By NATE KING
Salina Post
Located in the Donna Vanier Children's complex at the corner of E. Ash Street and N. Oakdale Avenue is the Child Advocacy and Parental Services organization, commonly referred to as CAPS. This non-profit 501-c3 organization has been part of the Salina community for nearly 50 years.
Salina Post sat down with the organization's executive director, Lori Blake, to learn more about CAPS and how this grassroots lead organization became a pioneer in Kansas child wellbeing services.
What is CAPS and how did it come to be?
In 1978, Salinans Wanda Macy and Ruby Reece learned that 10 children in their community had died as a result of child abuse. As a nurse in the mother-baby unit at the hospital, and as a mother, Macy felt she had to do something.
"She was part time because she had small children of her own so she picked up an extra shift at the hospital and had a hotline, telephone number installed in her kitchen," Blake said.
At the time there wasn't a statewide reporting system in place for victims or members of the community to report child abuse. Macy knew something needed to be done.
"They started promoting that telephone number across the community as a place where parents could call for information and support when they were feeling stress," Blake said. "What came of that were a couple of things. It reinforced the concept that parents didn't have the support they needed, and they didn't have the information that they needed when they felt stress. We know based on research that stress is the number one reason child abuse happens."
The phone number Macy and Reece created is still the phone number used to call CAPS for help. These two women, and the volunteers they organized, recognized that without education, advocacy and support, parents would resort to raising their families the way they had been raised themselves, perpetuating cycles of abuse normalized by their own family dynamics. Macy and Reece didn’t just acknowledge there was a problem; they took responsibility for their fellow citizens.
"Wanda and Ruby assembled a team of volunteers that for the next 11 years, provided free childcare to families," Blake said. "Initially it literally was volunteers driving to these families homes, and picking these children up and providing those parents with a break. But it turned into, 'Let's find a place that we can use and provide drop in childcare," said Blake.
For several years, the location Macy and Reece utilized to provide childcare was First United Methodist Church in Salina, 122 N. Eighth Street. As word go out in the community, the program grew and became an official 501-C3 known as "Morning Out for Moms," which grew into CAPS' weekly respite care.
Parents of children ages 1 to 6 years and who are not enrolled in kindergarten may use one session each week. Three-to-four-hour morning or afternoon sessions are available, Monday through Friday. The trained and friendly staff at CAPS read, play games, and engage in fun learning activities while parents attend appointments, run errands, or simply take a break.
As the phone number connected more parents to Macy and Reece, it became clear that more needed to be done to support families, outside of just childcare.
"There were a lot of gaps because we're still talking, it's the early '80s and these are all volunteers who are trying to dance as best as they can while raising their own families and working," Blake said. "These telephone calls, a lot of times would result in Wanda reaching out to Social Rehabilitation Services, which is now the Department for Children and Families (DCF) where she established a great relationship with a man named Ted Minton."
Minton at the time was the chief of social services and had heard about the kinds of calls that Macy and Reece received relating to abuse and he thought that SRS resources could respond.
"There was no place at that time either for families or anyone in the community to report when child abuse was happening," Blake said. "That was the other thing that came out of making that hotline phone number known in our community as people started using that number for that purpose and it eventually turned into a regional hotline system that the state and DCF implemented and developed."
Another social services gap that CAPS was able to bridge was the need for parental education classes - thanks to the help of Minton's wife, Margaret.
"Ted's wife, Marge, had retired from her professional social work career and saw an opportunity. At that time in the early '90s it was kind of like a Big Brothers, Big Sisters except for families," Blake said. "The idea was, let's pair up families that have been successful in raising their children, to keep them safe and healthy, contributing adults into society. Let's pair them up with families who have needs."
That program developed into the family mentoring and support program, which is still being offered to families today. During its first years, CAPS didn't have great sources of funding. Margaret as a part-time licensed social worker was the only person in the organization being paid.
"Prior to when I got here, we started getting some grant funding which turned into paid professional support," Blake said. "CAPS started hiring social workers and family support-- people that have training specifically in meeting the needs of children and families. It has evolved now into once a week 60 to 90 minute session. We serve anybody that walks through our door, there's no income guidelines, there's no racial definition, there's no at risk definition. If somebody walks through the door and they want the support, we will find a way to make that happen. And that is not universally the case elsewhere."
