For more information about Kids FIRST, go here.
The following transcript was generated using automated transcription software for the accessibility and convenience of our audience. While we strive for accuracy, the automated process may introduce errors, omissions, or misinterpretations. This transcript is intended as a helpful companion to the original audio and should not be considered a verbatim record. For the most accurate representation, please refer to the audio recording.
Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. We're coming to the end of April, and if you didn't know, it's Child Abuse Prevention Month. While everyone is aware of the crime of child abuse, many may not be aware of how prevalent it is in our community. Last year saw more child abuse cases than in previous years in Lane County. But it's a nuanced story: while the problem is monumental, the fact that many cases were reported at all shows a positive trend toward awareness and action. Today on the show, we're going to talk to Patty Perlow, who, through two different jobs, has committed herself to protecting children in the county, first as the Lane County district attorney and now as the executive director of Kids FIRST. The former prosecutor has transitioned from prosecuting abusers toward protecting kids and helping them navigate trauma. Patty Perlow, the executive director of Kids FIRST, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming in and chatting with us.
Patty Perlow: Thanks for inviting me.
Dunne: Yeah, you know, this month is Child Abuse Prevention Month, and obviously, when we designate a month, what we're trying to do is raise awareness. I'm curious: do we not have enough awareness about the challenge of child abuse, or just generally, harm befalling children?
Perlow: Well, I think there is plenty of awareness that child abuse happens. I don't think we talk enough about what we can be doing to prevent it.
Dunne: OK, let's talk about this. Is there a societal discomfort in talking about it that maybe people need to just get over? Obviously, even though it's a horrible crime, we need to be talking and doing things about it.
Perlow: Right. No one wants to hear the details of what happened. But on the front end, a lot of parents are uncomfortable talking to their children about body parts and body safety, about how to protect yourself, and about being able to tell uncomfortable things to another adult. If we can help people start having those conversations, then we've done our best job to try to help with prevention.
Dunne: OK, that leads right into this: talk about what Kids FIRST does.
Perlow: So Kids FIRST is the child advocacy center for Lane County, and we are a responsive agency. After a child has already suffered physical or sexual abuse or witnessed violence, we provide the wraparound services to help the healing process get started, along with helping with some evidence gathering. When a child has experienced a trauma, they come into Kids FIRST. If they're age appropriate and developmentally able, we conduct a forensic interview to find out what their experience was. At the same time, they can receive a medical exam. They get screened for a risk assessment by a therapist to determine whether they have any risk of harm, and then advocates step in to help get the family connected with resources and understand the process of what's going to be happening next.
Dunne: Talk about the training of the people who do that forensic interview, because I imagine that's one of the most difficult things.
Perlow: It is a very intensive program. It's called OC FIT, put on by Oregon Child Abuse Solutions. The lead forensic interviewer, who serves as director of forensic interviews and regional services at Kids FIRST, was one of the developers of the Oregon interview guidelines and one of the creators of the statewide training program for interviewers.
Dunne: Pulling the thread a bit: how does your organization first learn about kids who need these wraparound services? Talk about the collaboration with other entities you work with.
Perlow: All of our referrals come from either law enforcement or DHS Child Welfare. We don't take self-referrals or walk-ins, although we're close to South Eugene High School, so occasionally kids from there come walking in the door. But we get them connected with a law enforcement agency or DHS, and then they make the first contact with Kids FIRST to let us know that there's a child or children who need to be seen.
Dunne: A lot of people listening probably know you more from your other job, when you were Lane County's district attorney. What was it, once you left the DA's office, that attracted you to want to run Kids FIRST?
