Oakville Resident Fights Back Against Child Abuse

When Oakville resident Rene Howitt began fighting for custody of her nephew and his half sister nine years ago, she thought the focus would be on the kids. It wasn’t, and now she’s trying to change that. But she’s not trying to put the focus on the kids in the courtroom. Instead, her focus is on the kids in the classroom. 

Two years ago Howitt started COPE24 (Changing Our Parenting Experience), a nonprofit organization that teaches high school and middle school students how to handle stressful parenting situations with two goals in mind: to reduce the number of child abuse or neglect cases and reduce the number of teen pregnancies.

But the story of COPE24 begins six years ago, when Howitt and her husband picked up the phone to call child protective services. Howitt had raised three daughters of her own, but suddenly she found herself being the caretaker for her nephew and his half sister once their parents where no longer fit to care for the children.

Over the next few years, the Howitts were in and out of courtrooms as they fought for full custody of the children, only to have the children returned to their mom.

Early on, Howitt had been told she should take notes of everything that was happening, all the dysfunction she was seeing within the foster care system. Eventually those notes manifested themselves into a book, titled Whose Best Interest: A Fight to Save Two American Kids.

That book opened a lot of doors for Howitt, including one to the Missouri Children's Justice Task Force. She’s held a seat on that board for four years now.

It was after joining the board that Howitt decided her book wasn’t enough. Since she couldn’t write the solution she wanted, maybe she could create it.

According to the Missouri Department of Social Services, there are more than three million reports of child abuse/neglect recorded in the U.S. each year. And in 2010, more than 83,000 reports occurred in Missouri.

But often, the parents behind the abuse aren’t monsters.

“It’s spontaneous,” Howitt said. “They don’t know how to cope with the situation, and they’re stressed because of work or relationships, and the kid walks into the line of fire.”

When the reports are written up, each case falls into one of several categories of abuse: physical, psychological, sexual and neglect.

Out of all of those, neglect accounts for a majority of reported cases each year.

And of those cases, abuse occurs most often before the child is even 5 years old.

Those numbers leave Howitt with a definite sense of urgency, because many of the parents doing the abusing are often kids themselves.

In 2008, Missouri’s birthrate for girls between the ages of 15-19 was 45.5. That’s higher than the national average of 41.5, according to the Center for Disease Control.

So Howitt decided if she couldn’t change the parents, maybe she could change the children.

“It occurred to me that maybe we should be trying to reach our youth before they become parents,” she said.  “And give them situations they’ll face as parents and talk about how they would handle those situations.”

So Howitt began taking her book and her message into schools.

“We found a recording of the crying Baby Mia Doll,” said Laura Thomas, part of the COPE24 team. “She would turn it on for five minute… oh my gosh the impact it had on those kids.”

Howitt would then explain, that the doll was very similar to parenthood.

She would walk the students through ways to cope with the crying and the exhaustion, ways that didn’t involve shaking or hurting the baby.

As Howitt’s message spread, so did teachers' interest in bringing that message into their classrooms.

So Howitt began collaborating with teachers and therapists to develop curriculum that could be taught to students. Teacher’s handbooks and student workbooks were made. Howitt also made 16 DVDs that touched on 10 of the most common and the most frustrating situations parents face from dealing with a crying baby to knowing if your child is telling the truth.

Howitt planned on taking her the videos into high schools, but soon teachers were requesting the material be used in eighth and ninth grade as well.

The thought was, as Howitt said, “Maybe we can tap into our teen pregnancy problem.”

It might sound premature to take parenting material into a middle school, but Howitt has met moms who are as young as 13.

At one of Howitt’s presentations, a 13-year-old girl raised her hand to say she had recently given birth to twins.

But these are the stories Howitt is all too familiar with. These are the stories that prompted her to take action.

“Students would come up to me during lunch or in between class and talk to me about what was happening in their lives right now,” she said. “That just ate at me.”

By now Howitt has spoken in more than 160 public schools in Missouri. And if she’s learned anything, it’s that kids aren’t as naive as we think.

“Our children know so much more than we did,” she said. “They come to life when you show them the videos. It’s because they’re living it right now as kids.”

Each video is five minutes long and shows a situation that escalates to the point of physical abuse. That’s when Howitt stops the video to talk with the students about what went wrong, and better ways the parent could have handled things.

Michelle Wood, who teaches social studies at , makes sure these conversations continue even after Howitt has left.

“Students are almost always surprised by the information,” Wood said.

Wood is also able to take away some tips from the class. A mother of a 6-year-old girl and a 15-month baby boy, Wood is all too familiar with the pains of parenthood. The lack of sleep, the constant crying, the overall exhaustion, Wood knows these topics well.

But even though she's an adult, the responsibilities and struggles of being a mother were not always easy to deal with.

“You have to learn all this quickly,” she said. “But then you also have to live your life. That’s reality and that’s what most parents don’t talk to their kids about.”

That’s what Howitt is hoping to change. Her goal isn’t to scare kids away from having sex, they wouldn’t listen to her anyways, she said.

And her goal isn’t to point fingers and tell students that their parents are doing something wrong. Her goal is to provide students with the information they need to one day be good parents.