KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) -
As former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky awaits sentencing, a local task force is hoping to end child sex abuse right here in the Kansas City metro.
The Sandusky case may be bringing more attention to the issue of child abuse, but people with the task force that met at Crown Center Saturday said people need to focus the microscope of the issue closer to home.
Experts said they are hoping that the Sandusky trial and its public nature will help bring a paradigm shift to get people talking about the prevalence of child sexual abuse in our own community.
Experts from law enforcement, health, and mental health fields talked about concrete ways to secure funding for programs in schools, public health, and home visits with parents. Saturday's meeting was one of four across the state to help come up with recommendations for legislative changes to come out in fall of 2012.
Experts said child victims of sexual abuse have a lifetime of social, health and sometimes even criminal problems, making it an underreported issue that affects the entire community.
"It's not an unusual scenario at all for a child to tell a parent or a person they trust that they've been abused and the parent to sweep it under the rug or ignore it because they don't want to deal with that issue, and that's the sort of culture shift we have to take on because people have to realize that just because it may be inconvenient or challenging to deal with this issue, doesn't mean that you can ignore it or not address the issue," Dr. Jim Anderst with Children's Mercy Hospital said.
People at Saturday's meeting said one good finding that they had is that there are already a lot of people working on the issue of child sexual abuse in the community, but they don't have a lot of funding or government support. The idea of the task force is to provide the structure and make the efforts already ongoing a lot more effective.
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