Issue Position: Protecting the Vulnerable

Issue Position

Protecting the Vulnerable: This is a difficult topic for everyone ... no one likes to think that children, the poor, or the infirm will be abused by others but it happens every day and its been getting worse. Something we can do as a state is elevate the discussion so it shifts away from "us" versus "them". Us versus them only leads to thoughts of scarcity and fear and ultimately clouds the issue preventing tenable solutions that would meet people at their point of need and prevents our community from healing.

I was quite pleased to be a part of the community discussion on child trafficking this past 12 months culminating in HB2454 signed into law by the Governor this past May. It puts the fault and heavy financial penalties and incarceration on those who would advertise children for sexual exploitation and on those who purchase child sex and those who financially profit from selling children for sex. Children under 18 will be treated as victims. This is landmark legislation that will be modeled by many other states and something we can be proud of as people from all parts of government and the community came together to say enough! The discussion changes when we as a community speak of the children caught up in this rape for profit world as our kids rather than "those" kids.

Child Protective Services is a difficult topic fraught with the language of us versus them. Laurie Roberts regularly does columns in the AZ Republic highlighting the plight of children caught up in a world where parents and families are living day to day at the edge of crisis (see link) and CPS is the government agency of last resort. We generally don't see their successes (I saw a number of successes by CPS as part of the Foster Care Review Board) but when they get it wrong it is on full display and it is often tragic.

Through the Governor's leadership and key legislators a new Department of Child Safety is going to come into its own. We need to support them as they develop a more holistic solution to allow our crisis reaction time to be better and more effective but also to rebuild some of the public-private early warning system relationships in our society that allow people to be met at their point of need rather than after they have spun out of control into full crisis.

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