By Claire Louge, Executive Director
I was at the airport, and it happened again.
I was sitting on the floor at the crowded gate, propping my laptop on a seat to peck out a few emails,
when a man asked me what I did for work. When I said I worked with Prevent Child Abuse Arizona, his
face fell into an expression of seriousness and reverent consternation. Here we go, I thought. The train has left for Sombertown.
“It’s actually really hopeful and awesome,” I quickly said.
“It’s about getting families what they need so that abuse and neglect never happen in the first place. We’re working to build a system that gets families connection and support.”
I saw his brain recalculating. The train was slowing down.
I get it. We have ‘child abuse’ in our name. Everyone knows child abuse is bad, and the concept can bring up rattling feelings or images in your mind. But the most important word in our name is the first one: Prevent. But it can be genuinely hard to conceptualize.
I’m constantly trying to explain prevention in the most simple and understandable way. Prevention is a bout doing what we know works to stop a snowball from becoming an avalanche (definitely wrong metaphor for Arizona in July). It’s about focusing on the root cause of why harm happened and changing the context where adversity grows.
It’s about meeting needs early. It’s about making sure everyone has access to get their needs met. It’s about making it safe to ask for support. It’s about caring for the people who care so they can keep on caring.
Those things can all feel nebulous and gooey, too. That’s because prevention is basically about everything, and it’s hard to contend with the fact that housing stability, economic opportunity, child care accessibility, safe parks, paid leave, health care quality and social connectivity, among many other things, all prevent child abuse.
Prevention is complex. The work of building prevention infrastructure, which is about creating permanent ways for families to access what they need, is genuinely hard to conceptualize.
But it’s also super simple. Because we’ve all experienced prevention. We all have a story about something happening that led to something else, and thank goodness, because if that hadn’t happened, then things would have been bad. Prevention is a long chain of cause and effect. It’s taking the science of what causes create certain effects and stopping the causes that cause bad effects and doing more of the causes that cause good effects.
In one of my favorite books, Upstream by Dan Heath, he shares the story of when New York City chose to cut $3M in their tree-trimming department because they wanted to save money. The next year, they had to pay out $14M in lawsuits after branches fell and injured people. You don’t see prevention. But it hurts when it doesn’t happen.
Prevention is the absence of harm and the presence of flourishing. That’s why it’s so awesome.
Sometimes the men at the airports don’t get it. But sometimes they do, and the train of thought I see in their eyes heads in a different, more hopeful direction.
The more people understand the nature of prevention, the more it can happen. The more it can happen, the less child abuse we will see. And that’s the destination we’re headed to.