​Hello, friends and supporters of Safe Communities,

My name is Becky, and I’m honored to introduce myself as the new Executive Director of Safe Communities.

​When I stepped into this role in late May, I did so with deep gratitude for the trust placed in me and a clear vision for the work ahead. Our mission has always been to foster safety, healing, and hope for survivors of abuse, and I believe that mission extends to those who protect and serve our communities every day.

With that in mind, I’m proud to announce Safe Communities’ participation in Project Blue Light, a national initiative that honors the sacrifices of police officers — those who have fallen in the line of duty as well as those who continue to serve every day. Law enforcement officers play an essential role in the protection of survivors, and while the work is often unseen, it is never unnoticed.

Saloma Furlong
Guest Blogger from About Amish and The World Beyond

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. ~ Maya Angelou
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This past weekend I attended a Safe Communities retreat in Ephrata, Pennsylvania at the beautiful Hurst Bed and Breakfast. The retreat was led by Linda Crockett, Lyn Barrett, and Mark Harris, and it was exactly what I needed at this time in my life. The retreat was described this way:

"Resistance, Renewal and Re-emergence is an apt descriptor of the cycle of seasons, as well as our lives as we heal from trauma. We find ways to resist what threatens [to] devastate our lives; we build our resilience muscles as we push back against despair and loneliness to make space for life; and we re-emerge not as we once were, but as someone who has been made strong at the broken places and moves into a different stage of life."

Before this retreat, I had a negative view of the word “resistance” in terms of healing from trauma. To me that word meant resisting the hard work of healing, rather than facing the pain one has been through.

Linda Crockett
Director, Safe Communities 

Children are at an increased risk for sexual abuse during the holidays.  Before you are caught up in the whirlwind of holiday preparations, take a minute to read this blog post.  It may help you save a child from a trauma that can have a lifetime impact.
 
First, it is important to know that sexual abuse includes a broad range of behaviors in which an adult or older child (or one with more social power) engages a child in sexual activity of any kind. This encompasses both touching and non-touching offenses.

Why does risk increase during the holidays?

• About  9 out of 10 children who are sexually abused know their abuser; most often, the perpetrators are family members, trusted family friends, relatives, neighbors, or authority figures.
• 4 out of 10 children who are sexually abused are abused by other children, often siblings, cousins, and friends.  The practice of sending  children off to play in another room while the adults enjoy eggnog elsewhere is not safe. Regardless of the age of the offender, the traumatic impact on the victim can last for decades. That’s a holiday legacy no child should have to carry.
• Most children do not disclose that they have been sexually abused right away, and some never disclose.

 

Linda Crockett

Early this year, my friend and colleague Lyn Barrett asked me to write the forward for her upcoming book, Crazy: Reclaiming Life from the Shadow of Traumatic Memory which is now available for pre-order. It was a great privilege to do so, and I am sharing the forward in this blog post. It’s a must-read book for survivors of childhood trauma and all who walk with them.
 
FOREWORD
In her unforgettable memoir, Lyn Barrett helps us grasp how childhood trauma can be deeply hidden from our consciousness, and that the deeper truth of what happened can be discovered and healed even when cognitive memory remains elusive.

Lancaster County is home to the largest Amish population in the United States with 40,525 Amish in 2020. Yet they are greatly underserved in accessing resources to help them prevent the alarmingly high prevalence of sexual abuse of children in their community.

Although published large scale studies in this population do not exist, we have good reason to believe that rates are significantly higher than those cited in the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (22% of boys, 25% of girls).  In fact, Amish we talk to frankly admit that child sexual abuse is “out of control” in their schools and communities.   

Our meetings in Amish homes continued to increase during 2021. We have gathered with more than 125 Amish in small groups in barns, around kitchen tables, and on front porches to hear their stories. As we become known as trustworthy people, we receive calls from Amish we’ve never met with, asking for our help.

March 1, 2021

At Safe Communities, we hear from many survivors of child sexual abuse (CSA) about providers of mental, dental, and medical care who fall far short of their claims to be “trauma-informed”. It has become so ubiquitous to hang a “trauma-informed” label around a professional practice that one would expect things had improved dramatically. Most CSA survivors are still waiting for that to happen – and in the meantime, often foregoing much needed treatment because the risk of retraumatization by a provider is too high.
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The terror and agony faced by four-year old Jessica Mast as her parents and another couple beat her every day for two weeks in the name of “godly discipline” is unimaginable to most people – except for survivors of religions that embed submission and obedience to the “will of the father” into daily practices for women and girls, reinforced with bodily terrorism if necessary. Jessica will never be one of those survivors because in the end, after yet another beating with her father’s belt, her little head was held beneath the icy water of a pond. She was dragged to the bank and left there to freeze.

You might be tempted to write this off as mental illness of the murderers, or to a horrific and unexplainable anomaly. Please don’t. While mental illness may be in play here and most cases of child abuse do not end in death – what happened here was years in the making, as the adults who killed her, while also beating her two-year-old sister and at times, her mother – were products of a conservative Plain culture where physical abuse of children to break their will is broadly accepted. The church all four adults attended, unsurprisingly, has distanced itself from any responsibility for this child’s death. According to the Sheriff, the actions leading to her death are “not condoned” by the church.

As a woman survivor of childhood sexual and other violence, and the founder of Safe Communities, I am committed to changing the cultural conditions that allow the sexual violation of children to continue, and survivors to be disbelieved and shamed. But as heavy and challenging as that work is, it is not enough. As a white leader of a nonprofit, its critical I also work to change the cultural norms that allow racism to continue, the most extreme and heart wrenching examples being the killing of unarmed Black people, including children, at the hands of police and extrajudicial groups of white men. And that means living more fully into the complicated intersection of ending sexual violence and racism.  

While legislative changes are necessary, and police reform is critical, we simply can’t criminal justice our way out of this. We can’t just get rid of the “bad apples” in policing or the “predators” in churches, schools, organizations and communities. No amount of police reform or mandated reporter or diversity or anti-sexual harassment training will change the fundamental problem. To stop sexual and racial violence, we must change the cultural historical norms that allow them to operate. Problems that are systemic cannot be fixed using the same systems and mindsets that created them.

by Linda Crockett 

As a survivor, I am leading Safe Communities. Working with friends, partners and allies, we exist to end child sexual abuse and to create healing spaces for survivors – and that will not stop even as we live in this time of a global pandemic, which is scary for everyone.  

The virus is an invisible enemy that we can’t control, even as we try frantically to reduce risk through various tactics. No one is immune. Low-wage or hourly/contracted employees are particularly vulnerable economically. Older adults and those with underlying medical conditions are more vulnerable to severe illness, based on what we know right now.  Less discussed has been the psychological vulnerability of survivors of sexual violence.