It started with a day-long mentorship. Appleton, Wisconsin teenager Katie Jadin had a chance, as part of a Bring Your Daughter to Work Day program sponsored by her Girl Scout chapter, to spend a day with a local professional woman. Jadin chose Mary Kleman, director of a sexual assault crisis center in town. The choice wound up determining the course of the next few years of Jadin’s life—as she worked to produce a special book, Why Me?, now used by local human service agencies to help child victims of sexual abuse.

To protect the privacy of clients, Kleman limited what Jadin could see during her job-shadowing day at the center to administrative duties, a staff meeting and a public relations video. Even so, Jadin was hooked. “I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to stay.” She promptly asked Kleman for a volunteer position.

The Youngest Volunteer
Kleman initially hesitated to bring Jadin, who was then only 14, on board. “We had never had anyone as young as Katie volunteer for us,” says Kleman. She assigned Jadin to a Monday evening support group for children ages between the ages of four and 13, where Jadin would be under the watchful eye of two of the centers most seasoned counselors.

It turned out that Jadin’s age was the difference that many children needed to help them open up. Kleman says that a child’s abuser, usually an adult relative or friend, often shatters the child’s trust for adults. “If they can’t trust the ones who supposedly love them, how can they trust anyone?” explains Kleman. “Katie was not only non-threatening, but non-judgmental. Kids felt comfortable confiding in her.”

As she got to know the kids, Jadin was struck by their harrowing stories and their universal feelings of guilt. “She had trouble understanding how some perpetrators could be so horrible to these kids,” says Jadin’s mom, Ann Jadin. Most of all, Jadin wished the kids could understand that it was not their fault—and that they are not alone. (According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2002 nearly 90,000 children were sexually abused.)

Filling a Need
While she found plenty of resources for adult victims, Jadin found little that she could give to kids to help them understand what they were going through. So she came up with the idea of developing a book to help kids cope with the devastation of child sexual abuse.

The book, called Why Me? is laid out like a workbook. Jadin worked on it for a year, with help and advice from Kleman and staff at her agency, the Sexual Assault Crisis Center Fox Cities, Inc.; staff of the Outagamie County Human Services Department, and Jadin’s mother, occupational therapist Ann Jadin.

“Every day she was on that computer, plugging away to get it done,” says Ann Jadin. Katie Jadin, now 17, has a pretty busy schedule—a senior at Appleton High School, she is active in her church youth group, volunteers at a local nursing home, captains the school women’s tennis team, sings with an ensemble, and serves as a peer mediator.

Jadin won a grant from the local United Way, and convinced a nearby community college to offer free publishing services. In the end, 1,000 copies of the book were published. Kleman and her staff provided oversight of the content of the book, while Ann Jadin, who works as an occupational therapist, and staff from Outagamie County Human Services proofed it for accuracy.

Area social service agencies and hospitals, introduced to the book by Kleman during meetings of the Outagamie County Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault, use it as a take-home resource for sexually abused kids.

“Right on Target”
She’s right on target with it,” says Jennifer Shimek, a social worker and child protection intake worker for Outagamie County Human Services. Shimek says most of the literature for child sexual abuse victims is developed to help adults support the child. Until Why Me? few resources were available for the kids themselves. “We would talk to the parents and give them suggestions and referrals, but there was never a book for the kids that says: ‘Now that this has happened, this is how to work through it.’”

Kids love it. “One girl saw it the first day I brought it to the center and wanted to be the first to get it,” says Jadin. The workbook format is familiar to kids who might be overwhelmed by materials with serious or technical language—it looks much like a child’s activity and coloring book.

The book features a word-search; a place where children can draw faces that represent their feelings; a discussion of what happens at court, and a picture of a hand upon which kids can write the name of a person they can trust on each of the fingers.

Two full pages are devoted to quotes from other children. Comments like: “I don’t want to talk about what happened,” and “I was scared to go to court,” help kids understand that they aren’t alone in their experience and that their feelings are normal.

On one page, children are encouraged to draw a self-portrait with the reassurance that “you cannot tell by the way a person looks that they’ve been abused.” Jadin wants kids to know that “they are just like any other kids,” in spite of what they’ve gone through.

Youth Speaking to Youth
Kleman thinks the children’s book benefits from Jadin’s own youth. An adult could assemble a similar book, says Kleman, but it wouldn’t be the same. Katie’s empathy and concern for the kids, which was nurtured in her work at the center, comes out strongly in the book, says Kleman.

While Jadin’s goal was to create something that kids could relate to, the workbook format also invites parent and child interaction, helping bridge what is often a gaping hole of unexpressed feelings between family members.

“Kids would come to the center and work through what happened and they’d go home to a whole different life,” says Jadin. Why Me? helps children continue the work on their own time, in their own environment; and perhaps most importantly, with their parents. “It can be used to open communications,” says Kleman. “Parents know their child has been abused, but sometimes parents don’t know how to talk about it.”

“It’s really opened my eyes about so many needs out there,” says Jadin. Since publishing Why Me? Jadin has decided to devote her career to helping others, either as a social worker or a teacher. For her work on the book Jadin was recently awarded the Girl Scout Gold Award Young Women of Distinction. The award was given this year to only 10 of the 2.8 million Girl Scouts and included a $1000 scholarship and a weeklong celebration in Washington, D.C.

“Katie’s project affected hundreds of kids in her community, but the numbers do not always determine the real impact,” says Girl Scout of the USA Interim CEO Jackie Barnes, “Katie is helping one child at a time to discover their self-worth and reach their potential.”

Resources:

• Visit the Connect for Kids topic pages on Child Abuse and Neglect.

Talk Back

If you’ve got comments or questions about this story, we’d like to hear them. Send your response to Susan Phillips.

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Andrea Grazzini Walstrom is a freelance writer in Burnsville,
Minnesota.