People That Know Child Abuse
We know that the punishment model does not facilitate healing or learning – It is responsible for most failed grade level reading, math and history scores. It is a primary reason for underperforming schools.
What Psychiatrists Can Do: Restorative Practice in Children’s Mental Health
Psychiatrists can help abused and neglected children even when specialty care is scarce by using trauma-informed care, safer prescribing, community partnerships, and advocacy
What Physicians Can Do: Healing, Preventing, and Championing Child Safety
Physicians are often the first and only trusted adults able to see the hidden injuries of child abuse and neglect. This post explains what physicians can do about child abuse: recognize red flags, use ACEs and trauma‑informed care, act on reasonable suspicion, and advocate so fewer children suffer in silence and more find safety and healing.
What Mandated Reporters Can Do: Turning Knowledge Into Protection, Action, and Healing
Mandated reporters: teachers, clinicians, social workers, childcare staff, clergy and others are often the only adults who see the hidden signs of child abuse and neglect. This article explains what mandated reporters can do: recognize red flags, act on reasonable suspicion, report and document clearly, push past institutional pressure, and stay emotionally supported while protecting children.
What Childcare Workers Can Do: Building Safety, Trust, and Resilience from the Earliest Years
Childcare workers are often the first adults outside the family to see what very young children cannot yet say in words. This article shows how they can recognize early signs of abuse and trauma, act as courageous mandated reporters, and create trauma‑informed classrooms that give infants, toddlers, and preschoolers a sense of safety, trust, and resilience from the very earliest years.
What School Boards Can Do: Trauma Informed Policies That Protect Students and Improve Schools
School boards decide whether schools become trauma informed, healing environments or systems that deepen harm. This chapter explains what boards can do: make trauma and child safety central to district strategy, fund early identification and support services, reshape policing and discipline around healing and equity, protect relationship-based learning, and demand transparent, equity focused metrics and community partnerships so vulnerable students are seen, supported, and able to succeed.
What Teachers Can Do: Trauma Informed Classrooms That Transform Students’ Lives
Teachers are often the only steady adults who see what traumatized students live through. This chapter explains what teachers can do: recognize trauma as common and real, teach and discipline through a trauma informed lens, build trust, adapt academics with flexibility, report concerns, collaborate with school and community professionals, create healing classroom climates, and care for their own wellbeing so they can keep changing students’ lives.
Working With Childhood Trauma (what parents can do)
Working with childhood trauma is hard, but parents are not powerless. This chapter explains what childhood and family level trauma mean today, how they show up as “behavior,” and what parents can do: recognize patterns in their own histories, focus on safety and emotional regulation at home, seek trauma informed help, partner with schools and community supports, and deliberately build resilience and new, healthier family traditions.
America’s Child Brides: Jerry Lee Lewis, Legal Loopholes, and the Rights We Deny Our Children
Jerry Lee Lewis marrying 13‑year‑old Myra Brown isn’t just a strange story from the past. Child marriage is still legal in most U.S. states, creating America child brides whose trauma and rights we pretend not to see.
Youth Tried as Adults: Life Sentences, Trauma, and the Failure of America’s Juvenile Justice System
Children in the U.S. are still being tried as adults and sentenced to die in prison. This post explains how juvenile life sentences work, the trauma and racial injustice they reflect, what adult prisons do to kids, and where real reform is finally beginning to take hold.
KARA Conversations – Growing Childhood Trauma Awareness Where You Live
KARA Conversations brings experienced child advocacy speakers to your classroom, congregation, nonprofit or civic group for short, powerful Zoom sessions on child abuse, childhood trauma and how Child Protective Services really works. Choose a 30 minute overview with Q&A or a customized 60 minute event, and help the people where you live move from concern to concrete action for children.
United Nations Youth Conference (2007 – what’s changed for abused children?)
Kids At Risk Action presented a workshop at the fourth annual Youth Assembly at the United Nations in New York
Child Protection in the Dark: How Our Blind Spots in CPS Are Costing Taxpayers, Children, and Communities
Child Protective Services is one of the least understood and least transparent systems we fund, even though childhood trauma drives enormous costs in education, health care, crime, and prisons. This KARA article argues that taxpayers, children, and communities are all paying for our blind spots around CPS, shows how negative narratives and politics are pushing the system into crisis, and calls on readers to demand real data and trauma-informed reform.
Childhood Trauma, Suicide, and a CPS System Flying Blind
Repeated childhood trauma does cruel things to children. Things that never go away. Those things (behaviors/thoughts/self-harm/suicide) can be managed with help. Without help, depression, pain and sadness often become overwhelming.
