SALT LAKE CITY — Typically, when people think of first responders they think of police officers or paramedics.
Child protection professionals are often left out of the narrative, even though they are oftentimes so close to the crisis that they experience the same trauma-related symptoms as their clients.
"I've been letting the stress of my job get to me," Annette Summers, a protective services worker in San Francisco, said while attending this week's American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children conference in Salt Lake City.
"I thought it would be good to come here and see how I can maybe improve in that area," Summers added.
Sessions ranged from how the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration enforcement is affecting children to the impact child deaths have on child welfare workers.
Summer said she attended the session by Mary L. Pulido, executive director of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, to learn how to better manage the stresses of her job.
Pulido focused on how to use crisis debriefing to support child protection professionals after experiencing a child fatality or other traumatic incidents associated with their clients.
Secondary traumatic stress, which is common among child welfare workers, is defined as "the emotional duress that results when an individual hears about the firsthand trauma experiences of another person," according to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.
"The work that we all do in child protection will have some type of impact on us," Pulido said.
The symptoms are similar to those of post-traumatic stress disorder and include difficulty sleeping, dreams associated with their client's traumatic experience, outbursts of anger, feelings of helplessness and losing one's patience on family or friends.
"This is what happens when you don't address it, these are the types of impact that workers have been talking to us about," Pulido said.
The post-crisis debriefing, Pulido said, is a space that allows child welfare workers to talk to them about what they've been experiencing.
The debriefing process acts as a support group and includes the sharing of feelings, identifying stress reactions and learning new ways to manage that stress.
Pulido said it's a phenomenon that "comes with the territory" in child welfare professionals and debriefings and training help them "get back on track."
"It's important to not believe the issues are all-encompassing," she said.
She said the training and debriefings have helped child welfare professionals "regain their balance after they have dealt with critical incidents" such as a child fatality or if a traumatic incident happened to them on the field.
Experiences child welfare workers deal with include being shot at by family members, being assaulted in court, getting attacked by an intoxicated parent and being robbed while in the field.
Criteria for a crisis debriefing include child fatality, severe physical abuse or sexual abuse, cases involving homicide due to domestic violence or violence against the staff member.
The treatment of immigrant children being detained at the U.S. border was another topic of the conference.
Kelli N. Hughes, program director of Center for Child Policy, presented on the Flores Agreement, a national policy to protect immigrant children held by the government, and the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, intended to reduce illegal immigration to the U.S. through jail sentencing and separating immigrant children from parents.
This year, according to Hughes, 40,800 children have been placed in U.S. Department of Health and Human Services custody, a 57 percent increase from last year.
She said undocumented children being held in detention centers have faced lack of adequate medical care, lack of clean water, forced medication of minors, lack of separations from non-related adults and inadequate access to legal services.
"It's an important issue, it affects children and it doesn't matter if they are noncitizens or citizens, all children have the same rights," she said.
Hughes said other sessions might not cover minority issues because it's politically polarizing, but she's not afraid to address them.
"A lot of those problems that are related to minority issues or immigrants who have less of a voice in our country. It's almost like those are the hardest issues," Hughes said. "Those are the ones that are the most emotional, so you have people that are disagreeing the most."