SAN ANTONIO – April is National Child Abuse Prevention.
To highlight the campaign, ChildSafe, a San Antonio-area child abuse advocacy group, rolled out its annual initiative called “Cardboard Kids” to spark a conversation about abuse and neglect.
Started in 2011, the initiative encourages decorating cardboard figures to represent children in the community who may be silently suffering from abuse.
To learn more about “Cardboard Kids”, KSAT sat down with ChildSafe President and CEO Randy McGibeny.
‘People don’t want to have that conversation’
In its inaugural year, the nonprofit organization handed out 6,285 cardboard kids. Since then, they have distributed approximately 1 million in all.
The cutouts, which are mostly decorated by students, each come with their own decoration. McGibeny said some students decorated theirs to look like San Antonio Spurs forward Victor Wembanyama or a U.S. Army soldier.
However, before the kids get down to decorating, they are taught about child abuse and body safety, which McGibeny believes is critical.
Once finished, they are distributed to local businesses to display, which happened earlier this month on “Reveal Day.”
This is an important date for the nonprofit, as they encourage the community to take pictures with the cutouts and post on social media with the hashtag #CardboardKidsSA, which helps people spark a conversation about protecting children from abuse, McGibeny said.
KSAT asked McGibeny about the message he hopes the cutouts convey to the public.
“The idea behind that is to change the narrative about child abuse,” McGibeny said. “Because when you talk about child abuse, oftentimes, what you wind up doing is people don’t want to go there. Particularly, when you talk about child sexual abuse, people don’t want to have that conversation.”
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