Alaska’s Hidden Child Trauma: Beyond CPS Number
The Alaska Children’s Alliance warns that Alaska has “some of the highest rates of child abuse and neglect in the nation,” noting research that 38% of children born in Alaska will be reported to child welfare before age 10 and nearly 1 in 7 will face an allegation of sexual abuse before age 12
When Trauma Walks Into Class: Student on Teacher Violence, ACEs, and the Cost of Ignoring Childhood Abuse
Student‑on‑teacher violence is rising in Minnesota classrooms, and trauma is walking through the door long before the school bell rings. Children who grow up with beatings, sexual abuse, and neglect often bring survival‑brain reactions into class, turning ordinary directions into perceived threats. Without trauma‑informed support, teachers are being injured, driven from the profession, and left to “just deal with” a crisis they did not create.
Uncooperative often violent response to authority figures is normal for traumatized children. It’s driven by repeated pain and terror visited upon a child that has been unable to escape repeated trauma and abuse.
KARA’s Invisible Children Traveling Community Conversations
Life would be better for abused and neglected children if more people truly understood what they face—and what we can do to help. This coming fall and winter, KARA is inviting universities, community centers, and businesses to engage our INVISIBLE CHILDREN Community Conversations.
This traveling program is available to organizations, colleges/universities, and community venues within an hour’s drive of the Twin Cities metro and is designed to create awareness and solutions for at risk children and families in Minnesota.
Join KARA’s Children’s Crusade: Making Life, Liberty, and Happiness Real for Abused and Neglected Children
KARA’s Children’s Freedom Crusade uses a Fourth of July freedom theme to demand real life, liberty, and happiness for abused and neglected children—and to build a national, child first movement that puts their safety and healing first.
What Happens When Foster Teens Get Punished Instead of Treated? A CASA’s View From the Front Line
A CASA guardian ad litem shares what it is like to advocate for a deeply traumatized 14 year old foster boy when there is no safe housing or mental health care available. The system that removed him for his safety is now steering him toward adult court and prison, not healing. We can change that.
Childhood Trauma and Lifelong ACES Impact
Children’s mental health crisis post COVID is no longer invisible. California’s Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris has declared adverse childhood experiences a public health threat, while foster children across the nation are being overprescribed psychotropic drugs and suicide has become the second leading cause of death for youth ages 10 to 24. In Minnesota and beyond, emergency rooms are filling with suicidal children because there are too few pediatric mental health beds, rural facilities are closing, and communities fight against group homes instead of embracing trauma informed care. At the same time, teachers are leaving the classroom in high numbers as ACES driven violence and chaos make schools feel more like mental health wards than places of learning. This KARA post brings together data, frontline stories, and policy examples—from New Jersey’s “Road Forward” plan to the federal Mental Health Services for Students Act—to show how deeply our systems are failing abused and traumatized children, and why embracing early intervention, honest reporting, and real support for educators, families, and kids is critical now.
Childhood Trauma Is a War Injury: How ACEs Rewire the Brain and Fuel Crime
Childhood trauma and Post‑Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in war veterans look different on the surface—but biologically, they are strikingly similar. We accept that a soldier torn apart by bullets or standing next to a friend killed by a bomb will carry invisible brain injuries. Yet we still struggle to see how growing up in a violent, chaotic, or deeply neglectful home can damage a child’s brain in many of the same ways.
Why America’s Child Protection System Is Failing—and How to Fix It
America’s Child Protection System is producing the very harms it was meant to prevent: overflowing prisons, broken families, unsafe classrooms, and communities overwhelmed by untreated trauma. This post explains how secrecy, extreme caseloads, deregulation, and our refusal to recognize children’s rights have hollowed out CPS—and lays out four practical steps toward real reform: radical transparency, safe caseloads, rebuilt legal protections, and child‑centered laws that treat children as rights‑holders, not afterthoughts.
KARA Digital Toolkit: Free and Low Cost Tech for Traumatized Children and Teens
KARA’s Digital Toolkit brings together free and low cost apps, trainings, and tech tools that help abused and neglected children cope with trauma and behavior problems. These resources are designed to support—not replace—professional care and can be shared with youth, caregivers, schools, and advocates.
What School Counselors Can Do: Protect, Heal, and Empower Children
School counselors are often the only adults who truly see what traumatized students are living through. This article explains how trauma informed school counseling can spot abuse and adversity early, lead school wide change, coordinate crisis response, connect families to community support, and sustain counselors doing this work. With real world stories and a curated resource list, it’s a practical guide for counselors supporting students impacted by trauma and adverse childhood experiences.
