So this past week for foster care class was the hardest class so far: sexual abuse. It started heavy and went down from there.
I think the hardest thing for me in that class was that sexual abuse is more common than asthma and 1 in 4 girls are sexually abused by the time they’re an adult.
I was in Children’s Ministry for 10 years. If you take just the weekly attendance of the ministries that I oversaw that means I interacted with 1250 kids. If the average was half are girls that means 156 girls had been sexually abused or were going to be. Really I probably regularly interacted with twice that number.
I can count on one hand the number of times I was working with kids I thought we needed to watch for signs of abuse. I never knowingly saw signs of actual abuse that needed called. But the statistics are I missed it. And even though I knew all the stats, it didn’t hit me till this class how oblivious I was to what was really happening with some of my kids.
So because of this reality, I have some posters inspired by this class and similar thoughts.
The Dirt and Hurt Poster is a saying one of my co-workers likes to say and it just sticks with you. God doesn’t waste my dirt or my hurt. I know that because I’ve seen it and experienced it.
The End It Poster one is because slavery awareness day was this month. We like to think slavery doesn’t exist in first world countries anymore but there are over 40 million slaves world wide and a lot of them are sexually exploited in first world countries.
Finally, we have the Foster Care Symbol Poster. A heart entwined with a triangle for how a foster parent bio parent and child are interested through the foster process. light blue is the awareness color for foster care, so U thought that would be an appropriate addition.
