Child Safety Network
What is the 'Child Safety Network' or 'CSN'?
The Child Safety Network is a non-profit organization that we started in 1989, so we're getting ready to go into our 19th year of national public service. Our main focus is to prevent child abuse, abduction and injury, and most of our board has branched out, not away from abduction prevention because we're very involved in that, but we're concentrating a lot more on paediatric injury prevention now. We've got about 17 million visits to emergency rooms every year by kids that are under 17, so the poisonings, drowning, bicycle accidents, and so many of the preventable injuries that happen to kids everyday are things that we develop a curriculum for. We provide that both for kids and for teachers across the country.
Why did you become a child safety advocate?
I've been involved with children's safety issues for about 22 years. I originally became involved in child safety when one of my best friend's sons was abducted and murdered. We didn't know he had been murdered at the time, we just knew he hadn't come home from school and at that time there were no resources available for locating missing kids. They weren't listed in the National Crime Information computer, there's no milk cartons or public service announcements, so I got hooked on the issues. I got very involved in missing children's issues originally and was actually an investigator locating missing kids for a few years and worked a lot in legislation to help with the Missing Children's Assistance Act of 1985, which formed the National Center for Missing and Exploited Kids.
What does CSN do?
Child Safety Network is a non-profit organization. We started in 1989, so we're getting ready to go into our 19th year of national public service. Our main focus is to prevent child abuse, abduction and injury.
How can I use CSN to protect my child?
What is CSN's connection to the PTA?
Well, CSN has been providing curriculum through the PTA for many, many years. The Parent-Teacher Association is the largest and oldest child advocacy organization in the United States. They're 111 years old. Fact: The PTA was founded to improve the lives and futures of all children. Because the PTA are so well organized, our distribution method of getting safety information to the kids and the parents usually works through the PTA. There's 15.5 million parents that go to schools that have a PTA, and 35 million kids. So, that's roughly half of all children K through 12 in the United States. So, when we come up with a new concept on how to teach stranger danger, or how to teach health or nutrition; we create the curriculum, we give it to the PTA, and they disseminate it to all the schools for us.
Why do I need a safety resource to protect my child?
The reason why it's important for parents to have safety information is because common sense isn't always that common. The types of things that are out there these days that are dangerous, a lot of people would never expect to be dangerous. For example, nobody would ever think, if they went down to the local ice cream store and signed up for a birthday club, that that could cause their child to be abducted and murdered. It certainly can, because the types of people who do the data entry on those are usually criminals. They are people who are incarcerated, and currently reside in jail. They are the cheapest labor you can get to put in data about kids. Parents don't know that, and there are hundreds and hundreds of little things like that. Safety information is out there because something happened to a parent; something happened to a child, and we want to share that information so that it doesn't happen to yours.