Perlow: Well, it's a long history. Kids FIRST was actually started by District Attorney Doug Harcleroad in 1994, and it was a division of the DA's office up until 2015. As chief deputy of the DA's office from 2009 to 2015, I actually supervised Kids FIRST and wrote the evaluations for the executive director. So it was a pretty natural fit. Kids FIRST spun off as a standalone nonprofit in 2015, and the services expanded exponentially after that. That's when a medical provider came on board. We now have two full-time providers on staff, and therapy started in 2022, so the services have really expanded. It was a natural fit for me to go back to Kids FIRST. I had been on the board during my time as DA, and when I got a phone call from one of the board members asking if I would be interested, that was about the only thing that was going to get me out of retirement. I have to say there were a lot of challenges that came with it, because I had never supervised a medical clinic, so I've had a learning curve around compliance and billing, and I had never run a therapy program.
Dunne: Were there similarities or lessons learned as a prosecutor that helped you run Kids FIRST? I know it's very different, but there must be some leadership similarities.
Perlow: Oh, absolutely. And my connection to Kids FIRST goes back decades, because I prosecuted cases before Kids FIRST existed and then cases after the doors opened. I could see the difference in the quality of investigations as the organization developed and as it evolved over time, when the guidelines for interviews were standardized and the training improved. The interviews got better. And as everything develops, you get to study evidence about what is most effective, so I got to watch all of that happen over the course of Kids FIRST's development. I have run an organization before. The DA's office had about 80 employees overall, so it was pretty easy to step into this role from that perspective.
Dunne: Is it a fairly unique thing to have an organization like this leave a county government structure and become its own nonprofit? And maybe talk about how that gave Kids FIRST some advantages.
Perlow: Well, funding is very difficult when you are part of a government agency. Donors and grantors think government will pay for it. I don't need to go through the entire history of Lane County's budget shortfalls, but we would never have been able to expand the model to include medical services or increase the number of employees and services as a government agency. As a standalone nonprofit, we are able to obtain foundation grants, government grants, and we have a rural grant from the federal government to provide services to domestic violence victims. The opportunities for funding are so much greater outside of Lane County government.
Dunne: At your time at the DA's office, and now with Kids FIRST, if we talk about people being very uncomfortable talking about child abuse, that same discomfort applies to human trafficking, especially when it comes to kids. Talk about that issue and what you're seeing in our community.
Perlow: Well, we're on the I-5 corridor, and drugs are easily obtained, so we are a ripe market for children to be trafficked in the sex trade. That is a really difficult problem to address from every angle, because a number of the children who are being trafficked don't think of themselves as victims. They feel like they are in control of their circumstances and that the life they're leading now is better than the alternative from where they came. It takes an entire team to help get a child out of that circumstance and to provide them with the services they need to get away from all of that and begin their healing process.
Dunne: When I was doing some research on your organization, some of the language talked about trying to make it as easy as possible for kids to both reach a better outcome and navigate the system that's available. Talk a little about that and how your team works, because obviously we can only imagine how traumatic things have been for these kids, and then having to navigate a whole range of services on top of that.
Perlow: There are different systems involved. Some of the kids are DHS-involved: they're being placed either with other family or out of the home, or the family is being directed on what they need to do to remain intact. There's the criminal justice system, which most people have no concept of until they need it. And then there are the social service systems, and helping a family just meet their basic needs. For each of those systems, we have advocates who help the family understand what's available in the community and the resources that are available. We also provide support through the criminal justice system. If criminal charges are filed, the grand jury is held at Kids FIRST if the child is going to have to testify. That is unique in the state of Oregon, to have a grand jury at the child advocacy center. There are two grand juries impaneled in Lane County every 28 days, and one of them specifically hears child abuse cases at Kids FIRST. Those cases are only held at Kids FIRST when the child is going to have to testify during the grand jury proceeding. They come back to a facility that's familiar to them, advocates are there, and it's a much more supportive, trauma-informed way to help children through the process. But after grand jury, if the case proceeds to court, we help get them ready to go to the courthouse. They'll receive a different advocate from the Lane County DA's office, and we continue to support them and their family through that process and let them know what to expect. One thing about a child advocacy center that people might not know is that every case that comes through our door has a case review by a multidisciplinary team. Law enforcement, DHS, the DA's office, sometimes CASA, sometimes the schools, whoever was involved with that child in that case, comes together to review all the details and find out what supports are in place, whether any needs aren't being met, and whether there's work to be done to help get a case to the point where charges can be filed and prosecution can take place. That's a really important part of this process.