All About Adverse Childhood Experiences: Trauma, Testing, And Resilience (podcast)
Kids at Risk Action, hosts Alex and Jordan explore the profound impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and how childhood trauma can affect individuals throughout their lives, much like PTSD in veterans.
Tip of the Mental Health Iceberg (podcast)
Kids at Risk Action, the hosts address the growing mental health crisis in child welfare, particularly in emergency rooms and foster care systems. They reveal alarming statistics, such as the significant rise in ER visits for children’s mental health crises and the systemic failures that leave many without proper care.
What Teachers Can Do: Trauma‑Informed Classrooms and Child Protection
TRAUMA INFORMED TEACHING, TRAUMA INFORMED CLASSROOMS Teachers as Mandated Reporters and Frontline Defenders – Teachers are uniquely positioned—they often spend more awake hours with children than any other adult, especially for those from troubled homes. They are confidants, first responders, and witnesses to the silent suffering of abused, neglected, or traumatized students.
Very Young Children, Suicide, and Abuse: What We, CPS, and Lawmakers Must Do
Very young children are showing up in emergency rooms after suicide attempts and self‑harm, often with histories of abuse, neglect, and other trauma. When CPS and lawmakers lack transparent, child‑outcome data and trauma‑focused resources, these children slip through the cracks until it is too late.
How Child Abuse and Trauma Sabotage Education, Public Health, and Public Safety
Child abuse redefines the way a child thinks and sees the world. Abused children have severely limited learning and coping skills. An abused child’s mental development has been arrested by an anxiety and fear that supercede the learning of other personal and social skills. Without personal and social skills, and a lessening of the anxieties and fears, Abused children fail at school, don’t make friends, and keep a terribly low self image.
Part 5 of 5: Crime Dollar ROI From Early Childhood Programs
ROI Early Learning programs returns include reduced crime for at-risk children. The evidence is robust across decades of research, program evaluations, and cost-benefit analyses.
2. How Colorado Hid Child Abuse Behind FAR Policy Changes (thank you Marie Cohen & Child Welfare Monitor)
Colorado claims a 40 percent drop in child abuse and neglect, but state data tell a different story. Hotline reports are up, while fewer cases are screened in, more are diverted to Family Assessment Response (FAR), instead of investigating the child. This looks less like safer children and more like a system that changed how it counts—and hides—childhood trauma and its victims.
Adverse Childhood Experiences: Trauma, Testing, And Resilience (KARA podcast)
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are not just bad memories—they are powerful risk factors that change how a child’s brain and body develop. In this Kids at Risk Action podcast episode, hosts Alex and Jordan explore how ACEs like abuse, neglect, and domestic violence can lead to PTSD like symptoms, chronic stress, and higher risks of mental illness, addiction, and early death. They connect the dots between ACEs and the systems that are supposed to help: child protection, schools, health care, and juvenile justice. Too often, children only get attention after they are failing, acting out, or in crisis, rather than receiving trauma informed support early. This episode calls for ACEs screening, early intervention, and policies that fund prevention, resilience building, and compassionate care—so children are not punished for symptoms of trauma but helped to heal and thrive.
Creating Local Events For Child Advocacy
For child advocates supporting child advocacy organizations, local events can turn concern for abused and neglected children into real, repeatable engagement. The challenge is creating gatherings that are welcoming and energizing while still trauma informed, privacy safe, and grounded in child welfare priorities, especially with limited budgets and complex systems. This post lays out multiple event models—walks and rallies, arts and healing gatherings, youth leadership labs, policy facing tours, neighborhood family nights, learning series, and pop up outreach at existing festivals—that are practical and doable with modest resources. It also emphasizes designing for engagement beyond headcount, using hands on formats and small “do one thing today” actions so one well planned event becomes the starting point for stronger partnerships and coordinated advocacy for children.
Child Sex Abuse & The Most Powerful Suicide Note Ever (Bill Zeller from 2011)
This is the longest and most powerful and articulate suicide note I’ve ever read and it has great meaning to me for its power to relate these two incomprehensible sorrows (abuse & suicide).
Sometimes People Get Shot
• “From Cedarbluff, Mississippi, to parties in Houston and homes in Indiana, early 2026 brought mass shootings that briefly made headlines and then faded. This essay connects those tragedies to a deeper crisis: how our systems ignore childhood trauma, underfund mental health, and invest billions in punishment instead of care—creating adults who are dangerous because we failed them as children.”
