CASA Training

I am in the middle of a 30 hour training for CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate). We meet for 5 weeks, training 6 hours per week and I have 2.5 weeks to go. My wonderful husband has been supportive of me despite the fact that I can’t always make dinner and seem to have less and less time. I love you Michael.

In our training, we are prepared to work with children who have been physically, emotional, or sexually abused, or who have grown up around a chemically dependent parent, or a parent with mental illness, or a parent who wants nothing to do with the child. Because CASAs are volunteers, we are trained quickly on things like addiction, community resources for the mentally ill, and how children end up in custody of the state.  

One of the key components in our training is discovering for ourselves which case(s) we cannot work with. Meaning which case would bother us so much personally and emotionally that it would push our buttons and we wouldn’t be able to handle it well. This is, of course, designed to weed out anything that we cannot handle and help us to know that before we get into a case that overwhelms us and we have to step down from it or from CASA all together.

After much thought, I have come to the conclusion that the type of case that I cannot work with is one with a parent who feels that he or she is religiously entitled to abuse or neglect his or her child(ren). An example would the 450 children who were taken from the Texas Ranch Cult a year ago or a child whose father feels he is called by God to instill discipline in his children by the use of force to the point of broken bones. I can’t represent kids like that, it pushes to many buttons in me. I feel, at this time, that I can represent a child in any other type of case, including physical abuse, just not abuse resulting from religious entitlement.

Throughout this process, one question has kept popping up from other people: How can I involve myself with cases involving abused and neglected children and report my observations to a judge? My answer is, how can I not? The court system isn’t perfect and families need a lot of help and some may never get better, but a non-perfect system isn’t a good enough reason for me to not help someone that I might be able to. Not every situation turns out perfect, but a CASA is someone who walks along side a child and who stays consistent until the outcome of a case. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to be a person like this in a child’s life, I just hope that I am good at it.