One in Ten

Latest Episodes:

Addressing the Doctor Deficit Mar 25, 2021

Show notes

Sometimes we forget that the medical response to child abuse as a discipline developed over our lifetime, and what was nascent 30 years ago is now a board specialty, like cardiology or oncology. For all the gains we’ve made in research and practice, though, there are still tremendous challenges in ensuring that all children who’ve been abused have access to medical care. Things like: Why is there such a scarcity of child abuse pediatricians? What can we do to increase the number of physicians willing to care for abused children as a part of their practice? And how can we ensure that abused children—no matter where they live in the U.S.—get the care they need to heal and thrive? In today’s episode, “Addressing the Doctor Deficit,” we speak with a pioneer in the field: Dr. Suzanne Starling, a renowned medical expert and child abuse pediatrician.

Topics in this episode:

Accidentally becoming a child abuse pediatrician (1:16)
Fewer than 400: A rare specialty (6:18)
Barriers to kids getting medical exams (12:27)
Family advocates taking the lead (17:30)
How public policy can help (23:12)
Effect of the pandemic (25:28)
What’s next in the field? (31:50)
Unintended consequences (36:14)
How to get more people involved (41:17)

Links:

Suzanne Starling, M.D., is a board-certified child abuse pediatrician who serves as medical director and associate center director of the Chadwick Center for Children and Families at Rady Children’s Hospital - San Diego and clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of California San Diego

American Board of Pediatrics

Sexual assault nurse examiners (SANE) are registered nurses with specialized training in medical forensic care of patients who have experienced sexual assault or abuse

To learn more about teleforensic interviewing, listen to “The Intersection of Technology and Forensic Interviewing” with Debra Poole, Ph.D., and Jason Dickinson, Ph.D. (May 28, 2020)

To learn more about the impact of the pandemic on mental health and advice on how to cope, listen to:

“We’re Not All Having the Same Pandemic,” with Rabah Kamal and Carole Campbell Swiecicki, Ph.D. (June 11, 2020)

“Can a Pandemic Have a Silver Lining?” with Dr. Danielle Roubinov of the University of California (September 10, 2020)

For more information about National Children’s Alliance and the work of Children’s Advocacy Centers, visit our website at nationalchildrensalliance.org. And join us on Facebook at One in Ten podcast or email us at oneinten@nca-online.org.

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Engaging the Hope Within Us, an Interview with Deondra and Gregory Brown Mar 11, 2021

Show notes

On today’s episode, “Engaging the Hope Within Us,” our guests are award-winning classical pianists and siblings Gregory and Deondra Brown of The 5 Browns. When we think of classical music, we often think only of the beauty of it, not also of the pain and vulnerability that it can express and evoke. The 5 Browns shook perceptions of the classical music world when they revealed that all three sisters had been sexually abused as children and sought justice in their case. This brave act shattered stereotypes and elevated the issue of child sexual abuse in an audience where it had previously been little discussed. Our conversation today touches some core questions. How does music connect us to our own humanity? How can music help heal survivors in broken places that nothing else seems to reach? And how does the love and supportive family, as allies, help survivors thrive?

Topics in this episode:

The 5 Browns (1:29)
Deciding to disclose (4:34)
Advice for allies and survivors (8:04)
The power and benefit of music (21:45)
The Little Tin Box and supporting CACs/CJCs (33:44)
Learn more about our work (48:28)

Links:

The 5 Browns

The Little Tin Box

Tracey Tabet is the administrator for the Utah Children’s Justice Center (CJC) Program, where she oversees the state’s Children’s Justice Centers and serves as the director of the Utah Chapter of NCA

Children’s Advocacy Center (CAC) is the term we use at the national level, but some states use Children’s Justice Center (CJC)

For more information about National Children’s Alliance and the work of Children’s Advocacy Centers, For more information about National Children’s Alliance and the work of Children’s Advocacy Centers, visit our website at nationalchildrensalliance.org. And join us on Facebook at One in Ten podcast or email us at oneinten@nca-online.org.

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Neglect and the Ecosystem of Abuse Feb 18, 2021

Show notes

In today’s episode, we talk with Paul DiLorenzo, who’s worked in every aspect of the child welfare system over the past 40 years—as a writer, as a consultant, and as a case worker. This varied experience gives him a wealth of knowledge and information and truly unique insight into our field. One of his key insights has been around the relationship between chronic neglect and child sexual abuse. Now if you’ve been working in the child protection field for a while, you often think about it—yes, that people are polyvictimized, or maybe victimized in more than one way. But have you thought deeply about the fact that chronic neglect may create the environment in which child sexual abuse can thrive?

