks about someone being preyed upon in the night, the time when most molestations occur.

“It’s just indicative of everything that person is going through,” he says.

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Gillispie has been writing poetry since she was 10.

“They were more kid poems,” she says--poems about flowers and trees. But when she was 14, her poetry took on a darker edge.

“Like the poems in my first book,” she says, “they were blacker poems because I was working on resolving issues in my head.”

Those issues, she says, involved her being repeatedly sexually abused by a family member between the time she was 6 and 16.

Gillispie, who moved out of the house when she turned 18, continued to write poems throughout her marriage to her husband, John, and the rearing of her son and daughter.

In 1989, the year she became one of the first special advocates for the newly formed Child Abuse Services Team, she signed up for her first poetry-writing class at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana.

Her teacher, poet Lee Mallory, still serves as her editor.

Mallory remembers instructing his class to write from the “basis of experience.” When Gillispie first read her poems in class, he says, “People were just awe-struck at her candor.

“She takes subject matter that others would turn their backs on and raises it to the level of art and poetic craft. Poetry is a tough sell anyway, let alone when you use poetry to expose a grievous problem like child abuse, but she makes it work.”

Gillispie, of Orange, volunteers at CAST one afternoon a week and is on call the rest of the week.

Like all CAST special advocates, who take an oath of confidentiality, she has been sworn in by the court to look after the children’s best interests during the investigation process.

“Sometimes it entails straight baby-sitting,” she says of the younger children. She prefers working with teenagers and finds that her age is an advantage because “I’m not a little kid trying to give them sympathy.

“I like working with the teenagers best because sometimes they get the least amount of sympathy from outside people.”

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Gillispie doesn’t interview the children who are brought into the CAST office in Orange. There are trained social workers for that.

“But sometimes I’m called in to talk to them because I work well with them,” she says. “Sometimes I go to the medical examination with them, especially on a rape exam, and help them through it.”

When she accompanies a younger child into the medical exam, she’ll often sing them nursery rhymes.

“We’ll do anything to help distract them if it’s a young child,” she says. “If it’s an older child, I just let them squeeze my hand. I tell them, ‘This is a very bad, terrible day, but tomorrow will be better,’ and I think that is the truth.”

Not that she’s been able to put her own experience as a victim of child sexual abuse completely behind her.

“It’s always there,” she says, “but I’ve been married almost 32 years to a really great guy. I have a lot of good friends and a lot of support, and I talk about it.”

And she writes about it.

With her second book of poems, Gillispie says, “I decided to take people through all the elements of what makes up the team and what goes on. But more than anything, I want to make the children real to them so that they’re not a statistic, that they’re a real little person.”

Since joining CAST nearly eight years ago, Gillispie has watched only two interviews with young victims. “I take them home enough without watching the interviews,” she says.

One interview she observed through a two-way mirror involved a 4-year-old Santa Ana girl.

Though interview specialists normally conduct the interviews, the girl became so attached to the beat cop who brought her in that she wanted only him in the room with her.

“So he talked to her,” Gillispie recalls. “But when he asked her if her father had hit her or threatened her--and her father was the perpetrator--she dropped her head and said, ‘No . . . but I let him do it anyway.’

“That was the most powerful thing I’d ever seen. A little 4-year-old with this terrible shame for something her father did.”

The girl is in Gillispie’s book, in a poem titled “Thursday’s Children.”

Gillispie finds that she’s inspired to pick up her pen at odd moments--times “when something really powerful hits me.”

Fellow advocates occasionally ask her to write about a sexually abused child they have encountered. But Gillispie says she can’t write about a child she knows only through someone else’s words.

But if she has a child cry in her arms. Or if a child holds her hand during a medical exam. Or if she sees a child drop her head in shame, she says, “It’s a poem that writes itself.”

* “Truth of the Day: The Haunting Legacy of Child Sexual Abuse” is available, for a donation of $10, through the Child Abuse Services Team. Information: (714) 935-6390.