Children's support worker Jenna Threinen of the Medicine Hat Women's Shelter Society. (Photo Courtesy of Colton McKee)

By Chris Brown

Family violence

Uptick in children accessing women’s shelter outreach program

Jul 16, 2020 | 4:51 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB – One goal of the Medicine Hat Women’s Shelter Society is to end the cycle of violence wherever they can, and much of that work focuses on reaching children.

Throughout the spring and summer months, the number of children accessing the shelter’s outreach programs has risen by an average of nine children per month compared to 2019, including a jump of 12 children already in July.

Support workers for the curriculum-based Children’s Outreach Program work one-on-one with children who have been impacted and affected by family violence.

“We talk about feelings, coping, boundaries, we look at relationships — what’s healthy, what’s unhealthy — we do safety planning,” says child support worker Jenna Threinen. “We talk about different types of abuse, we do talk about family violence and we talk about ways that children have resisted abuse.”

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Threinen says making sure children are safe at home and elsewhere is a big part of the program, and sometimes it’s just a matter of guiding them along

“Working with kids we’re seeing that they know how to safety plan. They’ve been keeping themselves safe whether that be in the family, at school, maybe there’s bullies. They already know how to keep themselves safe. We’re just expanding on that safety planning,” she said. “They can identify after meeting a couple of times who their safe people are. They know addresses, they know phone numbers they know where to go if they need help.”

Among her most memorable successes, Threinen has seen transformations among the children she’s worked with in areas of self-confidence and anger management.

Natasha Carvalho, executive director of the shelter, attributes the uptick in use of the program to COVID and everyone spending more time at home have added stress to families.

“Home’s not always a safe place for (kids),” she said. “Staff were really struggling trying to connect with those kids during those first couple of months especially because they couldn’t make the calls, they couldn’t come in to see their workers. So we were worried about a lot of those kids but we’re really thankful now that they are able to access them now.”

The Medicine Hat Women’s Shelter Society also has outreach programs for tweens and youth.

Children accessing the program (2019 in parentheses)

April 2020 31 (21)

May 2020 35 (28)

June 2020 32 (26)

July 2020 35 (23)