People were able to place blue pinwheels in the lawn of the Kosciusko County Courthouse Friday during a ceremony held by CASA of Kosciusko County to bring awareness to child abuse prevention.
April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month.
Each year, 650,000 children in the U.S. are determined to have experienced abuse or neglect, said Erin Rowland Jones, executive director of CASA of Kosciusko County. Approximately 424,000 are in foster care “on any given day.” A child in foster on average will move to multiple homes and attend multiple school districts.
There are long-term effects to being in the juvenile system, Rowland Jones said. Children who are in the juvenile system are more likely to experience homelessness, face incarceration and unemployment. They are more likely to not graduate high school.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rowland Jones said children and families are isolated and under more financial and emotional stress, “which historically can fuel a rise in cases in child abuse and neglect,” she said.
Rowland Jones explained what CASA volunteers do. CASAs get to know children and the adults around them so they can best understand the situation and how to advocate for those children in the court and in the community. They come from every walk of life and range in age from 25 to 81 years of age. These volunteers are part of a national network of 93,300 volunteers who are doing this work.
Rowland Jones said CASA is always is need of more volunteers Rowland Jones recognized Judge Karen Springer, Judge Pro Tempore at Kosciusko Superior Court I, and Judge Karen McGrath, who was appointed to preside in Kosciusko County Superior Court I after the death of Judge David Cates. McGrath will start in mid-June. Superior Court I is where most of the child abuse cases go, Rowland Jones said.
Lindsey Castro, the local office director of the Department of Child Services, said her department helps identify and support protective factors for each child or family in the community. Some of those include nurturing and attachment between the child and parent, knowledge of parenting skills, social connections, concrete support for parents and social-emotional competence for children.
Those concepts can be built upon by some of the prevention agencies that are in the area, such as Head Start, Castro said, as well as connecting with the families and neighbors people come into contact with.
State Rep. Craig Snow said one of the committees he’s on is the Family, Children and Human Affairs Committee.
“And talk about awareness,” he said. “I live in a bubble, evidently, because there’s a lot of things that were happening.”
One of the statistics he shared was in 2019, 61 died in Indiana due to neglect or abuse, calling it “a sobering statistic,” Snow said. He said one child dying from it was too many.
As a committeeman, he’s given a book of what happened to all those children, Snow said, and every one of them could have been prevented.
He encouraged people to step up as a CASA volunteer.
Friday, people were given blue pinwheels before they walked around the courthouse. After people walked around the courthouse, they placed the pinwheels in the lawn.
Rowland Jones said there was large blue pinwheel, which was put in honor of Cates, who she said “left us too soon.”
In 2008, Prevent Child Abuse America introduced the blue pinwheel as the national symbol for child abuse prevention. These pinwheels represent a commitment to preventing child abuse and stand as a reminder of the happy childhoods and bright futures that all children deserve.
