297 – Stop Blaming The Victim, with Dr. Amelia Franck Meyer

Dr. Sandie Morgan looks back at Episode 28 "Stop Blaming the Victim" with, Dave Stachowiak and Amelia Franck Meyer. The three discuss the prevalence of victim blaming against commercially sexually exploited children, how it affects the children, and how to help them.

Dr. Amelia Franck Meyer

When we first interviewed Dr. Amelia Franck Meyer, she was the CEO of Anu Family Services, a child welfare agency located in 90 different counties in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Now, Amelia Franck Meyer serves as Anu's Senior Strategic Advisor and is the founder and CEO of Alia. Alia provides innovations for people and systems impacted by childhood trauma and is a strategic partner of Anu Family Services. Amelia is leading a movement to create a child welfare system where both caregivers and children can thrive. She has worked throughout the United States and internationally, promoting her ideas to change the way children welfare systems work. Amelia Franck Meyer also brought together professionals at the University of Minnesota, where she received her master's degree in social work, to create Youth Connections Scale and Wellbeing Indicator Tool for Youth, two tools largely used in the child welfare sphere.

Key Points

Terms like "teen prostitute" and "child prostitute" are incorrect and dangerous as they suggest youth were voluntarily involved.

Blaming victims instead of seeing them as children who are in need of protection adds to the harm these youth have already experienced.

A lot of the youth being found in these circumstances are children who were already in the Foster care system. Because these children felt that they had no protection in the system, from the lack of adult connection, they took it upon themselves to find protection.

When commercially sexually exploited youth are found, they have already had their innocence taken from them, however, they also lost the time they should have had doing things with their families and friends.

Resources

Anu Family Services

Olive Crest

Dr. Darla Henry's 3-5-7 Model

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Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:00

You're listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode 297.

Welcome back! My name is Sandie Morgan. Producing this podcast, dedicated to studying the issues, being a voice, and making a difference takes a team. We're saying another goodbye, this time to Idalis Moscoso, who has served as blog editor, organizer, wonderful website content provider. She's going off to Italy for grad school and we wish her well. And, we're welcoming on board Nadia Sosa. When I asked Nadia recently what her favorite episode has been during her onboarding, she quickly responded, "number 28!" I immediately knew what she was talking about and I want everyone to revisit it with us. You'll be listening now to Dr. Amelia Franck, in Episode 28, "Stop Blaming the Victim." The bonus is that you will also get to hear Dave again throughout this interview. Okay now, let's get to the episode. Here's me introducing our guest.

Let me introduce Amelia Franck Meyer, she has been the CEO of Anu Family Services since 2001. That's a child welfare agency located in Wisconsin and Minnesota. For those of you who listened to the last podcast, we were talking about not calling these kids terms that put them into juvenile delinquency, but finding the opportunities and making opportunities by giving them designations that place them squarely in a child welfare context.