In 1992, the acronym CAPS still stood for Chill Abuse Prevention Services, which dates back to the phone hotline that Macy and Reece established. In 2006, CAPS made a commitment to do more to combat child abuse in the community. CAPS officially became Child Advocacy and Parental Services. By changing their name, CAPS was able to position themselves to more proactively respond to child abuse.
"In 2006, we made a commitment to hopping into more of the intervention and prevention services," Blake said "Family mentoring certainly provides intervention support for families in crisis, but to actually be supporting victims of child abuse, we really weren't targeting into that audience outside of these mentoring cases that would come to us after the abuse."
CAPS in the early 2000s, started looking at why sexual abuse cases weren't being prosecuted in Salina. What they discovered was that there wasn't a sexual assault nurse examining team in the region. Sexual assault victims were being sent to either Topeka or Wichita to have those medical examinations completed.
"Imagine if you've gone through an experience like that, driving an hour and a half and maybe longer in that day, because the speed limit was lower, to run to a place that you're not familiar with by yourself," Blake said.
That all changed in 2002 when Salina Regional Health Center took a leap of faith and made the commitment to provide the north-central Kansas region with a sexual assault response team (SART). This team of forensic evidence detectives partners with local law enforcement to establish a unified and efficient response when a victim comes forward with testimony of sexual assault.
In the early 2000s, CAPS became familiar with national research focused on how community resource organizations could better serve sexual assault victims, both children and adults--and they learned about child advocacy center (CAC) model.
"Most people when they hear child advocacy center and they think, 'Oh, that's a great place, That's the place where people care about kids, But child advocacy centers actually are nationally accredited centers that agree upon using this model of a community response to child abuse," Blake said.
Without a CAC, a child may end up having to tell the worst story of his or her life over and over again, to doctors, cops, lawyers, therapists, investigators, judges, and others. They may have to talk about that traumatic experience in a police station where they think they might be in trouble, or may be asked the wrong questions by a well-meaning teacher or other adult that could hurt the case against the abuser.
When police or child protective services believe a child may be experiencing abuse, the child is brought to the CAC—a safe, child-focused environment—by a caregiver or other “safe” adult. At the CAC, the child tells their story once to a trained interviewer who knows the right questions to ask in a way that does not retraumatize the child.
A team that includes medical professionals, law enforcement, mental health, prosecution, child protective services, victim advocacy, and other professionals make decisions together about how to help the child based on the interview. CACs offer therapy and medical exams, plus courtroom preparation, victim advocacy, case management, and other services. This is called the multidisciplinary team (MDT) response and is a core part of the work of CACs.
"What we know about brains that have experienced trauma is they don't remember things in the same way, and they remember things differently at different times as they continue to process what's happened to them," Blake said. "So you can imagine from a prosecutor's, standpoint, that's a nightmare to prosecute a case like that. So we, we record that interview, and all of those team members are at the table to hear the interview one time, and it's recorded, and then it's turned over to prosecution. That interview is conducted here at the CAPS CAC."
Blake also spoke about the interdepartmental and regional cooperation that is necessary to insure that no children fall through the cracks or fail to have their testimony heard.
"We at CAPS have signed protocols to work with all of our local law enforcement officers, with the Department for Children and Families who are investigating these cases, with the hospital's sexual assault response team, with trauma focused therapists to help them recover from these experiences, the county prosecutor's office that are prosecuting the cases," Blake said. "We have a professional team of victim advocates that walk with the children and the families through those experiences, including the court cases. Those six disciplines come together every month to review the cases that are taking place in our community, make sure that kids are their needs are being met, and that they're not falling through the cracks."
CAPS strives to educate parents, nurture appropriate child development through loving interactions and to advocate for children who are victims of abuse and to support families in crises. These services provide 24-hour on-call counseling and referral to therapy; weekly in-home, case management and parenting education; and annual school-based programs to empower kids to protect their bodies and to stand up for each other when witnessing peer to peer abuse.
"Now we have research that that validates all our practices, and as you leave here you will see a little saying on the wall out there by Margaret Meade," Blake said. "'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.'"