Jill Starishevsky | My Body Belongs to Me

September 3, 2009

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! I’ve got four guests on the show today. At then end of the show we’re going to have Dale Anger, who’s one of the best fiddlers of our whole time. He’s done work with the Turtle Island String Quartet, amazing group, and before that we’ve got two best selling authors, Michael Port, who’s the author of Book Yourself Solid, and a new book we’re going to talk about with him, all about manifestos, thinking big manifestos. And I’ve got Michael Gates Gill, the author of How Starbucks Saved My Life, and he’s a best selling author as well. He’s going to talk to us later on in the show. But at the beginning, I’m very excited to talk to an author of a book called My Body Belongs To Me. She is an assistant District Attorney in New York City, and it’ll be fantastic speaking to her about children, and also about sort of the craziness of New York that we all see on television, but now we can hear about first hand. So welcome to the show Jill Starishevsky.

Jill Starishevsky: Thank you for having me, very good pronunciation of my last name.

Dr. Kent: I was about to ask that. Good, good. So tell me a little about you background, what a, it’s a hard job that you have, right?

Jill Starishevsky: Yes, I prosecute sex crimes against children, as well as sex crimes against adults, and child abuse as well. So all of those things are kind of sad and difficult. I’ve been doing it in New York City for almost 12 years now, and I find that as long as I don’t think about what I’m doing, I can move forward. But if I spend too much time thinking about it, it weighs me down. Otherwise I just think of it as helping people, and I can push forward and get the job done. It’s really quite exciting work, but sometimes it’s not dinner conversation. Dr. Kent, did I lose you? Hello?

Dr. Kent: Hello, and welcome back to Sound Authors. We’re back on the air after some technical difficulties, and I believe now I also have Jill back on the line. Sorry about those difficulties, we’ve got you back.

Jill Starishevsky: No worries, happy to be here.

Dr. Kent: So let’s go back where we were, and we were talking about, you had said that it’s a difficult job, and I surely understand. My father actually works with child abuse kids, and specializes in neglect and shaken baby, and all sorts of things, and it’s a horrible thing to hear folks that are in that industry, well, I shouldn’t call it an industry, in that service talk about the horrors that happen to these children. How do you go to sleep at night?

Jill Starishevsky: You go to sleep by not thinking about it. You just do as much as you can during the day, and when you go home you pray, and you pray for the kids that you dealt with, and you just go to work and you start again the next day. I have to say, some of the hardest cases that I’ve had to deal with are the shaken baby cases, because you just ask yourself, who would do this? How could someone do this to a child? Those are particularly difficult now that I’m a mother, but overall, the child (inaudible) and the sex abuse against adults, it’s very, it’s difficult work, to say the least.

Dr. Kent: And part of that, I imagine, is what inspires you to write a book like My Body Belongs to Me. Talk about that.

Jill Starishevsky: Well, absolutely. One of the things I learned early on in doing this is that children don’t disclose immediately when they’ve been sexually abused. People think that if a child falls down on a playground they’re going to come running over to the parent and say, “Oh, I hurt my knee.” And they try and draw a parallel and say, “Well, of course if my child were, God forbid, sexually abused, they would come running and tell me.” But it doesn’t work like that. And in so many of the cases, the children that I’m seeing have endured years of abuse in silence. And I decided after years and years of seeing this that something needed to be done. And there was one case in particular that really sparked this book, that was really the catalyst for me to write this book.

Dr. Kent: And now, let’s talk just a second about, one thing I’ve heard, and I’m pretty sure is true, is that most… And here we are again, back live again on BlogTalk Radio. Clearly there’s some connection problems today, but luckily we’re still live with the incredibly author Jill Starishevsky and the book My Body Belongs to Me. We’ve had some difficulties, but we’re persisting here.

Jill Starishevsky: We shall overcome.

Dr. Kent: Yeah, so tell me more, right where we left off. I’d love to know more about this book. How can we keep our children safe, and the question I’ve asked, I had heard that most domestic violence does occur within families.

