Becker High School hosted a Safe Kids: Parent Awareness seminar recently as part of Sherburne County’s Families First initiative.

 

Approximately 40-50 people attended the event that featured discussions on internet safety, drug and chemical use, mental health and suicide and human trafficking.

 

Bags with info and other goodies were handed out at the door as guests arrived for the two-hour event. Tables with information materials were just inside the doors from organizations such as Sherburne County Substance Use Prevention Coalition (SCSUPC), Running For Justice, Sherburne County Attorney’s Office, Central Minnesota Sexual Assault Center (CMSAC), Central Minnesota Mental health Center and Bridging Hope Counseling.

 

Rebecca Hall from the CMSAC spoke on her organization being the voice for victims and survivors of sexual assault. She mentioned 10 ways parents can protect children from sexual violence and spoke of CMSAC’s work to end sexual violence.

 

Signe Hushagen, marketing and resource development coordinator for the Sherburne County United Way, handed out promotional materials for the organization and its events and answered questions for parents who are looking for human services for her organization.

 

Alicia Klepsa of SCSUPC spoke about how to prevent prescription drug abuse and reduce heroin use as well as how to create tobacco-free environments, reduce impaired driving and develop policies to reduce marijuana use and underage drinking.

 

Klepsa also had an imitation “teen bedroom” set up outside the auditorium that showed a bed, bookcase, table and walls adorned to look just like a teenager’s bedroom. The display was called, “Hidden in Plain Sight” and had items in the teen’s bedroom labeled to show how youths hide evidence of drug and alcohol use right in front of their parent’s eyes.

 

In the bookcase, a half bottle of water sitting for days can sometimes be a vessel for holding alcohol if not checked. The over-the-counter drug, Niacin is sometimes used by youths to mask urinalysis results.

 

Also on the bookcase was an air dust can, a sink faucet screen and a plastic bottle with a bicycle pump.

 

The air dust can is sometimes used for huffing, the sink faucet screen for creating smoking pipes and the bottle and pump used for smoking alcohol.

 

Parents were advised to smell their children’s clothes going to laundry to try and detect the smell of alcohol or marijuana. Parents are also to keep an eye on photos their teens display and take note if the pictures show them at parties, which can be a telltale sign that ones child is using drugs or alcohol.

 

Other items parents were told to keep an eye out for in their kid’s room is Visine (for concealing red eyes), E-cigarettes, beer-flavored jelly beans and children’s Delsym with Mucinex tablets (produces hallucinogenic effects.

Sherburne County prosecutor Victoria Powell was one of the featured speakers and she addressed bullying, internet safety, and sex trafficking. She featured videos on bullying, how on-line predators target young girls and how prevalent human trafficking is in Minnesota.

 

Powell noted that physical bullying is a problem, but so is cyber-bullying. Cyber-bullying is spreading rumors about a person online, revealing secrets, altering photos and text, ganging up on others, hacking into someone’s account and sharing personal information about someone.

 

In situations where human trafficking may be occurring, keep an eye out for your kids making “friends” with strangers on Instagram, Facebook, Skype and Twitter. Make sure your youths are not participating in chat rooms with strangers or making arrangements to meet strangers via Omegle, My Space or other sites. Thirty-three percent of youths admitted they used Omegle to meet a stranger and 100% of them said they don’t tell their parents when doing so.

 

“Once you post a photo online, it never goes away,” Powell warned her listeners. “Facebook is a tool job recruiters use to see what type of character the job applicant is. Would you want some of the things you posted viewed by a potential work environment?”

 

Powell went on to identify other things parents can look for including unusual behavior, multiple cell phones, tattoos or branding, bruises, marks, cuts, new clothing, truancy issues and running away and substance abuse, to name a few.

 

A dark and foreboding video entitled, “She’s Not For Sale” was shown to the audience showing how easy it is for girls (and boys) to get lured into the business of human trafficking and prostitution. A law enforcement official gave staggering statistics on the trafficking business and explained how close-to-home these industries operate. 

 

He also spoke on how he had broken up a human trafficking situation in which a preteen was involved after he “found” her in the basement of a home suspected of operating in human trafficking. After she was “rescued”, the officer returned her to her home not far away.

 

The officer in the video  said he made another bust sometime later and discovered the same girl in the same situation in a different house.

 

“She asked why he (officer) keeps rescuing her?”

 

It was then he realized the girl thought she had a better life in the human trafficking racket than the life she had in her own home.

 

You could hear a pin drop in the auditorium when the video concluded.

 

The Safe Kids: Parent Awareness event has been held in six communities including Becker. It was first formed in March of this year and has been well attended in Princeton, Big Lake, Elk River, Zimmerman and Becker.

 

Rogers is the next community the event will be held in and that is on Nov. 21 in their school auditorium.

 

For more information on these events and other county initiatives, type in www.sherburnesupcoalition.org in your browser and navigate the site.