Dr. Sandra Bloom, associate professor at Drexel University’s School of Public Health and founder of the Sanctuary programs, and Brian Farragher, chief operating officer of ANDRUS, have come out with their long-awaited Restoring Sanctuary: A New Operating System for Trauma-Informed Systems of Care. ANDRUS provides services for families and children in New York State’s Westchester County, and also operates the Sanctuary Institute.

Restoring Sanctuary is the third in a trilogy. Creating Sanctuary, written by Bloom, focused on the Sanctuary Model of Care itself, and how it evolved. More than 200 organizations have adopted the Sanctuary model. Destroying Sanctuary, written by Bloom and Farragher, showed how organizational trauma is destroying the U.S. health care system. Restoring Sanctuary provides a roadmap for organizations to transform themselves into safe and trauma-informed environments.

Last week in New York City, about 100 people turned out at a book party for Restoring Sanctuary. In a write-up on PelhamPatch.com, Farragher was quoted as saying that Destroying Sanctuary “described the formidable barriers to providing effective mental health and social services to our clients and issued a call for reform and recovery.  This new volume takes that next step.  We see it as a roadmap to recovery for our nation’s human service organizations.”

Another book, Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren’t Being Fooled, by University of Oregon psychology

professor Dr. Jennifer Freyd and clinical psychologist Pamela Birrell, who teaches at the University of Oregon, will be published on Monday. It provides examples of why organizations, agencies, and society as a whole might want to adopt the Sanctuary model.

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In Britain, where officials are dealing with 450 people who have come forward to say that Jimmy Savile abused them when they were children, there’s more awareness, and thus finally more reporting of child abuse. Nevertheless, society still flinches from dealing with it, as The Guardian pointed out in an editorial, “Child abuse: Speaking the unspeakable“. It noted that the world is still doing what Freud had done a hundred years ago: recoiling from the common and damaging child maltreatment that occurs to millions of children daily, and falling into a type of societal dissociation by pretending the problem simply doesn’t exist.

The editorial explained that one of the hurdles that officialdom had to move past in prosecuting child abuse cases was the belief the “child witnesses could not be trusted”. Britain appears to have moved past that, but there’s one more systematic flaw:

Namely, an unwillingness to take seriously the complaints of youngsters who exhibit exactly the sort of symptoms of mental ill health – drinking, self-harm, extreme reticence – that can be caused by this abuse.

Around the U.S., other efforts are underway to make reporting child abuse easier.

In 2011 in Oregon, 75,000 cases of child abuse or neglect were recorded; 710 of those were in Lane County. The county has set a goal of reducing child abuse and neglect 90 percent by 2030. The 90by30 Project’s first annual conference begins tomorrow. The project was launched by the University of Oregon College of Education. According to this story on KVAL.com:

“It’s more the idea of taking the responsibility for that intervention away from that handful of people in government or non-profits and putting it where it belongs with each of us,” said 90by30 program director Phyllis Barkhurst.

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