Jill Starishevsky: Well, domestic violence is the violence within the family, that’s inherent in the definition of domestic violence, but most child abuse often does occur with either inter family, or with someone who’s a close family relationship, because someone has to have access to your child. So the person who’s going to be alone with your child and therefore able to hurt them or touch them is someone who you trust to take care of them, whether it’s a soccer coach, a religious official, it’s someone who you trust to be alone with your child. So it’s the kind of thing where a lot of people think, “Well, this isn’t going to happen to my child,” so they don’t talk to their children about how to prevent child sexual abuse. They don’t teach them what it is, that their bodies are private, that no one should be touching them, and therefore, if they are touched, oftentimes children don’t know who to tell, and therefore the abuse continues and often escalates.

Dr. Kent: And what has it been like after writing this book? What’s it like being in touch with children and parents in this way?

Jill Starishevsky: Well, you know, it’s actually been wonderful because I feel like in my role as a prosecutor I get to the children after they’ve already been hurt, and there’s nothing I can do to prevent that hurt. All I can do is work and move forward to try to get justice against the person who did this to the child, but having written this book, this is like a proactive step that I can take to try and help prevent the abuse from happening in the first place, help encourage a child who already has been abused and is continuing to be abused to get the courage to disclose and tell someone. So the book is very simple, it’s a 22-line rhyme, and it tells the story of a child who is touched by an uncle’s friend, and then tells a parent right away, and the parents praise the child for being brave enough to tell, and it’s a message that’s empowering for children. So although we as parents come to the subject with a lot of baggage, children hear this story and it’s light and easy to hear, in child-friendly language, and they walk away understanding that their body parts are private and that if someone touches them inappropriately to tell a parent or a teacher right away.

Dr. Kent: Well, and it is, it’s such a difficult discussion for parents to even have with their kids, and that’s part of the problem, right?

Jill Starishevsky: Right. Parents are afraid to have the discussion, they either don’t know what to say and don’t want to mess it up and therefore say nothing, they don’t know when to say it, and they’re often under the impression that it should be when a child is 7 or 8, but it’s really much younger that they need to hear this information, but again sometimes parents are under the belief or misconception that this isn’t going to happen to my child, so I don’t need to have this conversation. But it’s the kind of thing where no one thinks it’s going to happen, just like we teach children water safety and look both ways before you cross the street. You never think your child’s going to get hit by a car, but you still teach them about traffic safety. It’s the same thing with their bodies. You hope this never happens to them, but you give them the information, the tools, so as to hopefully prevent it, and again, worse case scenario if it does happen to know to tell someone right away. And in the back of the book there’s a part that’s called “Suggestions for the Storyteller.” And that’s the part of the book where it tells the parents how to utilize the book, what to talk to the children about after they’ve read the book, with questions to ask. So it’s really foolproof. It really, we’ve gotten a wonderful response from parents and educators in the medical community, and people who have really embraced the book and understand that there’s a need for this, and this is a tool that’s helping to facilitate an otherwise difficult conversation.

Dr. Kent: Well, and there was an interesting, in the election cycle, in the sort of brutal stuff that developed during the elections there was a statement that went out into the press that Obama was in favor of sex education in kindergarten and how crazy is this, and it seems to me that what he had been talking about was something like what your book does.

Jill Starishevsky: Absolutely. I mean, he’s talking about child abuse prevention, and child sexual abuse prevention. You know, this conversation is very timely. April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, and what the President’s talking about was that at a young age we need to teach children how to protect themselves and to know that their bodies are private and that it’s ok to say no. You know, we teach children, “Listen to adults.” And there needs to be a caveat, “Obey adults, unless they’re telling you to do something that’s hurting you, in which case it’s ok to say no to an adult. It’s ok to run away.” This is not common sense, and I can tell you this firsthand because I’m seeing the children on a daily basis, and part of what I do as a prosecutor is I need to understand why a child didn’t tell, or why a child didn’t say no and run away, so that I can explain to a jury. Because a jury might think, “Well, if this were happening to my child it wouldn’t have gone on for two years, and my child would have told me right away.” So I have to ask these children, “Why didn’t you tell? Why didn’t you run away?” It’s not intuitive. Children either, either they’re told, if he said, “It’s our secret,” or “He said no one would believe me,” all of these things are addressed in the book. We talk about, “We don’t keep secrets from adults.” You know, children and adults don’t keep secrets. In fact we’ve taken that word out of our vocabulary at my house. If you need to use the word surprise you can say surprise, because oftentimes it’s not that these children are being threatened into silence. “I’m going to hurt your mother if you tell them what I did.” It’s, “This is our secret, ok, don’t tell anybody,” and the kids don’t. So this is really a conversation that we need to start having at a young age, and I think schools across the country have been responding so positively to this book, and I think it’s only a matter of time that this message really gets out there.

