Why this Project?

Our group project is to raise awareness of the reality of child abuse right here in Utah. In fact, every 10 seconds, there is a new report of child abuse that has taken place somewhere in Utah. According to statistics from Prevent Child Abuse Utah, 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys experience some form of abide by the time that they are eighteen. Our hope is to raise awareness and then improve communication between parents, or caregivers  and children. The number one prevention strategy is for children to feel comfortable talking with their parents or caregiver. We want to help bridge that gap, and create comfortable dialogue on the part of both parent and child.

Problem Statement: (as of October 2, 2014)

Child sexual abuse takes place in Utah, yet parents continue to be unaware and unprepared to recognize the signs and symptoms of this abuse taking place. 

Members of our group, Abuse Awareness for Parents with Children, are Katie, Laurel, Diana, Ian, and Cameron. We met as a group yesterday to become better acquainted and discuss our ideas for direction and goals of our group. Everyone in our group was present for the group meeting. We will be working with Prevent Child Abuse Utah (PCAU), whose core values are to protect and value children, strengthen families, and engage communities. To get started, Katie will meet with Trina at PCAU to better define our group's role in creating a task force for PCAU. Our group will then meet again to discuss the meeting with Trina, and assign tasks to each group member. I am excited about this project because I love working with children and families, and protecting and valuing children, strengthening families, and engaging communities are all values that really resonate with me. - Diana


A few of the clients that I am working with at my practicum are adults who were abused as children or are children that have recently been abused.  I am hoping that I can learn a little bit more about childhood abuse for this project that I can use to assist my clients, as well as use the work with my clients to inform what is done with our project. - Ian

After discussing our plans the other day, I have thought of a few ideas of ways which we can get the word out on abuse. For one, we can reach out to local news media (sltrib, KSL, and Fox) as a possible means of bringing attention to the cause. By doing so, if we hypothetically had a large awareness event such as a 5k going on, we could easily advertise it through those news sources if they were interested. Another idea I had would be to help evoke intrinsic motivation within the community by spreading statistics specifically stating the prevalence of chid abuse within Utah, Salt Lake, Davis, and Weber counties. This could hopefully help people realize this is likely going on in their own neighborhoods. These are just some ideas I had to help brainstorm our intervention, and hopefully these can be of some help in addition to what we learn from PCAU. Looking forward to seeing you all on Thursday! - Cameron