Braving the Cold for Youth with Disabilities
Northern Lights Child Advocacy Center's Executive Director, Sarah Zyburt, will be braving the icy waters in the 2024 Marquette County Polar Plunge Event. This fun annual event raises funds for Special Olympics Michigan to provide children and adults with disabilities the opportunity to get together, be active, and shine. Special Olympics Michigan builds awareness around the unique needs and challenges faced by people with disabilities, as well as highlighting their resiliency and joy. Northern Lights Child Advocacy supports the mission of Special Olympics and is excited for the opportunity to partner and support this cause!
This partnership brings up an important advocacy point that is critical to Northern Light CAC’s work in protecting children from harm. Children and youth with disabilities are at increased risk for victimization and abuse. Offenders often target youth with disabilities, especially youth with cognitive impairments that impact their ability to communicate when they've experienced harm. Because of this targeted abuse, offenders often go on abusing children for prolonged periods of time. Through prevention education, we can help caregivers to recognize warning signs of abuse, coercion, manipulation, or isolation, to better protect youth with disabilities.
“Children with IDD have characteristics and experiences that put them at higher risk for trauma. These risk factors include varied cognitive abilities, physical limitations, and reduced communication skills. Specifically,
Communication and language barriers can make it harder for the child to tell others what is going on. Often, changes in behavior that may be symptoms of trauma can be mistakenly attributed to a child’s disability, unintentionally masking harm that may be happening to them.
Children with IDD are more often exposed to repeated medical procedures and hospitalizations. These may entail pain, stress, and fear.
Children with IDD often have multiple caregivers (home-care workers, residential staff, family members, and school staff, among others), some of whom may exploit them and cause repeated trauma with long-term consequences.
Children with IDD are less likely to be believed due to their disability. Simply being viewed as different may increase the risk for trauma.” [1]
Northern Lights Child Advocacy Center is currently developing free community education programs to address consent, body safety, recognizing power imbalance, protecting children from harm, and much more. Stay in touch, and subscribe to get updates as we roll out these services.
Please be sure to check out the 2024 Marquette County Polar Plunge Event to support this great cause. Donate, or register to take the plunge yourself. Come see Sarah take the plunge on March 16th, 2:30 PM at the Up North Lodge.
[1] Horton, C., Evans, N., Charkowski, R., D’Amico, P., Gomez, M., R., Henderson Bethel, T., Kraps, J., Vogel, J., and Youde, J. (2021)Children with intellectual and developmental disabilities can experience traumatic stress: A fact sheet for parents and caregivers. Los Angeles, CA, and Durham, NC: National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.