DiLorenzo asks the question about how we might interrupt the cycle of generational abuse by stopping the cycle of chronic neglect. What prevents us from doing this right now? Is part of it that as child abuse professionals, we’ve grown cynical and given up on some families entirely as they cycle back through the system? What would it really mean if we truly believed in the power of redemption and that even the most struggling families could change? Join us in this thoughtful conversation about engaging families right where they are and helping them invest in their own healing.

Topics in this episode:

Recurrence and revictimization (1:42)
What increases the risk (7:26)
Key points for prevention and intervention (14:49)
Own the outcome (25:39)
What's not working (31:46)
Learn more about NCA and CACs (39:20)

Links:

Abbreviations used in this conversation: CAC means Children’s Advocacy Center; MDT is multidisciplinary team; CPS is child protective services
Paul DiLorenzo, ACSW, MLSP, interim executive director, Philadelphia Children’s Alliance
Child Sexual Abuse Recurrence report, Philadelphia Children’s Alliance and Temple University (December 2020)
Julia Kobulsky, Ph.D., and Bernie Newman, Ph.D., Temple University School of Social Work

Engaging and Healing Families webinar, Philadelphia Children’s Alliance (February 17, 2021)

Casey Family Programs

National Children’s Advocacy Center (NCAC) in Huntsville, Alabama, was the first CAC

Humans of New York

Vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress (TEND definitions)

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An Interview with Filmmaker Sasha Joseph Neulinger Jan 29, 2021

Show notes

On today’s episode, we talk with Sasha Neulinger, director and producer of the award-winning documentary, Rewind, a film about his survival of abuse. Now for those listeners who attended our conference and watch party, you already know his powerful film. But for those who might be new to Sasha and his work, run, don’t walk, to your Amazon Prime account and queue up this great film.

Now, some of you might be thinking, “After a day of dealing with child abuse, why would I want to watch the film and listen to this episode?” In one single word: Hope. What makes Sasha’s account so unique are really two things. One, he didn’t have to rely on his memory alone to reflect on his childhood. He had 200 hours of film of his everyday life as a child and could watch as an adult and dissect how and when his abuse impacted his life. And two, he filmed his own reckoning with his past. With all the pain, yes, but also with all the resilience and hope that came with understanding and loving his inner child. What Sasha ultimately captured was radical self-acceptance and hope.

In this episode, we explore that journey—both the filmmaker’s journey and Sasha’s inner journey to healing and hope. Take a listen.

Topics in this episode:

Unresolved trauma: Making the film (1:39)
Facing your fears (7:17)
What audiences need (15:35)
Call to action (25:29)
Helping adult survivors (30:15)
What’s next for Sasha (40:17)

Links:

Sasha Joseph Neulinger, director and producer of critically acclaimed documentary Rewind.
Amazon Prime members can stream Rewind for free. It’s also available on AppleTV, iTunes, and Google Play, and it aired on Independent Lens on PBS.

Voice for the Kids

Statute of limitations reform (childusa.org resource)

National statistics on child abuse

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Is Child Sexual Abuse Inevitable? Jan 07, 2021

Show notes

Years ago, Elizabeth Letourneau had a key insight: What if instead of focusing exclusively on victims and parents for child sexual abuse prevention, we really turned to the source of the problem: the person at risk of sexually abusing a child?

Now, we really don’t like to talk about, or even think about, the fact that some youth and some adults are sexually attracted to children. But what if we could teach middle schoolers about sexual boundaries and about consent before they ever made a misstep? And what if those youth and adults struggling with the shame of an unwanted sexual attraction to children had a way to get help before they ever harmed a child? And what if we lifted the weight so many victims feel about their responsibility to somehow keep themselves safe and placed this responsibility instead squarely on the shoulders of those who might otherwise harm them?

Topics in this episode:

Help Wanted prevention program (1:40)
Google and Facebook get involved (7:24)
Middle-school intervention (15:27)
Online programs in the future? (23:15)
Which prevention programs work? (24:47)
Best practices for youth-serving organizations (28:01)
What do we need next? (34:15)
Federal focus needed (37:51)
Contact Congress about funding research (44:14)

Links:
Elizabeth Letourneau, Ph.D., director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Help Wanted

Prevention Project Dunkelfeld

Stop It Now! USA

CDC

Responsible Behavior with Younger Children

Shifting Boundaries

National Center for Child Traumatic Stress

Committee for Children

U.S. Center for SafeSport

Prevent Child Abuse America

Australian Royal Commission

Commit to Kids

Bloomberg American Health Initiative website, framework and leadership desk guide