What Foster Parents Can Do: Healing, Advocating, and Transforming Lives – 3
Foster parenting is about much more than providing a bed. This guide shows caregivers how to insist on full trauma histories, document key events, advocate against medication only approaches, partner with schools and agencies, and use their lived experience to reform systems and transform children’s lives.
Isabella’s Story
Isabella was taken into foster care when her birth home was raided by authorities for possession of drugs. She was found locked in a room by herself. She was silent – never spoke. Isabella had never been outside until she was placed into foster care at 7.
Where to Find the Best Child Abuse Data and Help for At Risk Kids
Stop hunting in the dark. Explore the best national child abuse data sources plus frontline resources for CASAs, foster parents, educators, and policymakers.
Ethan’s Story: How Foster Care Failed a Traumatized Child
Ethan’s story follows one boy taken from his parents into foster care, abused in placement, struggling with guilt and suicidality, and now facing adulthood alone. His journey exposes how often our foster care system fails traumatized children—and why changing life for foster youth will take all of us.
Trauma Breathing for Kids: A Practical Toolkit for Caring Adults
Trauma breathing is a simple, trauma-informed “belly breathing” practice that helps calm a child’s amygdala and nervous system. This toolkit offers step-by-step instructions and ready-to-use scripts for teachers, caregivers, law enforcement, health workers, and other adults who support traumatized children.
Child Abuse and the Domino Effect: Why Lawmakers Need Real Data
When lawmakers finally see the human and financial numbers behind child abuse and neglect, our politics can treat it as the national emergency it is—not a niche social‑services problem. Over a lifetime, the “domino effect” of abused and neglected children touches every system we claim to care about: schools, crime, taxes, public health, and public safety
What Principals and Administrators Can Do to Keep Children Safe and Help Them Heal
Principals and district leaders are on the front lines of childhood trauma. This guide shows how to create trauma informed school climates, rethink discipline, strengthen mental health systems, engage families, use data, and advocate for policy change so vulnerable students are safer and more able to learn.
What Social Workers Can Do: Reclaiming Hope and Safety for At‑Risk Children
Child welfare social workers stand where children’s trauma meets family hardship and broken systems. This trauma‑informed guide shows how social workers can find invisible kids, demand real accountability, build strong teams, use mandated reporting with courage, support caregivers, protect themselves from burnout, and turn casework into lasting system reform.
One Safe Adult, One Stable Place: The Hidden Power of Stability for Children
Children carrying high Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) live in constant survival mode. Stable homes, consistent caregiving, and trauma-informed schools can lower toxic stress, repair trust, and rebuild hope. This article explains why stability is a core intervention—and how adults and communities can help at-risk youth heal and thrive.
Why Minnesota’s Youngest Students Are Turning Violent: Childhood Trauma in K–3 Classrooms
“157 staff injuries and 142 cleared classrooms in a single year raise a hard question: Why are Minnesota’s youngest students turning violent? This piece traces those outbursts back to unhealed childhood trauma—and outlines what K–3 schools, families, and policymakers must do differently if we want safer classrooms instead of more suspensions.”
Five Daily Habits That Help Traumatized Children Feel Safe at Home
Kids who’ve survived abuse or neglect don’t need perfect parents—they need calm, repeatable habits that make home feel safe. This guide explains five daily practices that lower reactivity, build trust, and help traumatized children feel safe at home, plus clear signs of trauma and next step resources for families.
Children Watching War: The Hidden Trauma for Kids
Children are growing up with war in their faces, in real time, on every screen. This is what it does to them—and what adults can do in response.
The Youngest Children Face the Highest Risk — And Many Deaths Aren’t Counted
Babies and toddlers face the highest abuse risk, yet up to 60% of maltreatment deaths never appear on death certificates. Here’s what the data really shows.
Be a Tester: KARA’s Interactive Child Abuse Information Hub
KARA is piloting an AI driven, interactive child abuse and child protection information platform—and we need your help to shape it. By exploring the pilot and sharing what works, what’s confusing, and what’s missing, you’ll help us build a tool that truly serves educators, child advocates, families, policymakers, and others working with traumatized children. Your feedback in this early stage will guide how we organize data, refine answers, and add features before a wider launch.
Hungry Like a Wolf
Hungry Like a Wolf, a powerful new play about sexual predators, mirrors what I saw as a CASA guardian ad litem: very young children raped in their own homes, perpetrators never held accountable, and trauma that reshapes every part of a child’s life. In the U.S., 7.8 million children are reported abused each year—many sexually abused—and countless others are never seen. Until adults are willing to talk honestly about child sexual abuse and its lifelong impact, there will be no real push to change systems or protect children.