S.F. Helps Children Deal With Fallout From Violence

They are the tiny witnesses to a violent society, the innocent bystanders who can go unnoticed. They are the little girl huddled in a corner while dad batters mom or the 4-year-old boy who stumbles on the grisly aftermath of a gangland shooting.

All too often they are left to make sense of it on their own.

Authorities in San Francisco have launched an effort to better salve the psychological wounds inflicted on small children by the epidemic of violence at home and in the streets.

The city is one of nine in the nation, and the only one in California, that recently received grants under the federal Safe Start Initiative to help young children cope after witnessing family and community violence.

San Francisco, which competed with 208 other cities for the grants, is in line to receive about $3 million to finance its efforts over the next five years.

Experts say that children exposed to violent acts at a very young age, whether as victims or witnesses, are more likely to become troubled and abusive adults. They also suffer more frequent problems as they grow.

Traumatized children are twice as likely to suffer clinically significant problems, which can range from destructive behavior to racking anxiety. School performance can be affected and antisocial behavior fueled.

“We used to think we needed to get to these kids by 14 or so,” said Deborah Alvarez-Rodriguez, director of San Francisco’s Department for Children, Youth and Their Families. “The truth is, we need to be helping them by age 2 or 3.”

Currently, intervention is piecemeal at best, dependent on the persistence of individual social service workers, police and court officials as they come upon young witnesses to violence.

Sometimes a child will get help. But often they don’t, as law officers and others focus instead on the needs of a battered spouse or other adult victim.

“I’ve seen many police reports where the presence of children wasn’t even noted,” said Patricia Van Horn, an assistant clinical professor at UC San Francisco’s Child Trauma Research Project, which is helping shepherd the local Safe Start program. “No one was thinking of the children.”

Alvarez-Rodriguez said the city’s bid appealed to officials at the U.S. Justice Department, which oversees the program, because more than two dozen city and community agencies had committed to the effort.

Among those involved are police, prosecutors, court officials, probation officers, health workers and a variety of community organizations.

In addition, she said, San Francisco is one of the few cities that already has developed an extensive network of child-care workers, and it plans to train them in ways to spot and help children troubled by violence. Safe Start focuses on children up to age 6.

Van Horn said the program’s emphasis will be to boost coordination among a wide range of organizations--hospitals, law enforcement agencies and shelters for battered women--that come in contact with children after violent acts.

In San Francisco, many of the programs that can aid the young are already in place. Therapy, for instance, is available through the city’s health services department and other programs. But many children are never steered there.

One idea being weighed by Safe Start organizers is establishing a family violence court, where a single judge would mete out punishment but also would oversee an entire family’s recovery from the trauma of spousal abuse. All the agencies needed to help could be brought together in one place.

Van Horn said they also want to develop a data warehouse to keep better statistical track of the nature of violence affecting children. A similar program in Boston found that four of five cases involve children’s reacting to domestic violence.

Home visitation efforts by health and human services workers would probably be increased under the program. Organizers also envision training efforts for police, firefighters, the city’s 3,500 licensed child-care workers and others who come in regular contact with troubled children.

“We have to train those adults,” said Alvarez-Rodriguez, “so they understand what they’re seeing.”

The Safe Start effort is part of a program launched in 1998 by President Clinton, based in part on a similar project developed by Yale University and New Haven, Conn., police. “We want to put their childhoods on a better trajectory,” Van Horn said. “It can last a lifetime.”