In their shoes: Community leaders support efforts to prevent child abuse

Four hundred and three pairs of children’s shoes lined the Cache County Council Chambers as community members streamed inside for a presentation on preventing child abuse in Cache County.

Each pair symbolized a substantiated case of child abuse and neglect — an image that hung over the National Child Abuse Prevention Month event Steppin’ Up For Children today at noon.

“Each of these pairs of shoes has a story,” said Esterlee Molyneux, the executive director of The Family Place, a local non-profit organization which hosted the event to kick off its month-long effort to raise awareness. “Our goal — our full mission — is to strengthen families and to protect children. We are all here today because we believe in keeping our children safe.”

Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes was the keynote speaker at the event.

“For far too many children,” Reyes said, “living in that environment is like living in a storm.”

The Family Place, he said, is a sanctuary from the storm.

With a new facility under construction in Logan, the event was focused on continued efforts and goals to increase the organization’s reach and capacity.

Molyneux said the organization served more than 8,500 community members in 2015. The most prevalent form of child abuse in Cache County, she said, is child endangerment, followed by child sex abuse.

Reyes said the Attorney General’s Office specializes in getting people out of abusive situations. But that, he said, “is like investing in ambulances at the bottom of the cliff.”

Molyneux’s team members, he said, “are the fences at the top of the cliff to try to prevent any abuse from ever beginning to occur.”

Utah Sen. Lyle Hillyard said the children’s shoes “should remind us that we have a long way to go.”

“It is not just my responsibility as a father to raise my children and grandchildren correctly,” he said, “but it is my obligation as a citizen of this valley to reach out and to help people. Maybe I can stand tall by bending down and helping.”

Molyneux urged the audience to do more, to reach out, and to lift others up around them.

“I personally will not be satisfied,” she said, “until there is not one pair of shoes up here.”