Listen to Michele Booth Cole
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Safe Shores -- The DC Children's Advocacy Center
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Michele Booth Cole
Executive Director
Safe Shores-The DC Children's Advocacy Center
Audio Transcripts
On Safe Shores
We try to keep kids safe. We do it working with all the agencies and people who are responsible for helping keep children safe—the police department, the prosecutors, mental health services, social workers—and then there's us, at the center of this, trying to help everything be coordinated on behalf of the child.
You know, it's really a team of individuals and that's why this model exists. That's why the agency exists, because the presumption is that one group alone really can't do it. The needs of the child are such that—and the needs of the case are such that—all these different agencies are effected. And so the better we work together, presumably the better the outcomes for the children are.
On Community Awareness and the Risk of Child Abuse
Every child is at risk. Unless they're with their parents all day long—you can see them all day long—at some point, when they leave your care, the risk is always there. And there are things that we can do as parents, as caregivers, as a society to minimize the risk, but what's so scary to me is that we're not even acknowledging the risk. And that just creates untold dangers for kids. And so, the thing that's come to me in this work is that there's so much more we can do as a community to keep kids safe.
On Serving the District's Children
I would want done here, for the children who come here, as good or better than I want for my own children. And the fact is my children haven't been traumatized, whereas children who come here are bringing such devastating experiences, and not just one-time experiences. Some of these children are born into such chaos and such depravation and such dishonesty, all the things that childhood shouldn't be. So, if we are who we really say we are, then when they walk through here, everything is supposed to be different in this place—adults who respect them, listen to them, people who want to make it safe, and good. You have to merge this whole notion of helping people with honoring them at the same time.
On the Value of the Exponent Award
The longer I'm in the sector, the more I appreciate the need to affirm people's efforts to keep trying, and to keep trying to get it right, and to keep making things work, and to keep being honest, and to keep being kind, and do all those things that we all know we should, but sometimes the world just doesn't reward you for.