“Many families either are estranged from their family, or their family lives in a totally different area,” Conley says. “Neighbors tend not to know neighbors anymore.”
Lingering Wounds
In the past year in Spokane, downtown businesses have bemoaned the waves of local street youth who loiter, vandalize, smoke and drive away customers. But Bridget Cannon, youth services director for Volunteers of America, knows what some of them have been through. They’ve walked through the door of Crosswalk, a shelter and drop-in center for homeless youth. She’s blown away by how these kids have dealt with so much, but are still alive, standing and seeking a better life. It inspires her.
"Stress comes out
in some ugly ways sometimes on kids." When a kid sleeps at the Crosswalk shelter, they’re asked about their adverse experiences. Physical abuse is the most common. But Cannon knows that many who have been through horrible experiences don’t admit to anything, especially to someone legally bound to report any abuse. “This girl, her mom was the first one to show her how to shoot up heroin when she was 12. And she’d been sexually abused by her uncle,” Cannon says. “But she didn’t report any of that on her intake.” Cannon would love for these kids to get counseling, but many don’t want to go. “Anytime they may have asked for help in the past, they may have been smacked upside the head,” she says. Once a child is abused, there are few good options. Leave them with their ...continued on next page
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THE SHOELESS HORSE OFFERS CUSTOM CRAFTED HORSESHOE ART, WESTERN DECOR MADE FROM RECYCLED HORSESHOES & HAND CARVED DUCKS BY MIKE MARSH. WE ALSO SELL FRESH CUT FLOWERS FOR PLANT WORLD. CUSTOM ORDERS ARE ACCEPTED.
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skyrocketed. Inside the Spokane County Health District building, Elaine Conley, director of community and family service programs, taps a report on the table called “Healthy Families, Better Beginnings.” On the cover, two smiling multiracial parents give piggyback rides to two delighted kids outside a suburban home. The statistics inside, however, point to families stricken by abuse, neglect and trauma. “In fact, when we look at this report, the data is pretty overwhelming,” Conley says. It’s not just child abuse. Compared with the state, more of Spokane County’s women smoked while pregnant, contracted chlamydia, had shorter pregnancies, qualified for Medicaid and suffered from adverse childhood experiences. Fewer infants were breast fed, more were born with birth defects. And Spokane County has long had a lower median income and higher poverty rates than the rest of the state. While child abuse can happen in any family, the vast majority happens to children in poverty. A report to Congress in 2010 found child abuse more than three times more common in impoverished households. Neglect was nearly seven times more common. Spokane has incredibly vast disparities. The number of reports of suspected abuse or neglect from West Central’s Holmes Elementary is 26 times greater than the upper South Hill’s Moran Prairie. Yet attempts to link increases in child abuse to economic downturns have had mixed results. Recently, a working paper studying child abuse data from California posed a possible explanation: “Male layoffs increase rates of abuse whereas female layoffs reduce rates of abuse.” After all, even though men spend less time with their kids, they more often play a role in abuse cases. In Spokane County, local industries dominated by males — like construction and manufacturing — took the first and hardest blows in the recession, leaving more laid-off men home with the children. Conley sees yet another factor: For many, the days of being able to drop off the baby with Grandma or the family next door have passed.
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S e p te m b er 08, 2013
SpokeFest August 22, 2013 INLANDER 23