We interview Dr. Letourneau previously in “Child Abuse as a Public Health Issue” (aired 5/2/19)

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Centering Survivors in the Law, Criminal Justice Crystal Ball, Part 3 Dec 10, 2020

Show notes

In our season-ending episode, we look at the wave of statute of limitation (SOL) reform that has swept our country, giving survivors of child sexual abuse—who may take years to fully process and disclose what happened to them—more time to seek justice. But the reform also poses challenges for prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and professionals who work with victims of child abuse. How do we properly maintain evidence in perpetuity? What resources do we need to really store this evidence—both physical and digital—and support survivors throughout their lifetimes? In this conversation with Nelson Bunn, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, we discuss how to meet the practical demands of retaining evidence and prosecuting older cases while keeping survivors centered at the heart of our work and at the heart of reform.

This is the last episode of Season 2 for One in Ten. We’ll be back in early January with a fascinating conversation about a different approach to preventing child sexual abuse.

Topics in this episode:

Benefits and challenges of SOL reform (2:04)
Preserving evidence (7:37)
Digital evidence (11:31)
Prosecuting the backlog (15:29)
Advice for CACs (18:38)
Learn more about NCA and CACs (22:24)

Links:

Nelson Bunn, executive director, National District Attorneys Association (NDAA)

childusa.org/law has information on child protection laws across the United States

Justice Served Act of 2018 amended the DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act of 2000 to add, as a purpose area under the Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant Program, increasing the capacity of prosecutors to address the backlog of violent crime cases involving suspects identified through DNA evidence. Debbie Smith is a survivor of sexual assault. The DNA evidence from her forensic exam afterward went unanalyzed for more than five years.

Listen to the rest of the Criminal Justice Crystal Ball Series:

Part 1: “The Future of Prosecution” with Nelson Bunn (aired 11/5/2020)
Part 2: “What’s Past Is Prologue” with Brad Russ (aired 11/19/2020)

You may also enjoy “Radically Vulnerable: Achieving Justice for Survivors” with Prof. Marci Hamilton (aired 9/30/2019)

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What's Past Is Prologue: Criminal Justice Crystal Ball Series, Part 2 Nov 19, 2020

Show notes

It was after midnight one night in 1983 when young police detective Brad Russ heard the knock on his front door that would transform his career. A 16-year-old girl named Kathy had run through a driving rainstorm to reach the one person in her neighborhood she thought might help her. Russ had never investigated child abuse before, and overnight he got a crash-course in the disjointed way the system handled—or didn’t handle—such cases. It launched him on a lifelong mission to improve his own community’s response to abuse and made him a champion of Children’s Advocacy Centers (CACs) and the multidisciplinary team (MDT) model.

Fast forward to today, with communities across the United States confronting problems with our justice system and police-community relations. In part two of our Criminal Justice Crystal Ball Series, “What’s Past Is Prologue,” we talked with Russ about his own experience with systemic reform. What can we learn from the past? How might deep partnerships between the police, MDT members, and CACs set an example and provide a path forward in these community conversations? How can meaningful collaboration and trust form the glue that keeps it all together?

Topics in this episode:

The past: A siloed approach to child abuse cases (1:53)
Common issues in abuse investigations (11:26)
Collaboration is difficult and necessary (21:14)
How to make things happen (32:20)
Our next episode (42:39)

Links:

Brad Russ, former police chief of the Portsmouth, N.H., Police Department, is executive director of the National Criminal Justice Training Center of Fox Valley Technical College

Abbreviations used in this interview: CPS (child protective services); CACs (Children’s Advocacy Centers); DCYF (New Hampshire’s name for CPS, the Division of Children, Youth, and Families); MDT (multidisciplinary team); OJJDP (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention)

Seacoast Mental Health Center

Bureau of Justice Statistics

Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program

CACs mentioned: Colorado Springs, Colo.; Dallas; Huntsville, Ala.; Rockingham County (Portsmouth), N.H.

During his conversation with us, Brad Russ credited a number of people he worked with over the course of his career. Some of the names were edited out when we trimmed the interview. The full list of people mentioned: Joy Barrett, Bill Black, Ed Garone, Wendy Gladstone, Brian Killacky, Ron Laney, Sandy Matheson, Marci Morris, Bill “Mort” Mortimer, Jim Reams, and Kay Wagner.

