Countywide : Campaign Against Child Abuse Begins

The Child Abuse Prevention Council of Orange County this week launched its second annual Blue Ribbon Community Action Campaign to increase awareness and prevention of child abuse.

Council officials plan to pass out 50,000 blue ribbons this year for people to wear as a symbol of support for abused children.

Charlotte Lopez, 17, who is Miss Teen USA, said she was an abused child who lived in several foster homes for 13 years until she was adopted last month. She told her story Wednesday to a roomful of local dignitaries and children at the Children’s Museum at La Habra.

Lopez, of Dorset, Vt., said the public needs to become aware of child abuse to be moved to do something about it.

“My mother, who was an alcoholic, neglected me, my sister and my brother. I was 2 years old and I still remember how I was malnourished and mistreated until police took me away from my mother,” she said. “People don’t like to hear these stories because they’re too painful, but they need to be made aware. That’s what these ribbons are all about.”

Barbara Oliver, the council’s director, added: “People feel overwhelmed with the issue of child abuse and don’t think they can help. But pinning a blue ribbon on is something everybody can do.”

Oliver said the goal is to change public behavior by making child abuse unacceptable. In addition, the council plans to emphasize prevention through education, she said.

More than 15 seminars on topics ranging from incest to children’s views of abuse and therapy for abuse survivors will be offered by the council at colleges and high schools throughout the county until May 5.

The campaign is a grass-roots effort that began when a Virginia woman, Bonnie Finney, tied a blue ribbon to the antenna of her car after her grandson died from parental beatings in 1989, Oliver said. “She chose the color blue to symbolize the battered and bruised body of her grandson.”

About 38,000 cases of child abuse were reported in Orange County in 1993--more than triple the number of cases a decade ago, officials said.

“The problem isn’t going away,” said Deborah Vaswani, a council board member. “So we need to stop child abuse from happening in the first place.”

During the press conference, council officials also announced the winner of their poster contest, which was open to all Orange County elementary schoolchildren.

Lisa Higuchi, a fifth-grade student at Crown Valley Elementary School in Laguna Niguel, won the contest for her picture of a family reaching for a heart. Her poster will be displayed in local businesses, libraries and schools and on T-shirts.