The program itself is divided into four steps. The first is meeting with the administration, reviewing the material and explaining what will be said to the staff, parents and children. The focus then shifts to safe hiring policies, how to interview and reference check, environmental issues and the importance of not having areas that cannot be seen by others. The administration is informed that it has a responsibility to bring up issues of concern with a staff member. For example a principal has the right to say to a teacher, “I see you took Rafi somewhere in your car alone – why?” Each school will have its own rules. One school may never permit a teacher to take a child alone in a car and one may but only with permission. “Of course,” Debbie says, “we don’t want to take away the warmth of a close student-teacher relationship but it needs to be encouraged within the guidelines of appropriate behavior.”
After the administration is clear on the program, a satellite group will hold a two-hour intensive workshop with the school staff on what the signs of abuse are and how to handle disclosure. They will discuss why children naturally do not disclose and then review the laws of that particular state. “We explain to the teachers that they need to be professional and that means having boundaries and guidelines. We teach them how to avoid getting themselves into inappropriate situations, how keeping to the guidelines in our behavior and standards policy will protect them as well as the child.”
The next step is speaking to the parents. Magen Yeladim International does not believe in scare tactics, Debbie maintains. It’s about heightening awareness, not anxiety. They educate parents on what could happen, for instance, in a babysitting situation, in sleepaway camp, when boys go to the mikvah, even in their own homes, and then they provide the tools for prevention. They teach parents how to handle a child’s disclosure and most importantly, Debbie says, how to be the parent a child feels comfortable opening up to. “If you’re in the store buying a bathing suit,” Debbie explains, “that’s a perfect opportunity to discuss safety in camp when there are a lot of kids changing clothes, showering and sleeping in the same room. We teach parents to find windows of opportunity to talk about these issues in a non-threatening way. The most powerful tool a parent has,” Debbie emphasizes, “is being that safe parent your child can talk to.”
Debbie speaks about the breakthroughs that encourage her and her organization to continue this vital work. She said the night before Hurricane Sandy they held a parenting workshop in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Six hundred people attended. “They asked us to come back again the night after Hurricane Sandy,” she says. “Of course, they didn’t think that many people would come so they held the workshop in a small hall. Between 400 and 500 people showed up; people were lined up everywhere. And they wanted us to come back a third time!” Another time Magen Yeladim International did a workshop for fathers in Toronto. “The first evening,“ Debbie shares, “we had nine men. The second evening, we had 25 men, the third one was so packed, you couldn’t get in the room and they wouldn’t let us leave until 11:30 pm.”
She shares a story. “I spoke in a certain city one year before Chanukah, and immediately after Purim I received a call from a father. He told me that his wife had made him attend my workshop that winter against his will. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘she could make me go but she couldn’t make me listen.’ He sat in the back of the room with a book in front of his face and did not lift up his head once. Nevertheless, he confided to me, he did listen. Now he said he was calling to thank me. His 8-year-old son had been walking home from shul the previous Shabbos with a 15-year-old neighbor. The 15-year-old asked him to come into his basement with him and pull down his pants. The younger child said no and ran into his house yelling, ‘Mom, I have a ‘do tell’ and I need to talk you now!’ She immediately stopped what she was doing and went to a private room with him and he told her what happened. The father continued, ‘If you hadn’t come to our community and spoken to us on how to behave in such a case, we would’ve had a terrible situation on our hands. Thank you for saving us!’”