This past spring, the American Bar Association launched a social-media campaign that encourages adults in the legal community and beyond to recognize the impact, both positive and negative, they can have on struggling LGBT youth.
The ABA’s “The Kids Are Listening” campaign includes a website, antibullying video and myriad resources for those looking to alleviate the pressures placed on LGBT children in foster care.
The campaign is under the auspices of the agency’s Opening Doors Project, which launched in 2005 to offer training and other services for individuals who work with this population.
Mimi Laver, director of legal education at the ABA’s Center on Children and Law and co-founder and director of Opening Doors, said “The Kids Are Listening” seeks to raise awareness of the core message of Opening Doors.
“Adults can play an important, active role in the lives of these kids, and the words they say can be really important,” Laver said. “We need to teach judges and lawyers that kids remember the things they say, and if they say things that are demeaning or demoralizing, kids hold on to that. And ‘The Kids Are Listening’ takes this idea past the child-welfare system and into regular communities and lets people know that both their words and their actions have the potential to have a really good and positive impact on these children.”
The campaign’s public-service announcement video features images of youth wearing headphones, with sound bites like the vicious debates on marriage equality, the homophobic reaction of a parent to a child’s coming out or the childhood teasing of “that’s so gay” that are cut off when several adults, including a woman dressed in a judge’s robe, approach the youth and remove the headphones.
Opening Doors advisory board member the Hon. Ann Butchart, Philadelphia’s first openly gay judge, who sits on the Court of Common Pleas, said she was very impressed with the video and said the campaign provides awareness of issues that are scarcely talked about.
“The fact that they are in foster care means that the road they’re on is much rockier and steeper than other LGBT kids,” Butchart said. “That’s not to say they shouldn’t be in foster care because sometimes that might present a better climate for them, but they don’t necessarily have the supportive family structure that some other LGBT kids have and they’re a lot more on their own. All adolescents have to deal with the regular adolescent problems, but these kids often don’t have those stable roots.”
The video directs viewers to the accompanying website, where they can learn more about the challenges faced by LGBT youth in foster care and join or start a taskforce to look at the issues on a local level.
Laver said social-media outlets like Facebook have been instrumental in spreading both the video and the overall message of the campaign.
“It’s really been growing,” Laver said. “We’re excited to see how excited people are about this. We have calls set up with folks who want to start taskforces, and Facebook has been a nice medium that allows us to really share some substantive material. So we’re not just trying to raise awareness about the impacts of bullying and sending that message to kids, but we want to actually give adults something positive that they can do rather than worry. We’re putting out the idea that they can take the next steps, they can be involved in putting together a taskforce, in hanging posters in their offices — there are things large and small that can have a really big impact.”
Butchart said the call to action is a vital one.
“This has the potential to alert all responsible adults to the needs of the children in our community and also to empower us to take responsibility and speak up for them,” she said. “We’re being required to confront this now, no matter where we look. We can’t avoid that urgent call to respond.”
For more information on “The Kids Are Listening,” visit www.thekidsarelistening.orgJen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].