Dr. Kent: And you talk about a particular incident from your work that sort of inspired this book. Do you want to go into that a little bit?

Jill Starishevsky: Oh, sure. I mentioned that children often don’t tell. There was one case in particular, after years of hearing that children didn’t tell, one case really became the catalyst for this book. I prosecuted a case involving a child who was 9 years old, and she had been sexually molested by her stepfather from the time she was 6 until she was 9, and she told no one. And one day she got into an argument with her mother, who knew nothing about the abuse at the hands of her husband, and she said to her mother, “You love my little brother more than you love me.” And the mom wanted to show her daughter that that wasn’t true, that she did love her. So she had her 9-year-old watch an episode of the Oprah Winfrey show that was on, it was called “Tortured Children.” It was about parents who physically abuse their kids, locked them in cages, horrible stuff. The mom wanted the 9 year old to watch the show so she could say, “This is what parents do who don’t love their children, and I love you.” So the 9 year old watched this show, and although it wasn’t about sexual abuse, the 9 year old got Oprah’s message, which was, “If you’re being hurt and can’t tell a parent, because it is a parent, go to school and tell your teacher.” After three years of telling no one, this little girl went to school the very next day, and she told her teacher, “My daddy’s been,” whatever, however she characterized it. And the teacher told the principal, and the principal called child services, and child services called the police, and the police brought it to the District Attorney’s office, and I prosecuted the case a year later, when she was 10. I put the little girl on the stand and I put the teacher on the stand, and I put the principal on the stand, and we talked about the Oprah Winfrey show, and we convicted the man, and he’s now in prison for a very long time. Back when that happened I thought all it took to end this little girl’s nightmare, three years of a nightmare was a TV show saying, “Tell a teacher.” So I thought, either Oprah needs to end every show by saying, “Tell a teacher,” which of course she can’t do, she’s got a huge platform, and I understand that, but I was like either Oprah needs to end every show saying that, or someone needs to do something. So years went by and I saw more and more children who didn’t disclose, and the abuse continued, and I kept waiting for someone to do something, and finally I said, you know what, I’m going to do something. And I wrote this book, and that’s how I got to where I am. And it’s really been a wonderful thing because I can see it making a difference. The more the book gets out there, I really feel that there’s a war going on out there, another war, that the child predators know how to get to our children. They know what they like, they know how to get them alone and what to give them to keep them silent, and we’re not talking to our kids, and it’s not working so far. We’re not talking to our kids, and they’re getting to our kids. So if we try talking to our children and teaching them about how to keep themselves safe, then we can have a better chance of winning this war.

Dr. Kent: Wow, it’s such a powerful story, and you speak with such conviction about it, I certainly hope this book gets a mighty platform. And again, as the child of someone who did a similar job to what you’re doing, worked with abused children, it’s a real chore to have that in your life, and it’s amazing that you’ve turned around and created a wonderful book like this. My Body Belongs to Me is written by Jill Starishevsky, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Jill Starishevsky: Wonderful being here.

Dr. Kent: And we can find out more about the book at mybodybelongstome.com, and that’s really such a beautifully illustrated book, so positive, and a great way to teach your children about all of these things, and we all need to do that. So it was great speaking to her, and my next guest on the show is going to be the award winning author Michael Port, come on back for that.

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