April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, which makes blue the color of the day … and the month.

Saint Francis Ministries is kicking off this annual opportunity to raise awareness about child abuse prevention by wearing blue on April 5, and on other Fridays throughout the month.

We hope you’ll join us!

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

• Child abuse and neglect are common. At least 1 in 7 children have experienced child abuse or neglect in the past year in the United States. This is likely an underestimate because many cases are unreported. In 2020, 1,750 children died of abuse and neglect in the United States.
• Children living in poverty experience more abuse and neglect. Experiencing poverty can place a lot of stress on families, which may increase the risk for child abuse and neglect. Rates of child abuse and neglect are 5 times higher for children in families with low socioeconomic status.

Unfortunately, many children and youth served by Saint Francis Ministries come from low socioeconomic households.

We all can contribute to making our communities safer places for children and families by raising awareness about child abuse prevention. By ensuring that parents have the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to care for their children, we can help promote the social and emotional well-being of children and youth and prevent child maltreatment within families and communities.

The good news is that there exist effective ways each of us can help.

Explore those ways by checking out the 2023-2024 Prevention Resource Guide at the U.S. government’s Child Welfare Information Gateway.

Surely, we can all agree that no child deserves to be neglected or abused. Working together, we can keep kids in our communities safe, secure, healthy, and loved.

Saint Francis Ministries has worked for nearly 80 years to do just that. Consider joining us in our life-affirming work as a foster, kinship, or adoptive parent.

Or you can help in other ways. Visit the Saint Francis Foundation to see how.

Lubbock staff joined some of our community partners from various agencies at Covenant Children’s for their annual ribbon tying ceremony in honor of child abuse prevention month. Trees around the hospital were lit up with blue lights and 735 ribbons were tied to the fence in front of the building to represent the number of children in Lubbock county who were victims of child abuse last year. The 5 white kites placed in the middle of the ribbons represent the 5 lives lost last year in our region to child abuse.