Dunne: And CASA is Court Appointed Special Advocates. You've been involved in this for quite some time, both as DA and now running Kids FIRST. Is the problem getting better or worse in our community, from your view, with regard to child abuse?
Perlow: We saw a record number of kids last year, but I can't say that's because there's more abuse happening. I'm hopeful that it's because there's more awareness and that cases are being reported, that kids are comfortable telling what's happening, that law enforcement is getting engaged, and DHS is getting engaged, and our medical provider is seeing siblings of kids who have come in to make sure they're safe and healthy as well. So I'm hoping that it isn't an increase in abuse in our community, but rather that we have more awareness and things are getting reported.
Dunne: Sure. Kind of like the idea that if you hire more law enforcement officers, crime statistics may go up, not because there are more criminals, but because there's more law enforcement out there catching them. Specifically in our community, Lane County and even parts of Eugene: do you see a disparity in need for services between the more rural and urban parts of our county?
Perlow: Well, we serve all of Lane County, and Lane County is huge. If somebody needs to come to Kids FIRST from Oakridge or Blue River or Florence, transportation can be a real barrier. We work to make sure we can reduce those barriers and help families get in. We have a van that's fondly called the golden chariot, which goes out to pick up families that need transportation in the nearby area, down as far as Cottage Grove. Beyond that, we help provide gas cards and look for ride-share opportunities to reduce the transportation barrier. But it is a barrier to be that far away from services, and an appointment at Kids FIRST can take as much as four hours. Families living on the outskirts of the county are pretty much spending an entire day.
Dunne: I've talked to many leaders in social service programs, and to a person, they've talked about the challenge of federal funding cuts. What are you seeing in terms of what you can get from the federal government, and whether that's been curtailed?
Perlow: The Victims of Crime Act funding, VOCA funding, has been at risk for a number of years now, because it came from criminal fines and judges have not been imposing as much financial burden on defendants, so the VOCA money has been drying up. There was legislation in Congress, House Resolution 909, that the House did pass to provide a funding source for VOCA, and it's sitting in the Senate now. If it doesn't pass, federal access to that money remains a challenge and it's going to be cut further. Medicaid also impacts us, because forensic interviews, medical exams and therapy are billable services through Medicaid. PacificSource leaving the Medicaid area in Lane County was a blow, and while we have a great relationship with Trillium, our case rate with them doesn't cover our actual costs. So we have to make up that money through federal grants, community grants, state funding or fundraising. We have a significant exposure from federal cuts.
Dunne: Patty, my last question: is there a general message you'd like listeners to take away from our conversation about the community's obligation to protect children?
Perlow: Well, I've always believed that it is our responsibility as a community to get every child to adulthood safely and to be a good community member. Something like Child Abuse Prevention Month is a great opportunity to talk about what we as a community can do to get all of the kids who live here to adulthood safely. One of the most important messages is to talk to your kids in age-appropriate ways about body safety and who you can talk to. Find five adults that you can identify on your five fingers that you could go to if something happened, or if you were worried about something happening. Communication. Watch out for your neighbors. We've become so siloed, and so much of our communication now is online as opposed to just in the neighborhood. Open your eyes. Watch out for your neighbors' kids, not spying on them, not tattling on them, but just being a good community member and helping get your kids to adulthood safely.
Dunne: That's a great message. She's Patty Perlow, executive director of Kids FIRST and former district attorney. Thank you so much for coming in and chatting with us.
Perlow: It has really been a pleasure.
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon On The Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Tomorrow on the show: believe it or not, some influencers and even those high up in the Make America Healthy Again movement are touting the health benefits of nicotine. We talk with an expert at the University of Oregon to separate fact from fiction. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon On The Record. Thanks for listening.