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The Future of Prosecution: Criminal Justice Crystal Ball Series, Part 1 Nov 05, 2020

Show notes

In the midst of a national debate about criminal justice reform, what’s the role of the prosecutor? And how do we transform the system while still centering victims? We spoke to Nelson Bunn, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA), about the unique role of prosecutors in leading systemic change. In a time of anxiety in the community about the relationship with law enforcement and with the criminal justice system overall, trust, accountability, and transparency are vitally important. And so are victims—we have to make sure they’re taken care of as well.

This episode is the first in a three part series on criminal justice reform: Criminal Justice Crystal Ball. How might the justice system look different moving forward? Let’s find out.

Topics in this episode:

Prosecutors’ perspective on criminal justice reform (2:11)
A shift in thinking over time (6:20)
Transparency, accountability, and trust (11:25)
Collaboration; the CAC model (17:09)
The voice of the victim (21:05)
Our next episode (23:32)

Links:

Nelson Bunn, is executive director of the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA)

First Step Act of 2018 (and the NDAA press release about it)

Commonswealth’s Attorney Nancy G. Parr is the current president of NDAA

Prison Fellowship website has a video on Why Pell Grants Matter

The Children’s Advocacy Center (CAC) model and multidisciplinary teams (MDTs)

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Is Abuse Contagious? Oct 08, 2020

Show notes

In “Is Abuse Contagious?” we sit down for a conversation with a guest who does fascinating work—Dyann Daley of Predict Align Prevent. As a pediatric anesthesiologist, Dr. Daley was driven by the sight of little kids fighting for their lives in the emergency room because they had been abused. She started a nonprofit that uses existing data to find neighborhoods that are hot spots for abuse—including some places where folks say, “Oh, not, that’s not a problem on this side of town.” How can a family’s environment raise the risk of abuse? And what can we do to get abuse prevention services to the neighborhoods where they’re needed the most?

In this episode:

Children 0-3 most at risk of dying from abuse (1:45)
Environment influences behavior: A place-based approach to prevention (4:28)
The Predict Align Prevent model (11:53)
Office of Prevention and targeted universalism (16:50)
Protecting kids to death (30:31)
What the critics say (42:05)
There is no evil overlord hoarding data (47:35)
What can people do? (51:49)

Links:

Dyann Daley, MD, is a pediatric anesthesiologist and the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Predict Align Prevent (PAP)

Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities

The Richmond, Va., report; an ethical evaluation of the PAP program; and other resources are available online at predict-align-prevent.org/resources

Gary Slutkin, MD, former head of the World Health Organization’s Intervention Development Unit, founded Cure Violence (cvg.org)

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)

Nurse-Family Partnership

Casey Family Programs

Related episode of One in Ten: “Prediction as Prevention” with Emily Putnam-Hornstein, Ph.D., aired on August 15, 2019

The Leadership Conference mentioned is our annual conference

For more information about National Children’s Alliance and the work of Children’s Advocacy Centers, visit nationalchildrensalliance.org. And join us on Facebook at One in Ten podcast or email us at oneinten@nca-online.org.

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Did you like this episode? Please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.

Can a Pandemic Have a Silver Lining? Sep 10, 2020

Show notes

In “Can a Pandemic Have a Silver Lining?”, we invite Dr. Danielle Roubinov of the University of California to discuss a “research manifesto” letter she and her colleagues published in JAMA Pediatrics in August. Even as a novel coronavirus has upended our world, leading to new public health and safety guidelines that are playing hob with many research projects, it is also fostering innovation. The result has, in some ways, catalyzed research into early childhood adversity.

COVID-19 has also ratcheted up the pressure on parents. Dr. Roubinov has a hopeful message for them, too: Even small positive experiences, and having a strong relationship with a caring adult, can help a child weather adversity.

In this episode:

The intersection of childhood adversity and the pandemic (1:32)
Why we focus on the negative (4:49)
Concerns about disparities and about parents’ mental health (9:51)
The absence of a negative is not always a positive (14:12)
Polystrengths, and the importance of caregivers (16:48)
ABC intervention: Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (27:15)
An open letter to policymakers (35:35)
A message for parents (37:52)

Links:

Danielle Roubinov, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco

“How a Pandemic Could Advance the Science of Early Adversity.” JAMA Pediatrics. 2020 Jul 27. Roubinov D, Bush NR, Boyce WT. PMID: 32716499.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)

“Greater Than the Sum—Multiple Adversities in Children’s Lives,” One in Ten interview with Sherry Hamby, Ph.D., originally aired on February 14 (as “Mending the Tears of Violence”). Rebroadcast on August 6, 2020

Ann S. Masten Ph.D., Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development

Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC intervention) was developed by Mary Dozier, Ph.D., at the University of Delaware

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