The Safe Center LI, Inc. has completed its acquisition of Child Abuse Prevention Services and will immediately rebrand the vital programming as CAPS at The Safe Center.
The addition of established CAPS programs including Steer Clear of Bullies and CyberSMARTZ, both of which will be integrated into The Safe Center’s education department, allows the Bethpage-based agency to expand its program offerings throughout Long Island. Additionally, CAPS’ 38 year history providing training to prevent bullying and child abuse will create new opportunities to build new programs through each agency’s existing relationships.
“We are excited about incorporating CAPS into our Education Department and expanding our ability to keep children safe,” said Cynthia Scott, Executive Director of The Safe Center. “CAPS’ programs are a tremendous fit for our educational services and CAPS’ relationships with elementary schools across Long Island will enable us to reach a new population and broaden our prevention efforts. This is especially important now, when child abuse is significantly underreported as a result of COVID-19’s impact on schools and summer programs. Additionally, children who are suffering from online bullying may feel there is nowhere to turn. CAPS at The Safe Center’s programming will help to shed some light and provide a source of support to those children and communities in need.”
Through CAPS at The Safe Center, students and faculty will have increased access to educational workshops and programming developed with existing resources. CAPS has over 130 experienced program volunteers who will be invited to join the rebranded program.
Most of these highly trained volunteers have many years of experience delivering impactful programs to elementary, middle and high school students. These volunteers will be incorporated into the already robust volunteer educator program at The Safe Center markedly increasing the educational capacity.
“We are thrilled that CAPS’ mission to keep kids safe from harm will continue to thrive,” said Joanne Campbell Schiefer, Board President of Child Abuse Prevention Services. “There is great synergy between CAPS and The Safe Center, and our renowned education programs focused on bullying, abuse and neglect will fit perfectly within their array of programs and services.”
For more information, please visit The Safe Center LI at https://www.tscli.org.
A segment from Childhood Disrupted (How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal, pg.24) in part reads: “Well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development …”
For instance, would a large percentage of procreative adults specifically comprehend that, since it cannot ‘fight or flight’, a baby stuck in a crib on its back while hearing voluble adult discord in the next room can only mentally freeze; and if allowed to chronically continue for a sufficient duration of time, this consequential effect causes the brain to dysfunctionally develop? And that it can be the helpless infant’s starting point towards a childhood, adolescence and (in particular) adulthood in which its brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammation-promoting stress hormones and chemicals, even in non-stressful daily routines?
Yet society generally treats human procreative rights as though we’ll somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture our children’s naturally developing minds and needs. I strongly believe that a psychologically sound as well as a physically healthy future should be all children’s foremost right—especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter—and therefore basic child development science and rearing should be learned long before the average person has their first child.
By not teaching this to high school students, is it not as though societally we’re implying that anyone can comfortably enough go forth with unconditionally bearing children with whatever minute amount, if any at all, of such vital knowledge they happen to have acquired over time?
Perhaps foremost to consider is that during their first three to six years of life (depending on which expert one asks) children have particularly malleable minds (like a dry sponge squeezed and released under water), thus they’re exceptionally vulnerable to whatever rearing environment in which they happened to have been placed by fate.
I frequently wonder how many instances there are wherein immense long-term suffering by children of dysfunctional rearing might have been prevented had the parent(s) received some crucial parenting instruction by way of mandatory high school curriculum.
“It has been said that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty. Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practising medicine, ‘I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood’.” (Childhood Disrupted, pg.228)
Unhindered abuse can launch a helpless child towards an adolescence and adulthood in which their brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammation-promoting stress hormones and chemicals, even in non-stressful daily routines.