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Chicago-area Advocate program helps children recover from sexual abuse

For months, Erin Hagerty tried to get the young boy to open up about his traumatic past. Instead, he spent entire sessions avoiding eye contact, staring at the wall and refusing to speak.

But Hagerty, a clinical psychologist with the Advocate Childhood Trauma Treatment Program didn’t give up on the child, who had been abandoned by his parents and sexually abused by multiple relatives. She built predictable routines — like starting sessions with a joke — into each meeting. She offered him choices in activities, which helped him feel more in control.

In time, the boy learned to trust Hagerty and began sharing his feelings and experiences, while he and his new adoptive family learned how to work together. Eighteen months later, Hagerty said the young boy’s smiling, playful and trusting personality epitomizes the importance of work done by the Advocate Childhood Trauma Treatment Program, one of only a few agencies in Illinois specializing in mental health treatment for children who have suffered trauma or sexual abuse.

“With such a heavy topic — sexual abuse — it’s easy to get discouraged, or look at the negative,” Hagerty said. “Something the work has really taught me is how, with proper treatment, children are very resilient individuals.”

The Advocate Childhood Trauma Treatment Program, a division of Advocate Charitable Foundation, is one of many programs that receive financial support from Chicago Tribune Charities, a McCormick Foundation fund.

Since the program was developed in 1979 at the request of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, it has offered specialized and comprehensive psychotherapy and support to hundreds of children and their families each year. Today, the program operates out of centers in Oak Lawn and Bolingbrook.

With 1 in 10 children sexually abused before the age of 18, such programs are crucial to helping children who experience chronic abuse to combat the cascade of devastating effects that can shatter their lives. Children who experience severe trauma can develop a range of problems, from attachment disorders to extreme behavioral problems that make them hard to raise — even by dedicated caregivers, said Dr. Gene Carroccia, the program’s clinical director.

“When children have this severe trauma, their whole lives get affected,” Carroccia said. “If they can’t get help, they can become dysfunctional members of society.”

But clinical work is not the only way the nonprofit works to treat the sexual abuse of children. The center also provides specialized training to postdoctoral students and medical residents, which, in the last decade, has allowed more than 100 interns to bring expertise to domestic violence resource facilities and other centers around the country.

In 2008, through a special grant, the Advocate Childhood Trauma Treatment Program began offering two-hour workshops that teach police officers, teachers, nurses, community leaders and other adults to recognize and respond to sexual abuse. The training, which has been offered to 1,600 adults to date, is an important necessary step in stopping and preventing the sexual abuse of children.

“The whole topic itself has only come to light in the public’s view in the last 10 or 15 years,” said Dr. John Smith, executive director. “It was very much a hidden problem.”

Carroccia said he and other staff at the center feel the importance of the work every time they see a breakthrough in a child, who may have at first seemed unreachable. That was the case with the young boy this year, who now comes to sessions with his own jokes to share.

“He is really a different child now. He still has a lot of work to go, and we don’t have magic wands here,” Carroccia said. “But this is a child that can smile, that can laugh. … Through this patient process, his personality has really emerged.”

vortiz@tribpub.com

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