By Brian Craddock
This month, third-year students in the child and youth worker program have been going out raising awareness about child abuse as part of their class work.
Chances are if you walked through campus on Fridays in recent weeks, you saw students wearing purple – the official color of child abuse awareness month – out at booths across Algonquin’s Woodroffe campus.
Refrigerator magnets, bracelets, and pamphlets detailing the specifics of child abuse and what people can do to stop it were among the items students were distributing. These resources were both made by the students themselves, and given to them by the Ottawa division of the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) to distribute.
The students also had a large anti-child abuse banner for people to sign that, at the end of their two hour shift, was almost completely covered in the signatures of dozens upon dozens of people pledging their support to fight abuse.
The pamphlets the students distributed also explained various aspects of child abuse like the types and cycle of abuse, as well as explaining what signs people should look for when trying to identify people who they think may potentially be victims of abuse.
“As part of our work as child and youth workers, we work a lot with vulnerable populations such as children, so this is something we feel really strongly about” said student Carissa Mask.
Response from the college’s population was great, according to the students.
“We’ve had a lot of people come by,” said Marie Dallaire, a student working with Mask and Poulain, “and they’ve expressed a lot of emotions” about what the students were doing.
Dallaire added that during their time raising out awareness, they even had some people who walked up to their table and talked about their own history of child abuse: “A person came up to one of our people and disclosed her history of abuse,” she said that it was “amazing to hear people’s stories,” and how they’d triumphed and ultimately overcame their problems.
Dallaire added that she found it extremely inspiring to have people walk up to them and applaud their work. “We’ve had a lot of emotional responses.” added Mask.
Despite the students’ focus being on raising awareness, the students were also accepting donations for groups like the Ottawa division on the CAS. At the end of their two hour drive on Friday, Oct. 17, Dallaire reported that they had raised $112.80.
At the end of the four weeks that the child and youth worker students are out raising awareness, Dallaire explained that the donations that all the groups of students receive are going to be donated to the Ottawa division of the CAS, to aid in the fight against child abuse.